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A SHORT HISTORY
Indeed, the "Arcades"
catalogue has been shaped by the personality
of François Erval (1914-1999), who
ran the imprint for 15 years. He was Hungarian
born and a left wing intellectual, who had
settled in Paris early on in his life, and
after the war worked as a literary chronicler
(Combat, L'Express, La Quinzaine littéraire)
and an editor.
"He was one of those intellectuals,
who despite not being widely known, influenced
greatly literary taste and ideas generally.",
rightly comments Roger Grenier. This can
be seen with the imprint "Idées"
that François Erval created for Gallimard
in 1962, the first paperback imprint devoted
to social sciences. Students, researchers
and enlightened readers applauded this new
way of making science more accessible and
turned the imprint into a best-seller. Erval
brought together major texts from the Gallimard
backlist (Alain, Camus, Freud...) as well
as collaborative works and unpublished essays
from all the different fields.
There had been a time for "Idées";
and one for "Folio Essais", created
in 1985 by Antoine Gallimard. The academic
scene had changed, and so had the economy
of the paperback. François Erval
therefore created "Arcades", that
would enable him to continue part of the
work he had been doing with the unpublished
texts in "Idées". Unlike
"Tel", the other NRF semi paperback
imprint, "Arcades" only published
original works as yet unpublished, and mainly
in translation. It was a good alternative
to the foreign imprints of Editions Gallimard,
which tended to prefer fiction works - though
not exclusively. Therefore "Arcades"
regularly published essays by acknowledged
authors in the Gallimard backlist: Borges,
Calasso, Carpentier, Fuentes, Pavese, Paz,
B. Strauss, Vargas Losa... Peter Handke,
whom Erval was one of the first to read
in France, had been published in "Du
Monde entier" since 1969; Cioran since
1949 in "Essais", then in "Idées".
In fact, three quarters of the
texts assembled in "Arcades" are
translations, with a majority of German,
Spanish and English texts, and to a lesser
extent Italian, Russian and Roumanian. Russian
intellectuals dominate, together with "Mitteleuropean"
and Germanic intellectuals (Brandys, Cioran,
Eliade, Esterhazy, Handke, Walser... ; rediscovered
texts by Kafka, Mandelstam, Mann, Rilke
... ; studies of Gombrowics, Ionesco, Kundera
...). They are the hallmark and the legacy
of a unique editor. His "orientation".
Today "Arcades" is
managed by Jean Mattern, who is also in
charge of translations at the NRF.
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