TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
If we storytellers are Death’s Secretaries,
we are so because, in our brief mortal lives,
we are grinders of these lenses.
—John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos
GIVEN THE CHOICE, WOULD YOU rather know when—the precise moment—you were going to die, or how? A friend asked me this pithy question a few months ago, when I was in the final stages of editing the translation you’ve just read. I thought about it for a moment, then said it wouldn’t make all that much difference to me, so long as Valérie Mréjen wrote my obituary. How to explain to my friend: the lightness of hand, the quiet intensity of attention, the knack for finding poignancy in the banally absurd, all so distinctively Mréjen’s? Who wouldn’t want the postscript to their life to be handled with such care?
Of course, Mréjen’s approach to writing about death—its sly, callous inventiveness and the transformations wrought by it on the living—is formally more akin to the witness statement than to the obituary. Her aim is not to eulogize but to detail, to inventory, to record; to fulfill the role, in Berger’s sense, of Death’s secretary. And yet that word, care, is among the first that come to mind whenever I try to describe the peculiar intimacy of this writing that never once reaches for pathos. Mréjen’s insistence on maintaining a certain distance from her subject feels to me rooted in care, which is to say the opposite of carelessness: vigilance, discretion, accuracy. It’s as if she knew that to come any closer would be to breach some mysterious contract made with Death itself: I’ll show you my face, as long as you stay right there—no sudden movements—and as long as you don’t look away.
And she doesn’t; not for a beat. She doesn’t flinch, either. The steady focus of her gaze keeps our attention on the space of the encounter with death; an encounter that, in these pages, almost always comes as the rudest of shocks. Like the anonymous writers of faits divers—the brief, sordid news items used as “filler” in French newspapers of old—Mréjen catalogues the kind of sudden, tragic, odd and unexplained deaths that we secretly believe only happen to other people. She treats each one as a complete story with its own internal logic and timing, and these self-contained narratives are often devastating in their concision. But as they accumulate over the course of the novel, intertwining with the dark tale of mother and daughter that stands at its heart, the sense of a larger pattern begins to emerge: the one death’s traces have left, indelibly, on a forty-something consciousness; the contours of a forest populated by ghosts.
VALÉRIE MRÉJEN WAS BORN IN 1969 in Paris and grew up in the 17th arrondissement, a leafy, quiet enclave in the northwest corner of the city. Her circuitous path to literature began at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts in Cergy-Pontoise, where she developed a practice in video and mixed-media arts. The videos she made after graduating—brief sketches that mine the minutiae of everyday interactions, often revolving around a failure to communicate—were widely exhibited and remain touchstones of her oeuvre. (It bears pointing out that her first video, Une noix, contains the seed of what would become a leitmotif in this novel and in much of her work: the way language operates within the family, especially between parents and children. In it, a young girl grows increasingly frustrated as she tries to recite a poem and is interrupted again and again by her sermonizing mother.)
Around the same time, she began working on a series of cut-up texts that mimic the language in personals ads, using only proper names found in the phonebook; the fastidious and somewhat obsessive process involved in making the cutups was, Mréjen later said in an interview, “an indirect way of coming to writing.” Her first novel, Mon grand-père, published in 1999, and the two that followed in short order—L’Agrume (2001) and Eau Sauvage (2004)—are each in their own way collage-like, fragmentary texts that toy with conventions of self-portraiture. To my mind, they can be read as a sort of triptych that engages with the question of how others’ words shape us, in particular when we are young and still stuttering ourselves into being. Forêt noire shares in those concerns to a certain extent, but if the earlier work was preoccupied with the limiting forces of language, here Mréjen acknowledges those limitations and attempts the impossible anyway: to speak at length, exclusively, and without interruption of the very thing that embodies the unsayable (for, as the saying goes, no one has come back to tell us about it).
Little surprise, then, that the novel marks a stylistic and tonal break: from the short, declarative sentences that achieve a disquieting cumulative effect in the “tryptich,” to the meandering ones in Forêt noire that unfold like paper flowers; from the imposed flatness of tone that became Mréjen’s signature early on in her career, to the seamless shifts in tense, register and point of view that run through this novel, yielding more oddity and ambiguity. My greatest challenge in translating Forêt noire was, without question, finding the right way to carry that strangeness over into English, and striking the delicate balance between vagueness and precision—and, by extension, between formal distance and emotional immediacy—that gives this writing its subtle dissonance.
The deeper I delved into Mrejen’s sentences, the more compelled I felt to immerse myself in her particular universe, too. Whenever I hadn’t been translating for a while and needed to ease into the mood of the book again, it was a comfort to spend time with the films—and the hallowed HBO series—that are woven into the narrative, each reflecting its overall tone in some way. I watched and re-watched Raymond Depardon’s 1983 documentary Faits divers, which follows a group of cops on their daily rounds in a Paris precinct, and Ernst Lubitsch’s fleet, enchanting 1943 comedy Heaven Can Wait, in which the boundary between the living and the dead becomes magically porous. The translating flowed more easily once I came to understand that the two films serve as counterpoints in the novel, playfully echoing its title’s double meaning.1 I revisited Six Feet Under, which Mréjen has said served as inspiration (and more than once, as I settled in on the couch and let the opening credits roll, I found myself gauging the distance to the bathroom door). Perhaps most significantly, I discovered a whole body of work that isn’t named in the text, but that casts a shadow over it from the first sentence; that of a man who liked wearing a fragrance made from the essence of fig leaves, and who decided one day that he’d lived long enough. Mréjen’s late friend and sometimes collaborator, Édouard Levé, left behind several books of photographs and four slim volumes of deeply thoughtful, witty, enigmatic prose; in his final novel, Suicide, Levé’s narrator addresses a friend who killed himself fifteen years earlier, at twenty-five, on his birthday, the 25th of December.2 Mréjen’s novel, too, is filled with eerie symmetries, and reading Levé’s works alongside it gave me a heightened awareness of these patterns and resonances.
I first read Forêt noire in the winter of 2013, shortly after my grandfather died. Though it was, as they say, an easy death, it had levelled me, and I found myself unable to sleep at night, alert with the knowledge that everyone dear to me would sooner or later be taken away. During that time, this book was not only an unlikely source of consolation; reading it felt like an indulgence, too. Whenever I attempted to talk about it with someone else, I could not find words to explain the rush of pleasure—a physical buzz not unlike the one you might get from a slice or three of the titular cake—that I felt each time I picked it up again. This translation project began with that buzzy feeling, and with a desire to tease it out and understand it; at the time, I had no contract and no full-length literary translation to my name. Mréjen’s graciousness and enthusiasm kept me at it, as did a growing conviction that, while the novel isn’t for everyone—certainly not for members of the cult of the carefree—it would find its Anglophone readers. I hope that it comforts and unsettles them in ways they don’t yet know they need, and that it works on them in ways they’re unable to explain.
One of the interesting things about translating this book very sporadically over a number of years was that all my drafts and notes—all the emails and texts exchanged with Valérie, who also became a friend—began to mark the passage of time. With each year that’s gone by (and how fitting that the novel’s opening scene should take place on New Year’s Eve), our respective forests, Valérie’s and mine, have grown denser with ghosts. On January 2nd of last year, Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens, the beloved founder of Éditions P.O.L., died in a car accident while on holiday with his wife in Guadeloupe. Just a few weeks earlier, Valérie had accompanied him to a screening of his second film, Éditeur, which traces his decades-long journey in publishing and investigates his relationship to his authors. In the days that followed his death, she wrote an essay about the film and her memories of Paul from that night. These lines have stayed with me: A woman takes the microphone: now that you’ve made this film, and after so many years in the same profession, do you think you’ll go into a new line of work or will you keep at this one until the end? (…) He shakes his head—cheekbones lifting in a smile, neck tucked slightly between his shoulders—and says: you know, I’ve been doing this work for fifty years; if I was going to get tired of it, I already would have a long time ago. My model is Maurice Nadeau, who died still working at a hundred and two, so… (…).3 In the space of an ellipsis, fate takes a different turn.
I WOULD LIKE TO EXPRESS my thanks to E.C. Belli, Ruggero Bozotti, Eleanor Kriseman, Chad Post, and most especially Julia Sanches for their invaluable insights over the course of the translation process. Thanks also to the editors of Joyland Magazine for publishing an early excerpt; to Veronica Esposito for helping me to find an interested publisher in Phoneme Books, and to my husband, Christian Estevez, for his cheerful support and always perceptive comments on the French. I’m indebted to the Collège Internationale des Traducteurs Littéraires in Arles for giving me time to complete final edits in a place so lovely I didn’t want to leave (and haven’t). Above all: thank you, Valérie Mréjen, for your patience, your unfailing kindness, and your words.
VALÉRIE MRÉJEN (B. 1969) is a writer, filmmaker, and mixed-media artist. She has written five novels, most recently Troisième personne (P.O.L., 2017), and exhibited widely in France and abroad, including in a solo retrospective at the Jeu de Paume gallery in Paris. Mréjen has made several short films, documentaries (Pork and Milk, 2004; Valvert, 2008), and a feature-length film, En ville, co-directed with Bertrand Schefer and a Director’s Fortnight selection at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011. She has written two original plays (Trois hommes verts and Le carnaval des animaux, a collaboration with singer-songwriter Albin de la Simone based on Camille Saint-Saëns’s musical suite), and her adaptation of Alexandre Dumas fils’s La dame aux Camélias was performed in Arthur Nauzyciel’s production on stages throughout France. An alumna of residencies at Villa Medici in Rome and Villa Kujoyama in Kyoto, she is curating a 2019 exhibition based on the archives at the Institute for Contemporary Publishing (IMEC) in Normandy and working on a documentary about students at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. More information can be found online at www.valeriemrejen.com.
KATIE SHIREEN ASSEF is a literary translator living between Los Angeles and Arles, France. Black Forest is her first full-length translation.
1. Black Forest, of course, refers to both the mountain range in Germany often associated with the macabre fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, and the decadent dessert that gets its name from that region.
2. The author famously ended his own life ten days after delivering the manuscript to his editor at Éditions P.O.L., the same publishing house that would later add Forêt noire to its inimitable list.
3. Mréjen, Valérie. “Au cinéma avec Paul Otchakovsky-Laurens.” Trafic no. 105 (2018) : 7–12. Print.