Valery Larbaud was ahead of his time as a writer to acknowledge the importance of translation, and to honor the translator’s work. When he wrote the essays that were later published in the volume Under the Invocation of Saint Jerome, he wanted to share his experience as a reader, an editor of translation, and as an amateur translator. “Amateur” is how he saw himself: Humble, he couldn’t think of comparing himself to the masters, and he saw his own work as very modest attempts in the art. It is himself who he describes when he portrays the translator as somebody who wants to please a friend. Writers sometimes have an ideal reader in mind, Larbaud wrote, inventing the friend for whom one would translate a text in order to share the happiness it brought him:
Now your friend can read this poem, this novel you like: it doesn’t remain a closed book for him anymore; he can read it, and it is you who broke the seals, it is you who shows him the palace, takes him down all the byways, and around the most delightful corners of this foreign city that, without you, he probably would never have visited.1
He also reminded us that translation was a form of appropriation: “To translate a book that we’ve liked is to penetrate deeper in it than we could simply reading it, it’s to own it, it’s somehow appropriating it.”2 Desire of appropriation is also how Rosmarie Waldrop talks about her impulse toward translation in her own writing practice: “As I read the original work I admire it. I am overwhelmed. I would like to have written it. Clearly, I am envious—envious enough to make it mine.”3
Before desire arises, translation, according to Larbaud, Waldrop and Walter Benjamin, is the result of an encounter. Indeed, in his “Task of the Translator,” one of the meanings Benjamin gives for the notion of translatability is to find the answer to the question “Will an adequate translator ever be found among the totality of [the work’s] readers?”4 And for many occasional translators (to differentiate them from professional translators who get texts assigned to them by publishers), the decision to translate isborn of liking a book, of reading it many times over until the desire to share prompts them to get to work. Larbaud wanted his friends to read Samuel Butler, so he set to work, while Rosmarie Waldrop thought that American writers should know the work of Edmond Jabès, and so she embarked on an over twenty-year translation journey.
Following my illustrious predecessors, my translation journey through the work of Olivia Rosenthal started with a personal connection. A friend with whom I collaborated on a project sent me a book for Christmas. On the card she slipped in it, she wrote: “If you are interested, I’ll send you the other ones. They don’t resemble each other, except for their quirky, off-beat quality.” The book in question, Mes petites communautés [ My Small Communities ], was Olivia Rosenthal’s second novel, published in 1999. Reading it made me thirsty for more. A reflection on genealogy, memory and geography, it relates the introspective journey taken by the narrator through family archives and the testimonies of elders, in search of the roots of her desire to write. Through the novel her quest leads her to understand that she doesn’t write to revive the past, but instead to contemplate the future without the daily presence of her sister, who leaves the family apartment to get married: “My sister, enemy of the family, she writes, the one for whom I write this story, for whom I tell my sweet and sour stories—which I didn’t even know upon starting it.”5
I didn’t wait for my friend to send me the “other ones,” as she put it at the time. This was the summer of 2007, and when I arrived in Paris, We’re Not Here to Disappear, the seventh “novel” of Olivia Rosenthal, had just been published. I grabbed it at my local bookstore, and read it in one long night of jetlag. I had personal reasons to be interested in the story of Monsieur T., diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease and locked up in a psychiatric facility after he stabbed his wife. So my first reading was all about the diagnostic, the patient’s meandering thoughts, the treatment (care would be more appropriate as there is no treatment per se of the disease), the family’s and the writer’s reaction to it, and, tangentially, the biographic details on Alois Alzheimer, the doctor who unwillingly gave his name to this brain degeneration. So I have to admit that I waited till at least my third reading to pay closer attention to the structure to the narrator’s voice, and to realize that there might be more than a testimony in this text.
Meanwhile I had gone back to read all of Rosenthal’s works, this time in the order of their publication to have a more precise idea of her as a writer. That’s how I discovered that, contrary to what my friend had told me at the time, there were obvious similarities between the books. Each forms part of a linear story, sketching first the life of a high school and then university student, of a young woman, and then a more mature woman whose parents are Jewish, the paternal side of the family coming from Frankfurt-on-Main, Germany. We learn that she has been raised between the 9th and the 16th districts of Paris, that she has (had) a sister a couple years older than she, who had married, discovered her homosexuality, divorced, and aftera few romantic adventures settled in Paris in a stable relationship with her partner “C,” whose father, in We Are Not Here to Disappear, suffers from Alzheimer’s.
Her works are all closely related in their style, in how the author ties together those threads of lives, using prose, poetry, documentary-writing; also, the reader soon realizes that from one book to the next, the story is woven in a snail-like spiral, from the periphery to the center, in six installments, the latest one published this fall and appearing to be the last one of the series.
And the bond is certainly tightened between each book by the fact that throughout, Olivia Rosenthal’s narrator bears her name, or her initials, a relationship she addresses in the third one, Puisque nous sommes vivants [ Since We Are Alive] when she acknowledges that O.R. could be “me or my double,”6 immediately creating doubt as to the genre of the texts. Rosenthal is published by Verticales, a well-established publishing house known for shepherding some of the best French experimental fiction writers. At first her books bore the mention “novel,” a mention that disappeared after the third one with no further explanation. The fourth volume, We’re Not Here to Disappear, doesn’t present any significant change from the preceding ones. And if they are not novels, then what? Non-fiction? Autobiography? The care the author takes to make apparent the distance between her and her double makes me doubt this; all along she drops hints to keep the reader aware of the fictional nature of her writing, the most obvious example being no doubt the warning in the epigraph of the fifth book, Que font les rennes après Noël [ What Are The Reindeer Doing After Christmas? ]: Phu Si, to whom the work is dedicated, commits, in the narrative, a suicide that is refuted by the dedication,: “To Phu Si, who didn’t hang himself in his room.”
So what came first to my mind is the idea of autofiction: in the mid-seventies, French novelist and critic Serge Doubrovsky, working in his New York office, came up with this name to designate a fiction written out of “events and facts strictly real.”7 Mixing fiction techniques and autobiographical content, he wrote a first “novel,” Son, a landmark in the genre, in which respecting the conventions of the genre he had just coined, he appeared under his name, with an obvious autobiographical goal, though attached to the fiction part of his writing. Doubrovsky was responding to Philippe Lejeune’s structuralist definition of autobiography, which was based on a “reading pact” with the author, whose actual name appeared inside and outside of the narrative. Doubrovsky’s creation of a new genre has very much taken on a life of its own, but it was initially strongly derivative—a desire to fill the blank square in Lejeune’s chart.
Another concept, maybe more familiar to American readers, is the concept of biomythography, coined this time by Audre Lorde to describe Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, an account of her childhood and youth. Her publisher defined the term as a way of “combining elements of history, biography and myth.”8 If Rosenthal definitely includes elements of history andbiography in her narratives, she doesn’t shy away from myths, dreams and fantasies either, introducing them seamlessly in the texts, without any stylistic warning, as a way to show us that they are part of life, of our lives, of her life, of the matter that shapes us and shaped her. So it might be, as we examine more closely the making of We’re Not Here to Disappear, that biomythography, as defined earlier, would be the applicable term for Rosenthal’s work.
I mentioned earlier going back to read Olivia Rosenthal’s books in order, and it’s time now to contextualize We’re Not Here to Disappear, the fourth installment. Rosenthal’s bibliography is pretty impressive: Since 1999, the date of her first publication, she has published to this day ten books, made a couple of movies, written and directed a few plays, a libretto, and has done more performances than one (including her) could count. Also, I should add that she is a professor, teaching sixteenth-century French literature, her original specialty, and creative writing at a Parisian university. What interests me in this prolixity is the urgency one can feel in the writing, and specifically in the writing of the series. Each of the books is a piece of her life-puzzle, and it’s only when the sixth volume was published last fall that the reader— as well as the author—would achieve a sense of closure. I can say with some confidence that with Mécanismes de survie en milieu hostile [ Survival Mecanisms in an Hostile Environment ], she has gently closed the cycle; she seems to assert that she is through with her story, finally at peace, and in an ending epigraph (a quote on the last page), she leaves us with one last thought borrowed from another master-biomythographer, Georges Perec:
Quand on commence un puzzle, on sait que le puzzle s’appelle la vie et l’oeuvre de Georges Perec mais on ne sait pas à quoi ça ressemble. Peutêtre que ce sera tout blanc, peut-être qu’il y aura une petite étoile dans un coin. [When you start a puzzle, we know that the puzzle is called the life and work of Georges Perec but we don’t know what it looks like. Maybe it will be all white, maybe there’ll be a small star in a corner.]9
So if I consider the six books as a cycle, why choose to start translating Rosenthal’s work with the fourth one? Besides some marketing and grant consideration, there was an emotional tie, since We’re Not Here to Disappear was my first real introduction to her work. Of course as I reported, I first read My Little Communities but frankly if all the books had been of the same stylistic vein, I’m not sure I would have gone further in my reading. We’re Not Here to Disappear is when her writing really exploded, opened, matured, asserted itself. I’m not sure which verb to use exactly, but suddenly Rosenthal takes advantage of the space on the page, the prose is broken down in a patchwork of styles, including verses, lists and logorrhea as she frees herself from punctuation, and structure becomes meaning. And if We’re Not Here to Disappear is a turning point in Rosenthal’s writing, it’s also a crucial point in the narrative: Thepreceding volumes are just preambles to this one, and it’s not necessary to have read them to understand it.
For Larbaud, translation is also a form of criticism, “the humblest, shyest, but also the easiest and the most agreeable to practice”:10 how to get better acquainted with a text than turning every stone/word of it in search of its equivalent in the target language? One can’t translate without understanding, and that understanding is of the deepest kind, down to the bare bones of a text, on which flesh has to be superimposed in a way that will allow it to come to life on the other side of the language Styx. And it is through a close examination of the language and its use that I came to think that We’re Not Here to Disappear illustrates best the idea of biomythography, starting with the inclusion of myth and fantasy in the weft of the narrative.
Fantasies indeed play a key role, pushing Monsieur T., the main character, to attempt killing his wife in order to clear the way for another life, lived in some original kingdom where nobody cuts trees (his obsession), a promised land named America, that has more to do with Kafka’s dream world than the land on which we stand:
I’ll go to America, they won’t cut me down, they don’t burn wounds, we can hide in the trees, live in the wild, the real life, life as it was in the beginning, that’s what I wish for, that’s what everybody wishes for, that’s what they do in America, most of the time they live in the trees so I do like them and I also swim in the river we have to be careful there are plenty of babies floating.11
While Monsieur T. is dreaming in his hospital bed, the narrator is digging through his medical records, books and articles on the disease, and, as a starting point, the biography of Alois Alzheimer himself. While relating the main events that brought him to make his discovery, O.R. often allows herself to imagine what his relationships with colleagues, his marriage, his children, were. And that’s because once she has stated the biology of the disease, Rosenthal gets to the questions important to her: How does one acquire a legacy and a genealogy, what’s in a name, what if your name bears the weight of history, how are people remembered, if at all? And while she thinks about the burden of bearing the name of a disease that kills today millions of people, she mostly reflects on the meaning of her own name, a mirror in which she can see her parents’ parents, a Jewish lineage erased by history, of which she is the last descendant. In her mind and on the page, she superimposes images of Alois Alzheimer and of her father’s family as they all belong to the same place:
My father was born where Alois Alzheimer was buried, in Frankfurt, a city I’ve never been to. Maybe, in honor of Doctor Alzheimer, I could go to the Frankfurt cemetery and meditate on his grave. It would be aroundabout way of going back to my origins even though to my knowledge, none of my family members were buried in this city, nor in any other, for that matter.12
If the history of her family is a painful one, marked by death, destruction, the most destructive seed is not planted that deep in the past. And it’s taken her twenty years to dare the question: “I wonder how my life would have been if my sister hadn’t put an end to her life.”13 It’s the first one that costs…. From then on, the text is peppered with questions, lacing Monsieur T.’s story with the acid of another death: “I wonder what my life would have been if my sister hadn’t thrown herself out the window.”14 Or this one: “I wonder how my parents’ life would have been if my sister had accepted the idea of seeing them die before her.”15 And some statements follow, equally devastating: “I’ve spent twenty years of my life acting as if nothing had happened:16 “I spent twenty years of my life acting like I’d never had any brothers or sisters. Yet I’m not an only child.”17 And reflecting on her rewriting of history for so long, she comes to the conclusion that “My sister probably wished I’d die, but I didn’t wish the same for her. I actually wished the contrary.”18 But as she concludes in the end “Our wishes don’t come true.”19
And from there it’s a free fall…. Rosenthal uses several times throughout the text the metaphor of the fall, “Fall into the void/let go,”20 before tying Monsieur T. and her sister’s plight in one long fall in verse:
Now the world is hollowing itself out
the world is a hole I fall into
like into a well I fall
except that at the bottom
I don’t know if I’ll find water
or soil
or nothing
needlessly I fall
and for so long
that I don’t remember anymore
what before this fall
nothing
before this fall
nothing
there is
when I think about it
it’s beyond suspicion
it’s deep
a well in which
an oblivion in which
I look for
I look for
in the well that’s a hole that’s dark that’s black
I look for what before must have taken place
so that I find myself back in the hole
looking for
the well
the oblivion
the back exit
the back opening
the before of the hole
the before of the fall
and it’s even harder
not to be able to get out than just to know
you’re falling.21
And the fall is the sign of the language failing. Words are disappearing, leaving an abyss wide opened. The text, following Monsieur T.’s brain degradation and the self-imposed silence of the sister, is itself disintegrating, sentences getting shorter, vocabulary poorer, up to the point of its own erasure, as the last verses of the book sum it up:
he erases her
and erases himself with her22
The main goal of Olivia Rosenthal is not to tell us a story of an Alzheimer’s patient, nor to walk us through the history of medicine. As a writer, she has to try to speak the unspeakable, to defy the odds and fate, and to give a voice to those who don’t have it anymore. As she acknowledges, “We can’t really recount Monsieur T.’s life in full. His testimony is missing.”23 And
as she attempted to recreate Monsieur T.’s running thoughts, she does not put any words in the mouth of her deceased sister, nor does she try to learn German, her family language, erased from her lineage by the Holocaust, thus making it the true unspeakable.
Translating this text into English felt as if I were pursuing the author’s quest: All along, I had the uncanny feeling that it was made to be translated, as if Rosenthal had written in French with the rhythm and structure of English in mind. Walter Benjamin insisted on the fact that “Languages are not strangers to one another, but are, a priori and apart from all historical relationships, interrelated in what they want to express.”24 Through the filter of migration and dementia, there were several strata of language existing in We’re Not Here to Disappear, and English came as just another one, already contained in the writing, as if the translator that I was had just to peel the French layer to find underneath its Anglophone counterpart. Monsieur T. dreams of “America,” and his words slip into their American costume easily, as if, like him, in the writer’s mind, they had readied themselves for the journey.
Before engaging in this translation I had started to write directly in English, creatively and academically, but the main benefit of it was a personal one: In my own creative work, I try to find my way through hybridity and this book in a way epitomizes what a literary hybrid work could be. So throughout the translation, I often felt like a robber preparing her crime. I had fallen in love with her writing and my desire to see through it, to understand its alchemy, led me to translation, an act that could be better understood in this case as an attempted robbery than a literary gesture. Nothing got me closer to the internal mechanisms of the text than translating it: No better way to get to the matter, down to the bones, and modeling it back in a different idiom would teach me the tricks, wouldn’t it? And maybe more than dreaming of appropriating the text, I dreamt of appropriating a way of writing, and a language, building a literary home in my adopted tongue, English.
1. Valery Larbaud, Sous l’invocation de Saint Jérôme, Œuvres complètes, tome VIII (Paris: Gallimard, 1953), 90. (Translations are my own).
2. Ibid.
3. Rosmarie Waldrop, “Joy of the Demiurge,” Omniverse, 2017. http://omniverse.us/rosmarie-waldrop-on-translation-joy-of-the-demiurge/ (last accessed Jan. 2017).
4. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations (1968), translated by Harry Zohn. www.ricorso.net/rx/library/criticism/guest/Benjamin_W/Benjamin_W1.htm (last accessed Jan. 2017).
5. Olivia Rosenthal, Mes petites communautés (Paris: Verticales, 1999), 127.
6. Olivia Rosenthal, Puisque nous sommes vivants (Paris: Verticales, 2000), 120.
7. Serge Doubrovsky, Fils (Paris: Gallimard, coll. “Folio,” 2011), backcopy material, written by the author.
8. Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography, FeministSeries (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1982). Backcopy material.
9. Olivia Rosenthal, Mécanisme de survie en milieu hostile (Paris:Verticales, 2014),185. (translations are my own).
10. Larbaud, Saint Jérôme, 92.
11. Olivia Rosenthal, We’re Not Here to Disappear (Los Angeles: Otis Books/Seismicity editions, 2015), 28.
12. Ibid., 96.
13. Ibid., 113.
14. Ibid., 118.
15. Ibid., 128.
16. Ibid., 130.
17. Ibid., 135.
18. Ibid.,145.
19. Ibid., 149.
20. Ibid., 120.
21. Ibid., 133–134.
22. Ibid., 169.
23. Ibid., 166.
24. Benjamin, “Task of Translator.”
Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” In Illuminations (1968), translated by Harry Zohn. www.ricorso.net/rx/library/criticism/guest/Benjamin_W/Benjamin_W1.htm (last accessed Jan. 2017).
Doubrovsky, Serge. Fils. Paris: Gallimard, coll. “Folio,” 2011.
Larbaud, Valery. Sous l’invocation de Saint Jérôme, Œuvres complètes, tome VIII.Paris: Gallimard, 1953.
Lorde, Audre. Zami: A New Spelling of My Name: A Biomythography, FeministSeries. Berkeley: Crossing Press, 1982.
Rosenthal, Olivia. Mes petites communautés. Paris: Verticales, 1999.
———. Puisque nous sommes vivants. Paris: Verticales, 2000.
———. On n’est pas là pour disparaître. Paris: Verticales, 2007.
———. Mécanisme de survie en milieu hostile. Paris: Verticales, 2014.
———. We’re Not Here to Disappear. Translated from the French by B. Mousli. Los Angeles: Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2015.
Waldrop, Rosmarie. “Joy of the Demiurge.” Omniverse, 2017. http://omniverse.us/rosmarie-waldrop-on-translation-joy-of-the-demiurge/(last accessed Jan. 2017).