Like A Story Out of A Paul Auster Novel

There is an incredible story that goes along with the publication of [The Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians]. This goes way, way back, to when I was in my mid-twenties. I was living in Paris, and was a very close friend of the poet Jacques Dupin, whose work I had translated. Jacques was co-editor of a very good literary magazine, and in that magazine they published a short piece by a young anthropologist named Pierre Clastres. I asked Jacques about him, and who he was, because I'd been very interested in the piece; I thought it was brilliant. He told me about Clastres, and I went out and bought his book, Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians, which was extraordinary.

When I moved back to America, I presented it to publishers as a book to translate. Finally, somebody agreed to it, and I translated the book. Clastres and I were in correspondence; he was very happy about it. Then, all kinds of terrible things started to happen. Clastres died in a car crash at the age of forty-three. The publisher went bankrupt, and the book never came out. I had corrected proofs, I remember, but I had not kept them, nor did I have a copy of the manuscript. And the whole thing was lost, lost, lost, for twenty years. Twenty years! I had always told my wife what a wonderful book this was; she half-believed me, half-didn't believe me.

Then, miracle of miracles: I'm invited to give a reading in San Francisco for the City Arts and Lectures series at the Herbst Theatre. After the reading was over, I was signing books in the lobby, and a young man who's a book collector — I think he deals in rare and secondhand books, and I had met him a couple of times before — comes up and waves a red galley in my face and says, "What's this? I never heard of it." It turned out to be a galley of my translation, which he'd found in a bin for five dollars in a second-hand store. So I immediately got it from him (I traded him something for it), reread the book, and was just overwhelmed by it all over again. I gave it to Zone Books — the publisher's a friend of mine — and they published it, so it's still in print. But that translation was lost for twenty years.

-Paul Auster, interviewed by Powell's Books