I don’t claim to have created an updated or improved retranslation I believe there is a reason that Bray’s translation remains utterly singular and unrivaled.
It’s resurfaced serendipitously at three crucial junctures of my life, each time revealing new nuances and profundities in new words. A film version of The Lover, produced by Claude Berri and directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud, was released to great success in. It’s fluid circling a drain.Īnd I’ve been circling The Lover. It is not a story told on a linear plain, doesn’t abide by the problem, climax, solution formula, has no upward momentum. A young girl in an exotic land and a doomed love affair, a family and a life ready to combust. And the style-winding, flowing sentences, a stream of consciousness splintered by abrupt punctuation, single words and incomplete thoughts. A tangible fear and reticence to confront the most haunting memories, images, and a subtle boldness in the attempt to conquer them. A story of a life told out of order and from a distance. Give us your assignments Marguerite Duras The Lover Anaylisis and a subject matter expert will get it done quickly and painlessly. Everything is vague-names, places, events, time, words said and unsaid. And by the way you guys have a great customer support Have routine homework and academic assignments completed at affordable prices. The solution, it now seems obvious, was not to choose and commit to just one language, but rather to wade in the gray space between both. I just didn’t have the dexterity to extract what I needed. I believed for a while that I would never be able to write anything substantial in either language again. French seemed to take up more space in my head than English, but it was less facile clumsier and bulkier and less space-efficient, each French word pushing three English words out to make room. I began translating because I felt stuck, stuck between two languages, neither one of which was really sticking back. I began translating the novel after my return from a year of studying in France, my return to an incomplete literature degree, to a maternal language from which I had become estranged. This book is sticky and confounding and frustrating, but so is writing. This story is about Duras and the girl version of herself she created and how they became artists. Yes, there’s romance, family turmoil, cultural taboos, all the elements that make a compelling story. I love to write and Marguerite Duras loved to write, and The Lover is about writing. So over the course of my own process translating The Lover, various people have invariably asked me why I chose to translate a novel that already had an uncontested English translation. In fact, it is her translation of this book that I first read and adored as an eighteen-year-old creative writing student. The Lover, like the vast majority of Marguerite Duras’s oeuvre, was translated from French to English in the late twentieth century by the indomitable Barbara Bray. An emerging translator explores how translating The Lover helped her become “unstuck” at a time when she felt neither fully at home in English or in French.
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