Yasmina Reza - Happy Are the Happy

“A few years ago, you and I, Ernest, you remember, before you sold Plou-Gouzan L’Ic, we went fishing. You’d bought some angling equipment you’d never used, and we set off to catch trout or carp or some other freshwater fish in a river near your house. As we walked along the path, we were absurdly happy. I’d never gone fishing and neither had you, unless you count foraging for crustaceans on the seashore. After half an hour, maybe less, you got a bite. You started hauling in your catch, wild with joy — I even think I helped you pull — and then a small, scared fish, wriggling at the end of the line, emerged into view. That fish scared us in turn. Ernest, you said to me, what should we do, what should we do? And I cried, let it go, let it go! You managed to free it from the hook and drop it back into the water. We packed up and left at once. On the way home, we were more or less stricken and didn’t speak a word for a while. Then, all at once, you stopped and said: two titans.”

YASMINA REZA is a playwright and novelist whose works have been translated into more than thirty languages and include “ Art ” and God of Carnage , both winners of the Tony Award for Best Play. The film adaptation of the latter, Carnage , was directed by Roman Polanski in 2011. She has written six books, including Dawn Dusk or Night: A Year with Nicolas Sarkozy (Knopf, 2008). She lives in Paris.

JOHN CULLEN is the translator of many books from Spanish, French, German, and Italian, including Yasmina Khadra’s Middle East Trilogy ( The Swallows of Kabul, The Attack , and The Sirens of Baghdad ), Eduardo Sacheri’s The Secret in Their Eyes , Carlos Zanón’s The Barcelona Brothers , and Rithy Panh’s The Elimination . He lives in upstate New York.