Mark LaFlaur at The New Criterion:
Amid the recent tributes to Paul Auster, who died on April 30, 2024, at age seventy-seven, one important work of his that was overlooked was his translation in the early 1980s of The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert. Joubert was a French writer from the late 1700s and early 1800s, a man of both the Enlightenment and the Romantic age. You may not have heard of Joubert before—he never actually published in his lifetime, and he’s not famous for his maxims like Pascal or La Rochefoucauld—though you may have encountered his saying “To teach is to learn twice.” Joseph Joubert is, however, an original thinker, a writer of piercing aphorisms of surprising modernity and warm humanity who is well worth reading and rereading. He was a friend of Diderot and Chateaubriand among others, and he saw both the aristocracy and the common folk up close, before and after the French Revolution.
I happened to be in Paris at the time Auster’s death was announced. In France he is regarded as a rock star, and in the 1990s he was made a chevalier and then an officier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government.
more here.
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