Mary Beach

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Mary Beach (born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1919 ; died in Cooperstown, New York in 2006 ) was an artist, literary translator, book publisher, and writer. She lived in the USA and France. Her main work is the collage story Electric Banana , which was part of the American pop literature of the 1960s.

Life

Mary Beach is the niece of the bookseller and first James Joyce publisher Sylvia Beach . She spent her childhood and youth in France from the age of five and started painting at an early age. After the German occupation of France in World War II , she was temporarily interned in a camp under the Vichy regime in 1941 as a “suspicious foreigner”. She had her first solo exhibition in 1943. More followed. At the Paris "Salon des femmes peintres" in 1959 she was awarded.

In 1962, at one of her Sunday salons for US exiles in Paris, she met the French poet and graphic artist Claude Pélieu (1934–2002), whom she later married for a second time. Through him she began to turn to literature. She translated a text by Pélieu for the publisher "City Lights Books" by Lawrence Ferlinghetti , who had brought her to San Francisco in 1963 . Under his roof, she founded her own small publishing house, Beach Books, Texts & Documents. Translating became her main work. During these years she commuted between San Francisco, Paris and New York. Beach and Pélieu belonged to the beat generation scene around William S. Burroughs , Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and lived in 1969 at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City . In Barry Miles' memory , they seemed "to be a respectable middle-class couple in every respect [...] and Mary was dressed like the middle-aged Yankee heir she was". However, the walls of her hotel room are said to have been full of collages glued together from pictures, words and headlines from underground magazines and (sex) magazines.

Her text collage Electric Banana is based on her diary entries. Using what is known as a cut-up technique , she mixed the material with parts from a novel “about two homosexual youths, from Kriegsmarine propaganda, with René Magritte titles, comics and quotes from a wide variety of papers, as well as scraps of conversation from streets and pubs , Refrains from pop songs “, is how Franz Dobler described the collage. The political mood of that time in America was translated into literature better than Mary Beach, "who always kept composure". A continuation is Gothic Banana , in which she also processed her storage experience. According to Dobler, "a horror scenario between the Middle Ages and science fiction, with Nazi gangs and mass arrests and constant discussions about whether the United States could be compared to Hitler's Germany" emerged. In a crazy world, the language is completely crazy. The text is difficult to read and sometimes difficult to understand.

Through the agency of Burroughs, Mary Beach made friends with Carl Weissner in San Francisco . He translated Electric Banana into German . The collage story was printed in five different versions between 1967 and 1970. It appeared in the Acid anthology with an afterword by co-editor Rolf Dieter Brinkmann , who integrated a photo montage. In the United States, The Electric Banana came out only in 1975 as a book with a foreword by William S. Burroughs and together with Gothic Banana in 1980 under the title A Two-fisted Banana . The 2008 edition in German translation together with the original American texts contains the last version of the Electric Banana , plus the text No Eye No Cyclone by Beach and the foreword by Burroughs.

According to Carl Weissner, she never saw herself as an author. She threw out her few texts "with her left". By the mid-seventies at the latest, Mary Beach is said to have stopped writing her own texts. She settled in New York with Pélieu , worked as a translator and created art collages for the rest of her life.

Publications

  • The electric banana , in acid. New American Scene (anthology), edited by Klaus Dieter Brinkmann and Ralf-Rainer Rygulla , March Verlag, Darmstadt 1969
  • The Electric Banana , Cherry Valley Editions, New York 1975, first edition, ISBN 978-0-916156-07-7
  • A two-fisted banana. Electric & Gothic , Cherry Valley Editions, New York 1980, first edition, ISBN 978-0-916156-35-0
  • The mystery of the Squeaky Floor , collages from 1996–1998, Verlag Peter Engstler, Ostheim / Rhön 2011, ISBN 978-3-941126-30-5

Translations (selection)

Mary Beach, in collaboration with Claude Pélieu, translated poetry and other texts by William S. Burroughs , Allen Ginsberg , Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Bob Kaufman from American into French .

William S. Burroughs
  • The Ticket That Exploded , Roman, French: Le ticket qui explosa , 1969
  • The Yage Letters , correspondence between William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, French: Les Lettres du Yage , 1970
  • The Wild Boys. A Book of the Dead , Roman, French: Les Garçons sauvages - Un livre des morts , 1973
  • Exterminator! Short stories, French: Exterminateur , 1974
  • The Last Words of Dutch Schultz , play, French: Les Derniers mots de Dutch Schultz , 1975
  • The soft machine , Roman, French: La machine molle , 1985
Allan Ginsberg
  • Reality sandwiches , poems, French: also, 1972
  • Kaddish , poems, French: also, 1972
Bob Kaufman
  • Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness , poems, French: Solitudes , 1966
  • Golden Sardine , poems, French: Sardine dorée , 1976
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
  • Un regard sur le monde , poems, bilingual edition, English and French, 1969

From French into English she translated a. a. Poems by the Egyptian-French poet Joyce Mansour :

  • Carré blanc , Poems (Paris 1966), English: Flash Card , New York 1978

Web links

source

Footnotes

  1. ↑ According to Jörg Fauser, the great niece . In: The quietly smiling no and other texts , Rogner and Bernhard bei Zweiausendeins, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 978-3-8077-0296-4 , p. 53
  2. ↑ Quoted by Franz Dobler, in: This crazy Mrs. Mary Beach . Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Feuilleton November 30, 2008. A similar description can be found in the 2011 book by Barry Miles: In The Seventies. Adventures in the Counter-Culture , Serpent 'Tails, London, ISBN 978-1-84668-690-0 , pp. 44f
personal data
SURNAME Beach, Mary
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Beach-Pélieu, Mary (married name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American collage artist, translator and writer
DATE OF BIRTH 1919
PLACE OF BIRTH Hartford, Connecticut
DATE OF DEATH 2006
Place of death Cooperstown (New York)