Adrien Bosc - Constellation

I was born on January 20, and at the age of eleven I questioned the date of my birth. I had found a birth announcement that my parents sent out, it gave the date as January 21. I asked them, but neither was able to give me a clear answer, the birth certificate and the family record differed. I was furious, couldn’t understand why they waffled over the facts. I didn’t know the date of my birth and had no definite astrological sign, January 20 being in Capricorn and January 21 in Aquarius. A matter of constellations. The answer would eventually come from the hospital, the records said January 20.

My thanks to Manuel Carcassonne, Bernard Chambaz, Benoît Heimermann, and Luc Widmaier.

My gratitude to Philippe Castellano, author of the invaluable articles “Il y a 60 ans: le Constellation de Marcel Cerdan disparaissait aux Açores,” Avions , Nos. 173 and 174; to Dominique Grimault and Patrick Mahé, authors of Piaf-Cerdan, un hymne à l’amour 1946–1949 (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2007); to Jacques Chancel, orchestrator of the miracle.

Verse on this page from the song “Volutes,” original French lyrics by Alain Bashung and Jean Fauques. Copyright © 1991 Universal Music Publishing.

Letter from Édith Piaf to Marcel Cerdan on this page from Moi pour toi. Lettres d’amour , Édith Piaf and Marcel Cerdan (Paris: Le Cherche midi éditeur, 2002).

Letter from Ginette Neveu on this page from Ginette Neveu: La fulgurante carrière d’une grande artiste by Marie-Jeanne Ronze-Neveu (Paris: Éditions Pierre Horay, 1952).

Letter from Kathleen Ferrier on this page from Letters and Diaries of Kathleen Ferrier , edited by Christopher Fifield (Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2003).

Blaise Cendrars poetry extracts on this page from “Fernando da Noronha” and on this page from “Orion” reproduced from the collection Feuilles de route , copyright © 1947, 1963, 2001, 2005, Éditions Denoël.

ADRIEN BOSC was born in 1986 in Avignon. He is the deputy director of the French publisher Le Seuil. Constellation , winner of the prestigious Grand Prix du roman de l’Académie française and a best seller in France, is his first novel.

WILLARD WOOD is a winner of the Lewis Galantière Award for Literary Translation and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Translation. He lives in Connecticut.