Things become conspicuous by their absence, and in absentia gain significance. Nowhere is this more clear than in her fiction-silences, gaps, and holes populate her work. And maybe that’s why we scream noiselessly-we’re dumbstruck, seeking language as a way out, even as language continues to fail us. She reminds us that language is a limited and limiting tool. Duras would have us remember the gaps between what is said and what is meant: between signifier and signified. It can live in the gaps between the letters and the things that go unsaid. Then writing itself can function by omission. But Duras chooses the reflexive “se taire” for silence, reminding us that silence-like speech-is not something passive, but is instead an active choice. It might seem strange to characterise writing as not speaking, as falling silent. She herself describes writing as a contradiction, as nonsense-and the French ‘non-sens’ really underscores the lack of sense, the lack of meaning at play. I say “attempts” not because Duras fails in characterising writing, but because her definition is inherently paradoxical and contradictory.
C’est une contradiction et aussi un non-sens. As in her fiction, her voice resists narration or diegesis, and instead attempts to analyse writing as a form and practice:Ĭ’est curieux un écrivain. But instead she flits between episodes of narration and meditative passages that analyse the curious and contradictory nature of writing. In Écrire, Duras begins the text grounded in her material reality, that of the house where she writes her novels, and we might expect a fairly autobiographical piece on her writing process.
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It’s a piece full of contradictions-thought-provoking statements that lead us towards a Durassian conception of writing and style, which is in turn fruitful for our thinking about the arts of reading and writing, and their impact on translation. This interest in language as a tool and practice is evidenced in her essay on writing, Écrire, a reflexive piece that provides fruitful new ways of thinking about translation as a mode and as a discipline. Stein falls in love with Michael Richardson and frequents S. Non-Francophone names populate her work, as in The Ravishing of Lol Stein, whose protagonist Lol V. Later in life she was a notorious femme de lettres, known for her alcoholism and at times controversial opinions, as well as her literary success.ĭuras never wrote directly about the art of translation, but her work does testify to an interest in foreign languages. Her husband was deported to Buchenwald, the notorious concentration camp-an experience she later drew on for her work The War. During World War II, she was a member of the Communist Party and of the French Resistance, alongside François Mitterrand (who later became President of France). Best known for The Lover (a hybrid work that is best described as fictionalised autobiography, which won the 1984 Prix Goncourt), her oeuvre is distinctive, addressing themes of desire, loss, and death, in a style that can be repetitive, sparse, but striking all the same.ĭuras enjoys a certain infamy as a public figure in France-born in French Indochina (modern-day Vietnam) in 1914, she moved to her parents’ native France at aged seventeen.
One writer I turn to again and again to help navigate the complex threads tying together reading and writing-both so key to a sustainable translation practice-is Marguerite Duras, the celebrated French writer and experimental film-maker. After all, what is writing but the translation of ideas, experience, and memory onto the page? As writer-translators, we might seek guidance and models to follow-a way out of the text to be translated, or a way through. Writers become translators, and translators become writers. Writing and translating could be described as sister arts.