Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno

1951-2024 – In Memoriam

— Dana Delibovi

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For Chris

It’s strange when a mentor is younger than you are, which Chris was, by a year and change.

From our first meeting I’d assumed he was at least a few years older than me, and by the time I learned otherwise, the die was cast.

So much is projection, isn’t it? I took his white beard and hair, and calm, almost bemused demeanor as signifiers of the venerable, whereas I, looking in the mirror, could only see old.

But there was more to it than that. His seemingly effortless erudition, his eminence – at least in certain circles – worn lightly. Literary lion and architect. Yes, I can say it now: to me he represented the best of all possible patriarchs.

I don’t think I’m alone by any means among artists, and others, who came to trust both his critical faculties, and the intentions behind them. I’ve never known a more inclusive, less dismissive writer and editor than Chris, nor a person avowedly of the Left who seemed so willing to take people as they are. Most of the folks I’ve met who resemble Chris those respects tend to lack discernment. Chris, at least in my experience, managed to be simultaneously clear-minded and open. He reminded me, in some ways, of my uncle Joe, who saw straight on, but didn’t use it as an excuse to harden his gaze. In short, Chris was who I wanted to be, not so much when I grew up, but learned to differientiate without reflexive jugement.

Now to prevent this turning into a total hagiography, I’ll say that I know Chris was a human being like everyone else and that he came equipped with the full panoply of emotional states, ambivalences, multivalences even, and a robust ego. But I never witnessed him treating others disrespectfully, and came to feel it was safe to admire him without opening myself up to potential power trips. Over the course of our friendship, either working in editorial collaboration, or sharing an ever-deepening dialogue about our writing, we never met as anything but eye to eye. There are great souls in this world, and when you recognize one, its a gift. I hope Chris felt as supported by me as I did by him – not uncritically, but because we recognized our distinctions and commonalities as part of the same inalienable package. I and thou. What a concept. It’s possible, then, that one definition of love is not having to watch your back.

— Eric Darton

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Having only met Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno recently when I joined him as an editor at Cable Street, I hardly knew him. The man I met in our meeting zoom window displayed a gentle, intelligent demeanor that, as the meeting went on, burst through that flat rectangle to enliven our Cable Street gatherings into a brilliant 3D world. Charming, handsome with his gray/white hair and trimmed facial hair, serious, yet easily amused, I enjoyed his presence and began to learn from him and of him. As I read his memoir, serialized in our magazine, I was astonished to learn that this quintessential gentleman-scholar had such a wild childhood in Mexico and to discover his thoroughly rebellious nature. I followed his other contributions to Cable Street, including poetry, translations, book reviews, a published Afterward for a new and revised edition of Francis Carco’s From Montmartre to the Latin Quarter, and more. Amazed at the scope, I had to Google him. There I found his prodigious literary background, with citations from City Lights Bookstore, the Online Archive of California, Grove Atlantic. But duh, it finally occurred to me to check Cable Street’s editor bios.

Chris was the author of more than two dozen books including biographies of Paul Bowles, E.E. Cummings, books of his own poems, and even the heady The World’s Words: A Semiotic Reading of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and Rabelais’ Gargantua et Pantagruel. And to top it off, he taught writing at MIT for over a quarter-century. If I’d known all this when I met him, I would have been intimidated. But he himself was the antithesis of intimidating. Then I discovered that with all the work he was doing—writing, editing, adding contributors to the magazine—he was also battling cancer.

We sometimes arranged our meeting dates to allow him time to recover from some treatment or to occur after his release from the hospital. And still, there he was, vitally alive, smiling, offering clear analysis of some issue. Again, I was beyond impressed: at him, at his work, at his stamina.

A fear entered my soul and word came. He was no longer in the world, no longer going to be filling a zoom screen with his openness and generosity of spirit. Our budding relationship lopped off too early. However, I’m grateful that I can continue getting to know him by reading his writings. I leave you with this from his memoir in Cable Street Issue 6, in which he’s talking about his stepdad and their recent fight: “I wanted to tell him I missed him, and that I even loved him, but it seemed corny to say something that true and plain. Instead, I retreated, kept my distance, decided all I could do was carve out a world of my own.”

— Jan Schmidt

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Chris brought an endless positive energy and excitement to Cable Street. If you haven’t had a chance to read his serialized Memoir, you should definitely dive in—he had me from the first lines of the first installment:

I become.

No one has ever told me what I looked like at birth…

Powerful, interesting writing that immediately captures the reader. At the same time, the breadth of Chris’s writing, interests, and connections will always astound me, such as his translation work on Paul Celan’s poetry and his later participation in the memorial symposium for Roditi at Bosporus University with noted translators Saliha Özçelik and Clifford Endres.

But ‘the Chris effect’ went far beyond Paris and Istanbul. Imagine my surprise when I recently went to the Yucatán Peninsula for the first time and, wanting to learn more about Mayan culture, I went to an English-language bookshop and there in the window was Chris’s translation: Destruction of the Jaguar: From the Books of Chilam Balam (City Lights).

Chris’s enthusiasm for the literature of the world was matched by his service to readers and writers the world over — you would be amazed at the number of both that Chris has brought to Cable Street (you may even be one of them). At every turn, Chris championed poets and authors. He really was a card-carrying citizen of world literature. We will continue to delight in his writing, poetry, and translation even as we deeply miss his wit, good humor, and incredible generosity of spirit.

— Hardy Griffin

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Remembering…. Christopher Sawyer-Lauçanno

Memories, memories… our common acquaintance, Ed Foster…Talisman Press and publications… Massachusetts….  At first, just a name and the fact that “they”—Chris and his wife, Patricia, were in “Turner’s,” that is Turner’s Falls,  an old mill town about 4 – 5 miles from Greenfield, where I was living at the time.  Ed, a good friend of Chris’ lived in Greenfield also, though I did not get to meet Chris at one of Ed’s Greenfield gatherings but, rather, when Ed moved further up the road to Northfield. Contact was pleasant but infrequent.

Istanbul, Turkiyë. I had a teaching job in Istanbul. I remember sharing wine and conversation with several friends at an outdoor table near the Galata end of the old-fashioned Taksim tramway… my phone ringing…  news of the birth of my first grandchild … Patricia Pruitt, Chris’ wife, lifting her wine glass—”congratulations, Bronwyn!”

West Africa to Michigan…2008, preparing to leave that same teaching position for a Fulbright in West Africa… Word was that Chris was coming in to work at my same Istanbul university… mutual friend, Cliff Endres asked if I knew of a place where “someone—” guess who— could find a place to rent in my neighborhood…

Time passed …the occasional visit to Ed’s place, news via Murat Nemet-Nejat or others, the sad news of Patricia’s passing, a subsequent and unfulfilling, if not dreadful, teaching job in the wilds of Michigan… little chance to engage with Chris. 

To and from Latin America… Chris and I got back in touch in earnest and, in 2019, I introduced him and his memoir, Becoming, to The Wall, as I and two friends had dubbed our online literary journal. That was Issue 7.  By Issue 9 we became Witty Partition and Chris was still very much with us. By Issue 14, Sumer 2021, we invited Chris to join us as Contributing Editor-at-Large. He and I translated some work together, most memorable being an odd fiction using the Portuguese Spanish argot spoken along the western frontier of Spain and Portugal’s eastern border. Polyglot that Chris was, he was never a dictatorial or temperamental, and was an ideal working partner for the challenges of translation. He also gave us a translation from the Catalan of “San Sebastién,” by Salvador Dali (with notes!)… a translation from the Romanian, with Eduoard Roditi, of work by Paul Celan… with Paul Doru Mugur, translations of seven Romanian poets… revisited and added to an earlier essay on Eldridge Cleaver…a book on Fernando Pessoa… He memorialized Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whom he knew, in our ¡Viva! section. In the first Issue of Cable Street, as the journal is now called, he also wrote about the process of literary translation… Through him we also welcomed many intriguing writers, among them John High & Matvei Yankelevich (and their work on Osip Mandelstam), Mark Polizzotti, Rob Couteau.

It is easier to describe Chris’ collegial work than the joy of his friendship. The restorative effect of that good friendship is not to be dismissed, knowing him, whispers of him, the genuine person that he was… Now Chris’ absence, so sudden but not surprising given his delicate health, just plain hurts. I have lived out of country for the last twelve years, but we skyped or zoomed almost weekly.  He was funny, insightful, encouraged my writing and my efforts to unearth a publisher for my oddball novel; and he, too, spoke of and shared his own writing, our theories about translation, about language, about literary prima donnas we both wrung our hands over, about friends we had in common, …the ups and downs encountered when I agreed to put up the last two issues of Talisman, when Ed could no longer do so… I would tease him as he struggled with medical appointment after medical appointment, treatment regime after treatment regime. Even on the computer screen, the transition of his hair from grey to white—”Rest!” I’d write, “I’ll invoke all my pagan dieties to assist in your recovery…” And when he went back in, “Dedos cruzados!”

Then, “Back to pagan dieties–I must tell them to get off their hmm-hmms and do better than this!”

Funny how we turn to others’ words to express sorrow, but such a wound as the loss of a true friend—I can think of almost nothing. We write eloquently of romantic relationships, the importance of those that last and the painful loss of one or another partner, of dear family members for whose loss the wound never quite heals, but the delicacy and loss, the importance of friendship…

Dammit, Chris, I miss you.

— Bronwyn Mills

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