Editorial Statement on Liliane Giraudon’s poems and Amandine André’s introductory essay cotranslated by Jeff Nagy and Lindsay Turner
Thank you to everyone who has written to us to express concern about our publication of poems by Liliane Giraudon and Amandine André’s introductory essay, cotranslated by Jeff Nagy and Lindsay Turner. We are listening. We share the abiding concerns about Jeff Nagy’s past publications and in no way defend or deny the misogyny of his 2014 essay, written under a pseudonym and published in The Claudius App. We are replying here to share the history of the Giraudon publication in the Chicago Review and on our website, and to try to explain why we made the decisions that we did.
We did not know Jeff Nagy, nor had we read his prior work, including the deleted piece he published as “Jacqueline Rigault” (and which was subsequently written about by Amy King and Lynn Melnick for VIDA’s “Report from the Field” in May 2014), or that he had been one of the editors of The Claudius App referred to in the “No Manifesto” published in Chicago Review in 2015, prior to his and Turner’s submission of Giraudon’s work. (Jeff Nagy is not mentioned by name in the poem.) We first learned about what Nagy wrote in The Claudius App on social media on April 30, 2018.
We had signed a contract with Jeff Nagy and Lindsay Turner in February to publish their translation of Liliane Giradoun’s “Albumblatt” in print and to publish a web feature that included two further poems and an introduction by Amandine André, which had been previously solicited as well as translated by Nagy and Turner. We decided to go forward with the web feature because of that contract, and because we felt that it wouldn’t be right to suppress the work of three talented and important women writers—Liliane Giraudon, Amandine André, and Lindsay Turner—because of Nagy. We therefore went forward with the publication and announced it on social media as we would any other web publication.
The Chicago Review is committed to, and has a long history of, publishing the work of women poets and writers in English and in translation. Our decision to publish Liliane Giraudon was guided by that commitment. Her work, which is little known by American readers, is vital, strange, and alive. The publication of these translations and the essay by André was undertaken in the hopes of gaining a wider audience for one of France’s most important living avant-garde writers.