Paris Vagabond

Paris Vagabond is an unclassifiable masterpiece, a book that purports to be a novel but, accompanied as it is by the photographs of Patrice Molinard, is as much a brilliant documentary as a work of the imagination. In rich prose, suffused with the language of the street, and brilliantly rendered in English by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Jean-Paul Clebert captures the essence of a long-gone Paris of the poor, the criminal, and the outcast: a society of outsiders beyond the social pale. Clebert’s is a genuinely anarchist voice, a free spirit who was an intrepid explorer of a Paris that was in many places practically ruinous but where the poor were not yet completely marginalized. He was also a true writer’s writer, hailed by his mentor and friend Blaise Cendrars and admired by Henry Miller, who said that reading Paris Vagabond “roiled my guts.”

Jean-Paul Clebert (1926–2011) joined the French Resistance in 1943 when he was sixteen. After the war, he traveled in Asia and made his living as a housepainter, cook, newspaper seller, farmworker, and cafe proprietor before returning to Paris and living as a vagrant for three or four years, an experience that influenced his 1952 workUnknown Paris. Clebert went on to write thirty-two books, including volumes on the history of southern France, where he moved in 1956.

Donald Nicholson-Smith’s translations of noir fiction include Jean-Patrick Manchette’sThree to Kill; Thierry Jonquet’s Mygale (aka Tarantula); and (with Alyson Waters) Yasmina Khadra’sCousin K. He has also translated works by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Henri Lefebvre, Raoul Vaneigem, Antonin Artaud, Jean Laplanche, Guillaume Apollinaire, and Guy Debord. For NYRB Classics he has translated Manchette’sFatale and The Mad and the Bad and is presently working on Clebert’sParis Insolite. Nicholson-Smith won the 28th Annual Translation Prize of the French-American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation for fiction for his translation ofThe Mad and the Bad. Born in Manchester, England, he is a longtime resident of New York City.

Patrice Molinard (1922–2002) began his career taking stills for Georges Franju’s legendary documentary on the Paris slaughterhouse at La Villette,Le sang des betes (1949). As a film director, he is best known for Fantasmagorie (1963),Orphee 70 (1968), and Bistrots de Paris (1977).

Luc Sante is the author of many books, including Low Life and, most recently,The Other Paris. He is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and teaches writing and the history of photography at Bard College.