in his garden, where I was supposed to work with my translator,
his wife, Christine Le Boeuf, on my History of Reading. We worked, but seemingly under the watchful eye of a benign master.
We were two, Christine and I: we could have been several, little would have changed. What is always disconcerting with Nyssen is his ability of holding together a group of diverse people without ever placing himself at the core, like an invisible gravitational force that lends movement and grace to other bodies. As a writer, he defers to the reader; as a publisher, to the writer; as a lover of music, to the interpreter; as a friend, to other friends. There is such a compulsive generosity in this man that, when the possibility arose of giving a name to the little square on which stood his publishing company in Arles, the idea never crossed his mind of suggesting “Place Actes Sud” or (as so many ego-centred publishers might have done) “Place Hubert Nyssen” but instead canvased energetically for the square to be christened “Place Nina Berberova”, the writer whose work he had brought to light, fostered and made known, and who acknowledged her debt to him by naming him her literary executor. All his conversations partake of this same quality: with himself as mere witness, and the world --past, present and future—as full subject.
To be a publisher and a writer, both at the same time, is to be conscious of one’s Doppelgänger. L’éditeur et son double, the brilliant name he gave to his journals, makes this duplication explicit. Publisher Nyssen is the reader, the “dénicheur de textes”, the “passeur”, the one who encourages translations and sows in others the seed of new books, the nurse, companion and educator of writers; author Nyssen is the storyteller, the introverted seeker, the artisan of words in which to trap a memory, unravel a thought, illuminate an idea, offer the starting-point of talk, give birth to desire (which he defines as “la manifestation d’un regret, le regret d’une absence, l’expression exaspérée d’un manque”). Author Nyssen lends presence to those absences; publisher Nyssen offers them a home.
And then there is the man I discovered under the plane tree: the man with whom we exchanged quotations, the man who so generously remembered stories, the man who gave me as a present the discovery of Marcel Thiry, of Paul Gadenne, of Göran Turström... Once, discussing a list of things that made up “une certaine idée de la France”, he remarked that we shared, as outsiders, the possibility of seeing a nation that the dyed-in-the-wool Frenchmen could not (or would not) see. It is easy to forget that Nyssen had been born in Belgium because his interests and his tastes are worldwide; if anything makes him “French” it is his deep-rooted attachment to the French language. Because Nyssen is not a man of letters, he is a man of words: words seem to be part of his very being, and his passions (for literature, love, politics and friendship) seem always to be translated (the verb suits him perfectly) into words, polished words, with seemless accuracy and poetic felicity.
I write of someone I love and admire, but whom I got to know late in his career: the nuances and changes escape me. I wonder what the boy was like, the adolescent who became a Resistance fighter and who read the whole of French literature while hiding from the Germans, the young adventurous cartographer in Algeria, the middle-aged man whose hand served as the blueprint for the first Actes Sud books. I also know what Nyssen would say: that all those incarnations are still here, alive and well in the man he is today and that (as he has told us again and again in La femme du botaniste, in Le bonheur de l’imposture, in Quand to seras à Proust la guerre sera finie) if we are careful enough readers, we shall hear their voices in the echoes of his vigourous present conversations.
Alberto Manguel, Mondion, 6 May 2002
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