[University of Chicago Press; 2024]
Tr. from the French by Tess Lewis
On April 30th 1926, Virginia Woolf began to write the second part of To The Lighthouse. In her diaries, she seemed perplexed, even a little distrusting, at how the clear challenge of the section brought her into a flowing process, in contrast to the “hard wrung battles” of her previous novel, Mrs Dalloway:
I cannot make it out—here is the most difficult abstract piece of writing—I have to give an empty house, no people’s characters, the passage of time, all eyeless & featureless with nothing to cling to: well, I rush at it, & at once scatter out two pages. Is it nonsense, it I brilliance? Why am I so flown with words, & apparently free to do exactly as I like?
The section, titled “Time Passes’,” offered a new stage of experimentation in Woolf’s prose. Compared to the enveloping sections that offered detailed portraits of the Ramsey family and their social network across periods of time no longer than a day, “Time Passes” invokes the thrust of the passage of time itself across ten years. The novel’s characters withdraw, and the prose focuses on the abandoned house on the Isle of Skye and its environs. The death of major characters are fleeting moments in the uncompromisingly flow of time; famously, Mrs Ramsey dies is elaborated in only two lines: “[Mr. Ramsey, stumbling along a passage stretched his arms out one dark morning but Mrs. Ramsey having died rather suddenly the night before he stretched his arms out. They remained empty.]”
In 2021, Cécile Wajsbrot published a new novel, primarily involving an unnamed narrator translating this famous section whilst mourning the death of a friend. The title of the novel would not be in French, but rather a single, slight antiquated, English word: Nevermore. The title remains in the new English translation by Tess Lewis. Across the book, the narration shifts across associated cultural artifacts and memories—Dresden, the early films of Michael Powell, the aftermath of Chernobyl, the sunken cathedrals of Debussy and Ceri Richards—but always returns to the singular obsession of ‘Times Passes’ and its translation. Like Nabokov’s Pale Fire, a large part of Wajsbrot’s novel consists of a line-by-line commentary of Woolf’s original text. At points, the narrator ruminates on its meaning or associations. But, more frequently, and with a vivacity that is the chief strength of the novel, the commentary considers the challenges and possibilities of translation. Wajsbrot, herself a translator (including a French translation of Woolf’s later novel The Waves), strongly evokes translation as both a tiring labor and meticulous obsession.
The translation by Lewis attempts the daunting task of translating a book about translation. The worry here is diminishing returns. If, as the narrator states, “translation is an inexact science, an attempt that is always doomed—not to failure but to imperfection,” then is a translation of a translation doubly compromised, a reflection of a reflection showing nothing? If a novel primarily concerns the translation of English prose into French, what can be gained or revealed through a translation returning to English again?
Lewis succeeds by showing us the work. She uses italics to denote Woolf’s original prose, and separate fonts to mark sections of French against the translated English, carving text at the joints with typographic distinction.
Certain airs, detached from the body of the wind […] crept round corners and ventured indoors.
Certains airs, detaches du corps du vent, […] rampaient autour des coins, s’aventuraient à l’intérieur. Certain airs, detached from the wind’s body […] slipped round corners and ventured indoors.
In these sections, Lewis takes us through the exhaustive and exhausting nature of translation, adding another layer on top of the narrator’s own ruminations. I find myself prodded to my own layman translating thoughts: how does “rampaient” alter “crept” to a “slipped,” and why does “corps du vent” change the “body of the wind” to “the wind’s body”? For a novel built around obsession, especially in parsing To The Lighthouse, it seems appropriate Nevermore invites us into this meticulousness. That said, the performance of the labor of translation is still laborious, and it is a strangely exhausting novel to read, like reading a set of drafts simultaneously. Moreover, if it’s strange to say of a translation, the effect is stronger with at least some knowledge of French, especially in very occasional paragraphs that remain majoritarian French. Bluntly, no translation could have done otherwise, it is bound with the book, and Tess Lewis deserves immense credit for tackling. The book’s multilingualism compels the reader to continuously cross over from one language to another, it is strangely alienating, but an alienation that speaks to the strangeness disorientation of translation.
Outside this incessant translation, our narrator walks around Dresden, mourning her friend, even at points seeming to come across a specter of some kind. The sense of place and the character are lightly drawn: this is not a novel that draws out the character of the city through the process of walking, or a textured portrait of a deceased friend. The little we know of the friend is she is a writer. In remembered conversations, the novelist describes writing as “a patient construction, without the ferocity, without the fear of devastation” of translation. At other points, a specter appears to haunt Dresden, a nameless shape that resembles the friend. The novel seems less interested in the specifics of who is being mourned, than in the mourning itself. Mourning, after all, is its own kind of translation: from an immediate present to a remembered past.
It is this tendency of the novel—to eschew the specific and the narrative in favor of the poetic and associative—that I occasionally struggle with. Early in the Nevermore, “Time Passes” is described as an isolated island, “a separate work, a text we can approach as we would an island from which, to be sure, the contours of the shoreline, of the mainland can be seen—but the only thing that counts is the exploration of the island.” I’m not so sure I agree. Woolf, with as keen an eye for narrative structure as for genius in language, outlined the novel as a letter H, “two blocks joined by a corridor.” The poetic corridor of can only work in relief against the blocks of either side, “The Window” and “The Lighthouse,” detailing the family of the Ramsays and their summer home. Nevermore sometimes remains a little too much in the abstract, without concrete specific details of the world to ground its speculations. The novel offers an intelligent examination of mourning and of time passing, but details are spared solely for historical and cultural reference.
Such abstraction perhaps emerges from the diffusion and detachment of the central narrating translator. The narrator’s nebulousness speaks to an wider trend Irinia Dumitrescu has recently identified in the rise of fiction about translators, where translators are inclined towards disappearance and powerlessness. The novel is an intensification of the theme of the powerlessness of the translator, in this case sublimated in the text before them. But, as a response to “Time Passes,” I find myself noting the distinction between talking about the passage of time and evoking it. Nevermore offers insightful observations and meanings about the passage of time, but rather rarely elicits its flow.
Nevermore is a novel of frustration and fascination. It takes me closer than any other novel I have read to the exacting work of translation. But, in contrast to “Time Passes,” the sense of time passing, voided of narrative detail, remains at a conceptual level, an intellectual provocation. Appropriately for a work about translation, what succeeds most in the novel is Lewis’s translation: a triumph, that thickens and deepens the spooling questions of translation, choice of language, and passing of time.
Jon Venn is a writer and researcher working in the UK. He has taught at the Universities of Exeter, Warwick, and Birmingham. His research is about the cultural representations of madness, psychiatry, and suicide. He is the author of Madness in Contemporary British Theatre: Resistances and Representations. He tweets at @jonvenn.
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