Pseudo (Hocus Bogus)

"Yes. This is comedy taken to the point of complete lunacy. Or vice versa. Hocus Bogus is the use of fiction to achieve quite improper ends – being to persuade the world for all time that the author was not what he seemed. To put it in context, Gary was a popular and very gifted novelist who’d gone out of fashion in the 1970s. He’d already won the Goncourt Prize and was an international celebrity in all sorts of ways, but he belonged to the old crowd and he didn’t like that. So he started publishing under another name, Emile Ajar, and this was very, very successful. Lo and behold, he went and won the Goncourt Prize a second time, as Emile Ajar! The hoax was kept completely secret and he really did pull the wool over the eyes of the entire literary establishment of Paris. But he sort of got too involved with his own deception once he’d won the Goncourt Prize again – which wasn’t allowed – and he got paranoid about being found out. So he wrote this book in which he pretended to be somebody else confessing to being Emile Ajar. And that somebody was mad. The purpose of the book was to make it absolutely clear that Romain Gary was not Emile Ajar and that Emile Ajar was Paul Pawlovitch, a real person in on the hoax, and that Paul Pawlovitch was loony. And it worked! It was perfect. It deflected suspicion from Romain Gary for the rest of his life. It propelled him into a sort of total outer space, because he was Emile Ajar and nobody knew it. He could write anything under the name Emile Ajar – he could even rewrite one of his own books under the name Emile Ajar. So it’s the use of fiction and fantasy and comedy to achieve ends that lie outside of literature. But, at the same time, under those layers and layers of cover, it enables Romain Gary to speak about himself in a way he had never been able to before. Well, all translation is difficult! But, because it is written by a madman who has difficulty with language and whose language keeps getting out of control, it is full of puns and allusions and crazy bits, which, in my view, licenses the translator to invent his own puns, to let the English language do crazy loops and somersaults that Gary does in French. No, I’m too modest. Well, I’ll just say there are some puns that have made some people laugh."