Bessarabia, anti-Maoism, the little Parisian barricade of May 68, the Langues O’, the long strike at the Liberated Parisian, the proofreaders’ office (or cassettetin) of Le Monde where he then arrived, the man who loved women, the island of Bréhat, his boat Coureuse, the tender friend of dogs and cats, the delicious translations of libertine novels from ancient China with his accomplice “Huang San”… All this and many other things, it was Boris Goiremberg, proofreader at Le Monde from 1977 to 1984, and died on January 29, at the age of 94.
His mother, Raia, was born in Odessa. Maiden name: Epstein. It was notably under the pseudonym of Lionel Epstein that he signed his co-translations: “The tradition of Chinese scholars is to take pseudonyms, and we got into the habit of it when we began to write anti- Mao. »
“We” is the “gang” led by René Viénet, former member of the Situationist International and tireless slayer of the “maolatres”; for the record, in the “Asian Library”, a collection that he created for the Champ libre editions, we could read in 1971 the extremely famous Les Habits neufs du Président Mao, by Simon Leys, which, as Francis Deron wrote in Le Monde , “could have the effect of a blow from a cornet in the middle of a sacristy”.
Poetry for penance
Boris learned Chinese at Langues O’, benefiting from the spicy teaching of Jacques Pimpaneau. Lionel Epstein, Oreste Rosenthal: these were two of his translator pseudonyms bearing traces of the Occupation, when he had to leave Paris, because some names sounded dangerous, to leave the school on rue du Moulin-des-Prés (13th ) for a boarding school in Montmorency, in the former Seine-et-Oise. Pogroms, deportation to Siberia in a freight train, this was already his family’s past in Bessarabia, a territory over which Russians and Romanians constantly clashed, with the Jews constantly losing out in this conflict.
He was often punished at boarding school, but the actual punishment was a treat for the kid: not lines to copy, but verses to learn; poetry for penance, who would have thought it! Now his memory was oiled, and decades later, Boris embellished the conversation, which he had been fiery, with various verses, having retained boundless pleasure in saying and reading the classics; the Nouveau Roman and its sequels left him cold, but Louise Labé, Charles d’Orléans, no; and how much he was also carried away by the writing of Virginia Woolf. For him, the access code to the building where he had one of his Parisian rooms was the year of publication of a play by Racine. He brilliantly recounted his May 68 in memoirs that he had intended simply for friends, like this modest barricade in the rue du Pot-de-Fer (Paris 5th), “for hand-picked aesthetes”, one of his favorite expressions .
In his little house in Bréhat where he had lived for ages, he also liked to tell, until the teapot was empty, what trick he found to protect himself from the glare produced on him, he assured, by the women of the house. Cassin du Monde: one morning, in the entrance to the newspaper (then rue des Italians), he noticed a large box “well 1.80 m long” which he immediately made into a “small gatehouse” where he worked. Dazzled in turn were the correctors by the wild flowers and old roses with high-born names (emue-nymph-thigh, Yolande of Aragon, etc.) from his suburban garden which he offered them in armfuls, plumed of her white, foamy hair.
“Slow crowd in Beijing”
Of his life in Beijing where he arrived in 1964, a student tasked with teaching French, among many happy memories, he kept that of the alleys where walked “a slow crowd on felt shoes”; in Xi’an, that of his somewhat childish request to a bookseller: “A large printed book with images”; he learned a little later that a masterpiece in an edition from the Qing period (17th-early 20th century) was sold to him for nothing.
On a beach in Hong Kong, he devoured novels by the “brilliant” Peter Cheyney, hence his progress in English, and a number of expressions with which he peppered his sentences “with relish”. In the bag he carried when walking, he never neglected to put a packet of madeleines which had the divine power to revive walking and conversation. Borrowing from a passage in his Memoirs devoted to Beijing, let us add these few fruits, “persimmons lined up on a window sill”, giving autumn “a last glow”.