Queer Places:
Chérence
Paris, City of Paris, Île-de-France, France
Maria
Jolas (January 12, 1893 – March 4, 1987), born Maria McDonald, was an
American-born translator who was one of the last survivors of James
Joyce's Paris circle. With her husband, Eugene Jolas, she founded a Paris
quarterly literary review called transition, which in the 1920's
published articles by James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett,
Dylan Thomas, Franz Kafka, William Carlos Williams, Henry Miller and James Agee.[1]
Shari Benstock's Women of the Left Bank: Paris, 1900-1940, is a study
devoted principally to thoughtful biographical and literary analyses of
some 22 women: Margaret Anderson,
Djuna Barnes,
Natalie Barney,
Kay Boyle,
Sylvia Beach,
Bryher,
Colette, Caresse Crosby,
Nancy Cunard,
Hilda Doolittle,
Janet Flanner,
Jane Heap, Maria Jolas,
Mina
Loy, Adrienne Monnier,
Anais Nin,
Jean Rhys,
Solita Solano,
Gertrude Stein,
Alice B. Toklas,
Renee Vivien, and
Edith Wharton, who came to dominate the
landscape of the modernist literary experiment in Paris.
Jolas was born Maria Carr McDonald in Louisville, Ky., in January
1893. After her graduation from high school she studied music in Berlin
and Paris. Back in the United States she met Eugene Jolas, an American
citizen who had been reared in France. They moved to Paris after their
marriage in 1926, and remained there until the war. Before the war Mrs.
Jolas founded a school in Neuilly, and when the Nazis invaded she
evacuated some its students to a chateau in south central France. She and
her husband returned to the United States during World War II and worked
in the Office of War Information.
Unlike her husband, a critic and poet, Mrs. Jolas chose to manage the
business side of the review. She also translated into English about a dozen
books by Nathalie Sarraute, whose style -with broken sentences, stream of
consciousness effects, characters who remain nameless for many pages and
abrupt shifts in perspective - would prove daunting to any translator.
Although her translations were widely praised, Mrs. Jolas insisted, in an
interview in The New York Times Book Review in 1970, that translating is a
lazy person's job. ''Someone else has done the thinking,'' she said, ''and you
accompany him like a pianist accompanying the singer, self-effacing if
essential.''
Jolas and her husband had two daughters, the composer Betsy
Jolas and Tina Jolas, an anthropologist, of Vaucluse, a region of southern
France. .[2]
A well-known figure at peace conferences, Maria Jolas was active in
Europe in opposing the U.S. war in Vietnam 1965-75.[2]
Maria Jolas was the chair/president of the Paris American Committee to
Stop-War (PACS, pronounced PACS) with several hundred members, formed in
1965 and banned by the French government in September 1968. She also
translated many works, including Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of
Space. She died, aged 94, in Paris, France.[2]
Maria Jolas, Woman of Action - A Memoir and Other Writings was
edited and introduced in 2004 by City University of New York professor
Mary Ann Caws.
My published books:
BACK TO HOME PAGE
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Jolas
- Reader's Guide to Lesbian and Gay Studies
Timothy Murphy
Routledge, Oct 18, 2013
- MARIA JOLAS, 94, A TRANSLATOR AND PARIS MAGAZINE FOUNDER, By EDWIN
McDOWELL, Published: March 7, 1987, The New York Times