ROUND THE WORLD AGAIN IN 80 DAYS

A surrealist’s 1936 diary of a voyage meant to recapitulate Jules Verne’s classic fantasy of modern travel. Gilbert’s translation is accompanied by a new introduction explaining the author’s relationship with his companion, Marcel Khill.

Cocteau’s casual travelogue begins with an homage to the influence of Verne’s 1873 yarn on what he claims was a whole generation of French schoolboys. Inspired by his young friend’s suggestion that they honor Verne’s centenary by re-enacting Phileas Fogg’s wager, the middle-aged poet—not yet a filmmaker—finds himself embarked on a frantic jaunt through the antiquities of Italy, Greece, and Egypt, the ports and opium dens of South Asia, the theaters and geisha-houses of Japan, and the glittering confections of the US. Apart from a significant encounter with Charlie Chaplin (whom Cocteau apparently worshiped) the adventures recounted are less spectacular than the texture of Cocteau’s wonderfully lush yet economical descriptions of great cities and their underworlds. Interspersed with his minute observations are mediations on beauty, death, colonialism, sex, race, and vulgarity, all shaped by the poetic bemusement of a Westerner noting “with what vast reserves of energy the Orient can challenge an exhausted Europe.” To a modern American ear, the dated English translation occasionally thrusts itself annoyingly into the foreground—conventions for rendering dialect or pidgin are particularly egregious—and seem to occlude the rhythms of the French original. As reminders of the complexity of East-West relations, these lapses of translation heighten the cultural interest of the text, yet they resonate oddly with the highly biographical cast of the introduction (which concentrates on Cocteau’s opium addiction, the unswervingly homosexual character of his liaison with Khill, and the contribution of this peculiar adventure to his artistic career). Though informative and empathetic in its own way, Callow’s reading entirely ignores the rich cross-cultural questions raised by the text.

A light-footed but penetrating survey of the land of the Other that rebukes the artificial weightiness of later French cultural criticism.