Even if you are not familiar with their writings, Ceci n’est pas Keith Ceci n’est pas Rosmarie is a very engaging pairing of autobiographies from Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop, the couple who founded and serve as editors of Burning Deck Press and have translated many important works by authors such as Jacques Roubaud and Anne-Marie Albiach.
Keith’s autobiography is first in the small volume and it is fitting that the first paragraph is not “about” himself, but about music, for music figures prominently throughout his life. It is only in the third paragraph that he writes “I was born on Sunday.” What you get from Keith are not the particulars about his life, and especially not in any semblance of a chronological timeline. But there are details, mixed in with musings, so that the reader walks away with a better picture of what Keith’s life has been all about than one would get from what we typically read in the way of autobiography.
There are no sections in Keith's autobiography, just 40 pages worth of short paragraphs. We are given glimpses of the details that Keith feels are important to know:
As a child, I was considered sickly, though I myself never took it seriously. Whenever my mother was not hauling me off to the doctor, it was my father. He was sure I had T.B. – or undulant fever – or something.
And then Keith uses that bridge to provide details about his father, a railroad worker and inventor. We never find out what, exactly, caused Keith to be considered sickly. There is a lovely wandering to the details that allow a reader to be carried along as if on a boat, enjoying a ride navigated by someone else.
The format of Rosmarie’s autobiography, which comprises the second half of the volume, is similar to Keith’s, but features slightly larger – and titled – “glimpses” of the parts of her life she feels most worth sharing with the reader. On the second page of her autobiography, Rosmarie writes:
FOR REFERENCE
I was born on August 24, 1935, in Kitzingen am Main, Germany, the daughter of Josef Sebald, a highschool teacher, and Friederike, nee Wohlgemuth. My twin sisters Annelie and Dorie were born 9 years earlier, in 1926.
But not all of Rosmarie’s autobiography is as factual. For instance, the section titled “NOT JUST POSTWAR FOCUS, BUT DEEP AND FETID” lyrically handles some of her and her family’s reaction to the end of WWII:
I dreamed I was human, but not sure it was possible. The naked part of morning had disappeared. Natural space lost to mirrors on the wall.
Things settled down to “normal.” The quarrels, the silences. My sister Dorle Married and became my refuge. Mother cleared my throat. Every few weeks she moved all the furniture. Father retreated into his astral body, quoting Goethe and working the Rühmkorff pendulum. I barricaded myself behind books.
It is also interesting to see how each partner relates the stories about their meeting and courtship. Especially how each approaches the topic and the amount of space each occupies in the other’s section.
While autobiography, as a genre, attracts me less than most other genres, I found myself completely won over by the unique style and format of Ceci N’est Pas Keith Ceci N’est Pas Rosmarie. Of course, given the distinctive styles of each of these writers, who would have expected anything less than the atypical in their autobiographies?
93pp.
Translations by the Waldrops: Paris Spleen: little poems in prose, by Charles Baudelaire; The Flowers of Evil, by Charles Baudelaire; Figured Image, by Anne-Marie Albiach; The Form of the City Changes Faster, Alas, than the Human Heart, by Jacques Roubaud; Theory of Prepositions, by Claude Royet-Journoud; Close Quote, by Marie Borel; Mental Ground, by Esther Tellermann; Click-Rose, by Dominique Fourcade; A Geometry, by Ann-Marie Albiach; Heart into Soil: Selected Poems, by Di Xue; A Descriptive Method, by Claude Royet-Journoud; Boudica, by Paol Keineg; Etat, by Anne-Marie Albiach; If There Were Anywhere but Desert: The Selected Poems of Edmond Jabes; Collected Prose, by Paul Celan; The Book of Questions: Volume I, by Edmond Jabes; I My Feet: Selected Poems & Constellations, by Gerhard Ruhm; Desire for a Beginning/Dread of One Single End, by Edmond Jabes; Some Thing Black, by Jacques Roubaud; A Test of Solitude: Sonnets, by Emmanuel Hocquard; The Little Book of Unsuspected Subversion, by Edmond Jabes; Mountains in Berlin, by Elke Erb; The Plurality of Worlds of Lewis, by Jacques Roubaud; The Book of Questions: Volume II, by Edmond Jabes; The Book of Shares, by Edmond Jabes; The Book of Margins, by Edmond Jabes; and The Book of Dialogue, by Edmond Jabes.
