Nevermore by Cécile Wajsbrot is the first-person account of a translator who is working on translating the “Time Passes” section of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse into French. This makes a certain sense as the starting condition for a novel. In Nevermore, English sentences from To the Lighthouse are followed by the translator’s deliberations as she labors to render the sentences in her native language. As a transcript of the thought process involved in the act of translation — or better, as a record of the act of translation as an all-consuming thought process — Wajsbrot’s book is innovative enough. But whose idea was it that this book, which is greatly concerned with the distance between the protagonist’s native language and English, specifically, could be rendered in English? Whoever believed that such a thing could work?
The idea must be credited to the translator, Tess Lewis. At the novel’s outset, Lewis proceeds as any translator must. Woolf’s sentences or phrases stay in English, and Lewis back-translates the French that records the protagonist’s deliberations also into English. The solution that the translator-protagonist settles upon is allowed to stand, next to and distinct from Woolf’s original. So, the book begins:
“’Well, we must wait for the future to show,’ said Mr. Bankes, coming in from the terrace.
We must wait for the future to appear, said Mr. Bankes, coming in from the terrace. We must wait and see what the future brings, said Mr. Bankes, entering from the terrace. We must wait for the future to show, said Mr. Bankes, as he entered the house from the terrace. We must see what the future has in store, said Mr. Bankes, coming in from the terrace.
Let’s see what the future has in store. Let us wait and see what the future … Well, we must wait for the future … said Mr. Bankes, entering from the terrace.”
Each sentence, in the course of manifold small adjustments to phrasing, must be written again and again as the translator weighs the effects. The endless dickering, which is often illuminating, at times funny or maddening, allows the near-infinite postponement of the full stop. As the book unfolds, we learn that the protagonist is mourning the death of a friend. Translation thus becomes caught up in the effort to stop time’s passing. We must wait for the future to show, but for now, the devastation it will show has been massaged away; we are only waiting.
In this first passage, we see the audacious transformation that has been enacted upon this book: instead of Wajsbrot’s initial situation, in which one language confronts another and extends itself to meet the other or finds itself lacking, Lewis’s text beholds itself in a mirror — through a glass, darkly. To the Lighthouse centers on the Ramsay family at their summer home on the Isle of Skye, entertaining guests, on the brink of the First World War. The war interrupts their yearly rhythms, so that the “Time Passes” section describes the house in a state of abandonment. In the third section, the war having ended, the surviving Ramsays and their friends return to the long-empty house under drastically different conditions. The challenge Woolf posed to herself as a novelist was to set the two end sections, consumed with the steady stream of her characters’ thoughts and reactions, against the middle section, which depicts the passage of time as a phenomenon occurring without any human witness.
Wajsbrot could not have created such a complete account of a translator’s experience without having herself translated Woolf’s last, experimental novel The Waves, along with many other works of English and German literature. The transcript of the narrator’s process records not only translation as an exercise in word choice and phrasing. She works through dramatic situations, explores historical contexts, and meditates on themes; she consults Woolf’s diaries, compares manuscript with typescript with the first British and later American editions, trying to articulate Woolf’s objectives and resolve questions about the text. She observes, “In the typescript, the descriptions gradually become more like implicit evocations, ghostly, more ephemeral. The text takes flight.”
Wajsbrot’s narrator muses on the sentence “What people had shed and left […] those alone kept the human shape and in the emptiness indicated how once they were filled and animated.” She expands on the situation: “Shoes, a hunting cap, coats and skirts in the wardrobe. Clothes become useless; their limp forms keeping the shape of those who had once filled them.” She moves on to the phrase “how the looking-glass once held a face,” and thinks, “the face is not reflected in the mirror; it’s the mirror that holds the face.” For all the narrator’s techniques of delay we catch the fleetingness of her work, too: it unfolds in the duration of the reading of a finite text, the moment in which face and reflection coincide.
[left — Cécile Wajsbrot] Wajsbrot depicts her protagonist living and working in solitude as a global citizen of the 21st-century. Hence, her thoughts when not occupied with her translation are all but consumed by the contents of her Web searches. Woolf’s manuscript and typescript are also available online — through the Berg collection of the New York Public Library — so that, as the narrator reflects, all she needs is her computer. The work of the project could be done anywhere, and she has chosen to do it in Dresden, a first destroyed and abandoned, then rejuvenated city, analogous to the Ramsays’ summer home. In this way, as grief for her friend becomes entwined with grief for Mrs. Ramsay, her personal loss is projected onto the mutually inflicted national losses of the World Wars, the destruction of Coventry, which Woolf experienced, and Dresden. After Web-assisted perambulations involving the High Line, Melville, Poe, and Arvo Pärt, the narrator comes to fixate on the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, which becomes a leitmotif for the rest of the book. An aside: Nevermore was published in French in 2021, a year before Russia invaded Ukraine. If, in the span of the book, the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone becomes paradigmatic of unlikely renewal, the next catastrophe was also already looming.
The narrator’s account of the disaster in 1986 suggests substantial research. “At 1:23 a.m., local time, the test begins. The temperature in the vessel rises and it takes only forty seconds for the reactor to explode, or, more precisely, for a concrete slab to explode. A weight of 1,200 tons falls on the reactor and crushes it, and a fire spreads.” She concludes, “But the extent of the disaster, like all disasters, is measured only later.” In the very next section, the novel’s original French suddenly appears. Lewis’s account in the epilogue of reweaving French back into the book is rather understated. However, as her second radical decision in conceiving this work in English, it is no coincidence that the French resurfaces immediately after nuclear disaster. All bets are off, we aren’t doing translation anymore. Throughout the rest of the book, there are passages where the narrator’s (translated) thoughts interpose her (untranslated) translation:
“Flies wove a web in the sunny rooms; weeds that had grown close to the glass in the night tapped methodically at the window pane.
It seems best to use the pluperfect here. Des mouches avaient tissé une toile (leur toile?) dans les pièces ensoleillées; des herbes ou plutôt, de mauvaises herbes ayant poussé près de la vitre dans la nuit. A web or their web? And in the night — is it that the weeds grew in the night or that they tapped at the window in the night? Flies — when you’d expect spiders. Is this because spider has two syllables but flies only one and the sentence is composed almost entirely of monosyllables?”
The movement between languages is plausible in the reading experience because of the differences in modality that we are already quite comfortable with, such as are often represented on the page through typography. Woolf was a pioneer in exploring the boundary between the internal life as the transcription of characters’ thoughts, and external life as the transcription of their speech or description of their actions. Through Woolf’s advancements we understand that the medium of writing moves back and forth between these zones more effectively than any other — and that the line between them is often not clear. In Wajsbrot’s novel the source text becomes the external event to which the narrator’s internal life responds. These passages, in which the linguistic boundary is reconceived as a boundary between “in here” and “out there,” become more intricate as the book goes on. Evidently, Lewis’s invention has been brought on by her immersion in Wajsbrot’s dialogue between text and translator.
[left — Tess Lewis] Wajsbrot’s interiority is plainly the product of the Internet age. Despite its modest subject, a translator at work or taking walks in solitude while remembering her deceased friend, the book spans the world, spans history, encompasses the works and biographies of writers, composers, artists; it looks into zoology and botany. A tour-de-force encyclopedic thread on the subject of bells moves from Pärt to Poe to the invention of bells in ancient China and Mesopotamia, to the European bell tower and the first bells in Britain; their municipal use to organize the day; later, their inclusion in symphonic music and the performance of compositions upon city bells. This culminates in an account of German requisitioning of bells during the Second World War and their subsequent restitution; we learn of a Czech parish that opted not to reclaim its bell as a gesture of reconciliation. This plenitude of information is set against the fascination with erosion and emptiness, as Woolf pitches the emotional rise and fall of a more socially focused mental life against the same. Wajsbrot’s narrator considers, “You could say that the great concern of the twentieth century was the unconscious, its emergence — its revelation, its examination … Let’s say, then, that the great concern of the twenty-first century will be consciousness, not its discovery, but its exploration, its definition and its limits. Do animals have a consciousness? Do trees? And robots? Does artificial intelligence — to what extent?”
In the moments when the French source text is replicated, the reader seems to witness Wajsbrot’s book being lifted into infinity, as the translator’s consciousness merges with its prosthesis, a vast assembly of data that contains all the articles she has cited, all the works of literature, art, and music she has referenced, all the items in the Berg collection (by its own account “some 35,000 printed volumes, pamphlets, and broadsides, and 2,000 linear feet of literary archives and manuscripts, representing the work of more than 400 authors”), all the original and translated works contained on the servers of the world’s other libraries. The narrator’s voice, the one we English readers can follow, the voice-doing-translation which is univocal with Lewis’s voice, becomes a fractal bud or fragment of the collective Internet consciousness; the Internet is a mirror that now for a moment holds Wajsbrot’s — or Lewis’ — face.
It is in some way quite strange to compare this stream of Internet-assisted consciousness with Woolf’s interiority, even as Wajsbrot’s project asks us to do this. Her protagonist early on reveals her decision to remain single: “life had determined — or had I? — that I would follow its paths alone and only occasionally meet someone who would briefly become a companion.” In the dramatic structure of the book, the loss of her friend is therefore all the more devastating. In To the Lighthouse, Lily Briscoe has also remained single to pursue her art, but Woolf has pitched her in the midst of a crowd who are constantly intruding to frustrate or inspire her. Perhaps these were the economic constraints of her time: she must befriend the Ramsays in order to paint the seashore, whereas Wajsbrot’s narrator’s project is funded by a grant. So also the servants whose labor supports the Ramsay’s whole enterprise in To the Lighthouse are no longer present. Wajsbrot’s narrator spends the day working at the Kulturpalast Café in order to feel the presence of other people and then returns to an empty apartment. The pressure exerted by community in To the Lighthouse is now exerted by works, texts, histories. The translator’s extreme isolation is compensated by her deep identification with her author. Nevermore ends, as it began, with “Time Passes.” Lily Briscoe wakes up in the Ramseys’ house after many years away. Lewis’s translation concludes, “Here she was again, she thought, sitting bolt upright in bed. Awake.” In italics. This represents Lewis’ concluding intervention, since Wajsbrot’s protagonist translates these words also into French. In Lewis’s version, source and target chime together.
[Published by Seagull Books on November 28, 2024, 215 pages, $25.00 hardcover]