On Monday I mentioned that the centenary of Blanchot's birth lacked an English dimension. It still does. But here's Jean-Luc Nancy with his contribution to the French commemoration, which includes the lines:
[L'écriture/la littérature] ne transcrit pas un témoignage, elle n'invente pas une fiction, elle ne délivre pas un message: elle trace le parcours infini du sens en tant qu'il s'absente.Google Translate has this as: "[Writing/Literature] does not transcribe a testimony, it does not invent a fiction, it does not deliver a message: it traces the infinite course of the direction as it goes away." Ooh yesh. But can anyone come with a better final line?
The Fall edition of The Quarterly Conversation is out. Good to see Goldberg: Variations and Remainder receiving more serious attention.
And finally, in more translation news, Robert Alter discusses his new translation of the Book of Psalms, and Pierre Joris reports a new translation of The Collected Poems of Alberto Caeiro by Fernando Pessoa.
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"...it traces the infinite journey of meaning as it goes away."
ReplyDeleteor: "the infinite path of sense as it absents itself."
ReplyDeleteSteve (corrected from previous post),
ReplyDeleteThanks for the introduction to this periodical which was hitherto unknown to me. I enjoyed the Roth review/essay having been lucky enough to have read an advance proof of the UK edition. I particularly enjoyed the irony of the reviewer's surname - reviewing a book where Zuckerman's loss of virility is never far away. I'm sure the great man himself would too.
Q
I hadn't seen that until now. I agree with him about The Counterlife.
ReplyDelete