PUBLISHER: ORNAN ORTEM

In addition to being the publisher of Sylph Editions, Ornan Rotem is the translator and designer of Days Bygone. In response to my prompts and questions, Ornan composed the following and generously included addenda related to the translation of Days Bygone and the broader Sylph Editions publishing program.

SYLPH EDITIONS came about accidentally-on-purpose. ‘Accidentally’ in the sense that there was no programme, no plan – business or other – that it was circumstantial perhaps even serendipitous. It was purposeful in the sense that there were genuine intentions, there was a will, an overarching idea and the knowledge to execute it. 

Our first book, Ten Poems from Hafez by Jila Peacock, perfectly captures this. Jila is a painter of British and Iranian descent and in 2005 she produced an artist’s book of poems she had translated from the Persian and which she had rendered into zoomorphic drawings. She printed her book at the Glasgow Print studio in an edition of 50 but she was also keen to publish the book as an affordable commercial edition and asked me to design it. She approached several publishers but was taken aback by their insensitive responses. Her encounters with prospective publishers revealed that the prevailing attitude was, something that I too had seen from my perspective as a book designer. Publishers lacking an understanding of what a book is and a failure to imagine what it can be: ‘14th century Persian poet? Too obscure. Love? Don’t really get it – and what’s the market? OK, maybe a small paperback, short run, that you finance.’ After she failed to find a suitable publisher we decided to plunge in and do it our way and to spare no effort in doing it. It would be a slim book, beautiful and will handle ‘obscure’ poetry differently. It was a perfect springboard since it was word and image, two places where I felt very much at home. It was art and literature intricately bound into each other and it set the tone for all future publications. It made use of the extensive experience we had as a design studio working mostly with books. It was to be beautiful and original and produced in a way that could cover its expenses. Our ignorance on the more prosaic side of publishing was counterpoised by serendipity: Jila’s original artist book was to be exhibited as part of the Word into Art exhibition at the British Museum and the museum bookshop happily took on board our publication and offered us unprecedented exposure and fortuitous sales. 

Ten Poems exemplified Sylph’s approach. First, books where text and image are conceived as one; that is to say that the one is not subordinate to other, that they engage with each other in a meaningful dialogue. This is the opposite of illustrated books in which primacy is given to the text and the images, regardless of their merit, are ancillary. Admittedly, we began on a high note since in Ten Poems the image is the text and the text is the image and to a certain degree nearly every publication to date embraces this aspiration. Not only this, but other core values that can be summed up thus: respect and admiration for the book as a physical object, complete and total involvement in all stages of the making and dissemination of the book, and the primacy of content. I shall explain in greater details what I mean by these values and then demonstrate this by a few chosen examples. 

THE PHYSICAL BOOK. The proliferation of digital culture has offered great opportunities for books of a certain kind. The glass screen is a great equalizer; it irons out differences and places all content in a Procrustean bed. The delivering device (screen, tablet, phone) dictate predetermined sizes, locking the reader into a material universe with relatively little variance (glass) and limited sensory interaction (mostly eyes and ears). In return for these limitations you get unprecedented delivery speeds, open-ended updates and opportunities for enhancement, such as sound and moving images. Where this is meaningful, for example in an educational text book or an encyclopaedia, the codex is at a disadvantage and will probably be relegated to the periphery of the publishing world. But where material qualities and size can make a difference, where the room for touch and smell can be meaningful, where there is pleasure in relishing in someone else’s artistic decisions, the book will thrive. To put it bluntly the ugly book is dead, it is the time of the beautiful book. Now is the time for books where typography is not left to the whim of the reader (aptly named the ‘user’); for books where paper is well chosen and relates to content; for books that create a luxurious and pleasurable sensation and work through the fingers and nose and ears as much as the eyes; for books where the mere presence of the object in its uniqueness and disconnectedness is a source of pleasure and delight. And the more online culture makes everything look the same, the more we will find the yearning for a different and more sensual kind of experience. The cheaply-printed yellowing paperback served a purpose, an important purpose, but its time is over and it is important that publishers and book designers embrace a new set of skills and look at things differently. With Sylph Editions, we are trying to work within this new framework.

TOTAL INVOLVEMENT. In the early centuries of book production, that is the 17th century, most aspects of the making of books happened under one roof. Over the years, the different function became more specialized and with industrialization layout, printing, publishing and distribution gradually became independent activities. What we are doing harks back to the old days; it is a cottage industry with a twist and the 21st century is ideally placed for this model. On the whole, when we publish, we engage directly with the author. We try not to work through intermediaries such as agents and gladly embrace our primary role as readers. We keep editorial in house and where feasible, translation too. Should the need arise, for example, in introductions to art books, we will endeavour also to write it ourselves (see for example the introduction to Saul Leiter’s Painted Nudes). We handle all assigned photography since we have a high end photographic practice. Design is done in house and we find the prevailing custom idea of passing on covers to a third party abhorrent. A book is designed from its centre, which springs from its content, and the cover needs to grow organically from the text section. Production is all handled in house and we engage directly with our printers and are always on press when a book is printed. Yes, we do have a distributor but at the same time, these days online sales, much like the bookshops of yore, is an important aspect of publishing. That means we also pack and wrap and go to the local post office. In that sense we are traditional and at the same time modern not only in working and embracing the most up-to-date technology but in making use of what a connected culture offers.

PRIMACY OF CONTENT. As I hinted before, it is my understanding that for the kind of books we design, to be a book designer is first and foremost to be a reader; it is a certain kind of commitment to the printed word. I think the same applies to what we expect of publishing. To achieve this we find it necessary to create ad hoc partnerships that complement our skills and interests. These partnerships enable us to enrich our context and to execute our productions since they also have financial value. Partnerships need to be based on trust, shared values and mutual benefit. Of course, this can change overtime. Sometimes these partnerships are with individuals, sometimes with institutions. For example, we teamed up with Piano Nobile, a London art gallery, to create The Nobile Folios, a set of six publications that explored a single work of art visually and textually. Each short publication chose one prominent artwork that was in the gallery’s inventory and we reproduced each work in it’s totality and carefully well chosen detail shots. To complement that, an author was assigned to devise an original piece of writing inspired by that work. Another example is our collaboration with the American University of Paris producing The Cahiers Series. There are currently 36 volumes in this series whose general remit is to make available new explorations in writing, in translating, and in the areas linking these two activities. Translation is understood in the broadest sense possible not just movement between language but also translations as shifting between cultural practices e.g. painting architecture music, etc. And of course, since it is conceived under the aegis of Sylph Editions, each publication is a dialogue with carefully chosen images. 

Two examples will convey how these values are put into practice. Rachel Shihor’s Days Bygone is the seventh volume of The Cahiers Series and was published in 2008. Rachel Shihor is a contemporary Israeli writer. Her writing stands apart from most of her peer’s literature both in content and her use of language. I’d read her novel, Ha-Tel Avivim, in the original, and it left an indelible impression on me. This was her only published book but it is the sort of book that when you finish it, your first response is simply to want more. I approached her, primarily for egotistical reasons; I asked if I could read more of her work. She sent me an unpublished novella called Yankinton which I found exquisite. I gathered that it had yet to be published in Israel and not only that, it was having a difficult time getting a publisher. The question is always why? and the answer is, I don’t really know. Some of it was down to luck (bad luck), some due to mismanagement and some of it, I suspect was the consequence of swimming against the current. It was then that we thought that The Cahiers Series, with its’ emphasis on translation, would be an ideal vehicle to promote this author and an opportunity to exercise the Series’s remit by contextualizing texts for the non-native reader. I had in the past translated from the Hebrew, and so I did not hesitate to take this upon myself. Being the publisher, translator and designer tied in with our notion of an all-in-one cottage industry publishing. Each cahier is limited to 40 pages, so it meant choosing excerpts, which I did with the author. We then had two of our previous writers go over the translation (Richard Pevear and Lydia Davies) who made their comments – as you can see, it all stays ‘in house’. Shihor has a language of her own, and it was quite a challenge and given the framework of The Cahiers Series it made sense to explain, discuss and elaborate some of the issues arising from the translation in an afterword (see addendum 2). Because the novel is set in Tel Aviv in the late 50s there seemed no better way to engage with the material than through the material of David Hendler, a contemporaneous, down trodden artist of the period. I knew his paintings very well as my parents owned several of his watercolours (in house again) and we approached his daughter in order to seek out more of his work. We met with her at her place and sieved through endless folders and after making our choice, we scanned and cleaned the selection in our design studio. Since Hendler’s work was counterpoised to Shihor’s writing it made sense that the translator offer the reader some background on him and thus we ended up with yet another afterword. The cahier was very well received; people were intrigued and wrote from near and far asking about Shihor, always wanting to know more. This promoted us to publish a second book with Sylph called, Stalin is Dead, with an foreword by Nicole Krauss, one of those aforementioned intrigued readers. In time Shihor has had her work published by Seagull Books, and I’d like to think that this is a direct outcome of the cahier she published with us. 

The other example I’d like to offer is the photographic essay A Typographic Abecedarium, maybe because it sits at the other end of the continuum of our publishing ethos, but still very much part of it. I have also chosen this example since being it’s author it is relatively easy for me to talk about it. It assembles different strands of my professional interests: writing, typography and photography. The book explores the relation-ship between typo-graphy and the visual world. The premise is very simple: each letter of the English version of the Roman alphabet is refracted, appearing in four dimensions: as the world presenting itself in the shape of a letter; as an intended letter in space; as a flat letter on paper, and finally in the manner of a pure geometric form embodied in a typeface. This publication was years in the making. Primarily, it meant going around with a camera in London, Paris, Berlin, New York – wherever I went – plucking typographic examples that convey the idea underlying this book. The next phase was more studio bound since it drew from two-dimensional sources. In what respect is it at the other extreme of Days Bygone? It is a solitary work, much less about collaboration, and also much more private, contemplative and idiosyncratic. But it is equally part of our publishing ethos since it attempts to create a book whose validity is derived from the specificity and uniqueness of the printed page. To stress my point, let me state that besides the codex, inside the book is a larger double-sided poster of the whole abecedarium section. It is also part of the ethos because it all happens ‘under one roof’ and, finally, it is an attempt to engage and articulate the textural with the visual in ways not dissimilar to Jila’s Ten Poems from Hafez: it is about letters, that in turn make up words, sentences, paragraphs, books. It is also textual in the more mundane sense that besides an introduction each of the chosen dimensions of a letter are explained.

ADDENDA

01 THE EXPLANATORY AFTERWORD, REPRINTED IN EACH OF THE NOBILE FOLIOS

One of the primary gestures in the appreciation of large canvases is the act of moving in closer in order to apprehend the details and to immerse oneself in the painting. Not every work lends itself to this kind of investigation, but when it does, curbing one’s view seems to unleash new paintings, variations on the grand theme of the canvas as a whole. The whole is nothing but the sum of these refracted parts, though admittedly a sum larger than its parts. Each spread in The Nobile Folios is an attempt to identify and to explore these parts, these auxiliary paintings. This exercise has an added benefit. Most of the canvases in the series are much larger than even the largest of books; the fragmented view releases the painting from the Procrustean constraints of the printed page, drawing us nearer to a real-life appreciation of the painting. 

Words are an inseparable part of our experience of a painting. Verbal expression can take many different forms: a learned discourse, an entertaining anecdote, a touching recollection, or merely an association. The juxtaposed texts that form part of The Nobile Folios are precisely the latter: informative associations. They represent words that might come to mind when one gazes at the painting. The association, obvious or oblique, complements our attempt to explore the painting and enhances our appreciation of it. 

02 REMARKS ON THE TRANSLATION (AFTERWORD IN DAYS BYGONE)

Any reader of Rachel Shihor’s original text will not fail to be struck by her unique language and its precise application in her prose. Hers is a language of opposites. On the one hand, rich in historical and literary allusions, while on the other, a very personal, almost idiosyncratic, language. Her sentences alternate between the straightforwardly simple and the excruciatingly complex: a short, seemingly childlike sentence befitting the protagonist’s age, may be followed by an intricate multi-layered construction, a testimony to the author’s philosophical training. Equally noticeable is the musicality of her Hebrew: ancient words or word formations will be inflected in modern idiom, or ‘played’ in a contemporary, dissonant key. Hannah Herzig, writing about Ha-Tel Avivim, rightly notes that ‘the melodiousness of [Shihor’s] Hebrew echoes previous epochs, even though the words she chooses are not in themselves ostentatiously archaic’. Another aspect of this musicality makes itself heard in a tension between what is said and what is left unsaid. At times it seems that she uses language to conceal as much as to reveal. 

Modern Hebrew readily draws on a linguistic practice and on an elaborate literature that spans some two and a half millennia. Even a simple sentence in Modern Hebrew bears immediate testimony to the different epochs that have converged in this language. One of the more prominent myths about Hebrew is that it was a dead language, which in the nineteenth century was revived alongside the regeneration of the Jewish people as a national entity. The political agenda underlying the promulgation of this myth need not concern us here, but it is important to note that throughout its long history Hebrew has always displayed an unwavering commitment to its past. It evolved not by obliterating preceding layers, but rather by assimilating them into the fabric of the language. In simple terms, this means that a very young speaker of Modern Hebrew can comfortably understand the less complicated sections of the Bible, a literature that dates back two and a half millennia ( by comparison, the same cannot be said of Homer and speakers of Modern Greek, the Vedas and speakers of Hindi, or Chaucer and English-speakers ). It might be argued that one of the unique developments of the last few decades in Hebrew literature and language is that for the first time one can detect a relaxation of this commitment. In this respect, Rachel Shihor’s writings are different. Hannah Herzig, again on Ha-Tel Avivim, evokes the subtle, yet important, distinction between ‘Israeli literature’ and the more dated term ‘ Hebrew literature’. Both are written in Hebrew, yet Israeli literature (a body of work measured in decades) pertains to the experience of a people in a well-defined geographical area; while the great arc of Hebrew literature (measured in millennia) pertains to a much broader cultural phenomenon reaching far beyond geographical confines. Herzig claims that Shihor’s work reads not like Israeli, but like Hebrew literature, and suggests aligning it with the work of such writers as S.Y. Agnon, David Fogel, and Amalia Kahana-Carmon – to whom one could add Ya’akov Shabtai. 

This context has to be borne in mind, for without it, it may be hard to discern certain features of Shihor’s writing, features which are inevitably somewhat blurred, or even lost, in translation – as some examples may serve to illustrate. 

03 ‘A WORD FROM THE PUBLISHER’ (FROM THE 2016 CATALOGUE)

A decade ago we published our first book: Jila Peacock’s Ten Poems from Hafez, a slim volume of zoomorphic poems in calligraphic form presented alongside the Persian source and accompanied by original translations of Hafez by Jila Peacock. In many respects, this book epitomized our ethos as publishers and continues to guide us to this very day: to let words and images coalesce on the printed page such that they become one. Subsequent publications have striven to attain this evocative interplay between the visual and the verbal in which each element is illuminated in a new and engaging way. 

We are committed to making beautiful books, and books that celebrate both the image and the written word. The books we publish cover a wide range of subject matter and come in many different guises: from the slender volumes of The Cahiers Series to Rasika’s lavish large-scale art books. Nine years after the publication of Translating Music, our first cahier, and 29 issues later, The Cahiers Series remains as popular as ever. In this catalogue we are pleased to introduce three new additions by Kirsty Gunn, Javier Marías and Georgi Gospodinov, from New Zealand, Spain and Bulgaria respectively. Even in this small sample, the breadth and scope of the series is evident: three languages (two translations), three explorations of the art of translation from three unique literary voices. 

Five years ago we founded Rasika, an imprint whose goal is to investigate and examine aesthetic culture in all its manifestations. These lush books have so far dwelt mainly on Chinese art and artisanship, but plans are underway to venture further afield: to India, Africa and of course, the West. In this catalogue, we are announcing two new Rasika titles. The first, Crags and Ravines Make a Marvellous View, continues our exploration of classical Chinese culture through an extraordinary scroll painting by the 17th century master Wu Bin. The scroll, one of the most esteemed and highly-prized examples from the Ming dynasty, depicts in utmost detail and with astounding candour ten views of a single scholar’s rock. Each view is bracketed by flowing vertical lines of calligraphy, written by Mi Wanzhong, the owner of the depicted rock who commissioned the scroll from Wu Bin. Our publication can be seen as a continuation of the subtle, suggestive act of annotating Wu Bin’s painting; like Mi and the authors of the ten colophons attached to the scroll, we cannot resist nestling images in a bed of words. Our book, forthcoming next spring, also attempts to recreate the experience of viewing and handling the magnificent scroll; in addition to a stand alone book, we are producing a handsome boxed limited edition featuring a folio of large-scale reproductions of all ten views printed on exquisite Takeo paper from Japan. 

The second new Rasika title, Classical Chinese Furniture from Weiyang, is the work of the contemporary artist, scholar and restorer Zhang Jinhua, and provides a penetrating and imaginative study of the overlooked Weiyang style of furniture. 

Our books, especially those not reined in by series such as the Cahiers or The Art Monographs, roam far and wide. They range from novellas to essays on typography, from poetry to photography books. Here, too, we are pleased to introduce a new offering. Gorgeous is a new volume of poetry by Robert James Berry. The poems are a collection of scintillating gems strung together to portray the story of a tumultuous and glowing love affair. Their nuanced colours – shades of vermilion, hues of gold and sapphire – have gently trickled down to C. Sabarsky’s specially commissioned images for the book.

Finally, let us return to the theme of making beautiful books. What unites our books is more than subject matter or form; it is their common quest for verbal and visual eloquence. It is a tireless quest and it is not always easy; at times, a wonderful text will resist the company of images, and conversely there are striking images for which a suitable text has not been written – and may never be. At other times, however, a collection of words and a body of images find themselves comfortably nestled in each other. Like the warp and weft of textile they make an inseparable, meaningful whole. We’ve mentioned Ten Poems from Hafez, yet among our more recent publications Lisa Davidson and Ralph Petty’s Breathing Underwater perfectly exemplifies this. Davidson’s poetry and Petty’s watercolours were conceived together and made in response to each other, but each, to begin with, was on its own. Once they were creatively forged together on the printed page, meaning shifted from each disparate element – image and text – and a new entity came into being.

Another way of looking at this is to say that striving to make books in such a manner is tantamount to dropping conventional boundaries which in turn give rise to new form. Our recently published Painted Nudes by Saul Leiter pushes the boundaries that he himself demolished. The works are marvels in their own right; neither pure photography nor pure painting, they are the best of both. By using his black and white prints as canvases Leiter gave new meaning to the images he had created. Then, in book form, when these images were punctuated by the apposite texts, the result was neither a photobook, nor an artbook, but something much more, something unique: a genuine Sylph publication.