A lot can happen on a trip out to sea to the lighthouse. In Virginia Woolf’s novel “To the Lighthouse”, before the long delayed excursion to the Scottish island of Skye, thoughts, memories, associations and speculations drift close together in the vortex of inner monologues. In the book at hand, the eddies consist of language, more precisely: of several languages. The narrator settled in the German city of Dresden for a few weeks to translate the middle chapter “Time passes” from the novel by Virginia Woolf into French. And then everything is in motion in the fluid between the languages, on whose rippling surface the nuances of meaning shimmer ambiguously.
The Parisian author and translator Cécile Wajsbrot, who lived in Berlin for a long time, is known for her delicately inward narrative style, which rather than a clear course of action rather spans a network of subjectively linked topics. From narrative event segments, essayistic excursions and diary-like notes, a complex text structure is created here, for which the term “novel” in the title does not really fit.
Her friend’s closeness is sometimes only present in a voice or fleeting appearance
The twenty pages of “Time passes”, on which Virginia Woolf wanted to depict the passing of time in her novel in its immediacy, not in the mirror of a narrative, can be read almost completely in the original at Wajsbrot in English, in individual sentences across the entire book distributed. Wajsbrot’s own reflections, traces of hesitant probing as a translator, drive around these sentences. One could almost read this book as a reflective work log of a translation project, if it weren’t for the increasing urgency of the presence of a deceased friend.
As she walks through the city, which has risen from the bombing, and in her search for the right expressions for Virginia Woolf’s text about the irretrievable passage of time, Wajsbrot’s narrative sometimes senses the closeness of her friend in the form of a voice or a fleeting appearance. “It was not a ghost, not a shadow,” she writes, but something that would only make her laugh, and yet the word came naturally when walking past the Dresden Kreuzkirche: “The soul. That was what accompanied me, the soul of a life that no longer existed and yet still existed “.
Cécile Wajsbrot: Nevermore. Novel. Translated from the French by Anne Weber. Wallstein, Göttingen, 2021. 228 pages, 20 euros.
Such sensations bordering on the mystical are difficult to convey in literary terms. However, the author of the book succeeded in laying out a carpet of expectations through an immensely broad network of sometimes spontaneous, sometimes researched associations, which spurs us on to continue reading and drives away the question that sometimes arises as to what this story has to do with us. The association inserts range from the creation of the novel “To the Lighthouse” to motifs by Herman Melville, Upton Sinclair, Otto Dix, the cathedral of Coventry which was bombed in the war and the destroyed Dresden, Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem”, to the reactor disaster in Chernobyl and on the cause of the bee deaths according to Virgil in his “Georgica”. Furthermore, the echo of the sound of bells pervades the entire book, musically by the composers Berlioz, Debussy, Rachmaninow, Heinrich Johannes Wallmann, in real terms as bells melted down or destroyed during the war or as the chime of the hour in our everyday lives. And the title of the book echoes the “Nevermore” from the poems of Edgar Allen Poe and Paul Verlaine.
The stringency of loosely linked patterns of association may not be obvious to everyone. But do you ask the source about its blueprint? Anyone who is receptive to such open literary forms will take away a lot from the book. And the fact that the translation was provided by the writer Anne Weber, a colleague who is an accomplice to the author Cécile Wajsbrot, is not the slightest attraction of this literary self-talk for connoisseurs and lovers.