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Review: Nevermore by Cécile Wajsbrot

ByRahul Singh
Jan 30, 2025 04:48 PM IST

Wajsbrot demands the full attention of her reader as she plays with form, ideas and writing in this novel about an unnamed protagonist arriving in Dresden to translate Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse’

In The Politics of Translation, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak writes that “the task of the translator is to surrender herself to the linguistic rhetoricity of the original text”. She asks the translator to think beyond the logic of a text and consider the space it occupies within a given political milieu. This demands ‘preparation’ and ‘patience’ from the translator in their engagement with the text, she adds. Cécile Wajsbrot’s novel Nevermore, originally published in French in 2021 and translated into English by Tess Lewis in 2024, recalls Spivak’s words.

A view of Dresden (Shutterstock)
A view of Dresden (Shutterstock)

192pp, ₹699; Seagull Books
192pp, ₹699; Seagull Books

An unnamed translator has escaped the lure of her home city Paris and has arrived in Dresden to translate Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse. The translator is mourning the death of a close friend, possibly a writer with whom she spoke of texts, writing and translation. She sits at her desk to translate the section Time Passes from Woolf’s novel and jots down comments of whether a sentence, a phrase, or a verb works or not. When she is tired of it, she goes out on walks in the awakened city streets to observe time passing for other people. She ruminates on death, ecological disasters, the world’s problems and wars between her translations until she encounters a silhouette by the river Elbe. The silhouette speaks to her and then vanishes in the darkness leaving her with too many questions. Over the course of her stay in Dresden, the translator dabbles in worlds until the consciousness of her present dawns on her and she realises that a choice has to be made.

This is not the easiest novel to get into. Within 200 pages, the author demands the full attention of her reader as she challenges their notions on dealing with loss and creating a version of a text. The case is similar with Time Passes in Woolf’s novel where, in the span of 20 pages, an entire decade is dealt with without the characters themselves taking centre stage. Wajsbrot plays with form, ideas and writing making the reader experience her protagonist’s turmoil more ideologically than at the visceral level. French Nobel Laureate Patrick Modiano does something similar in his books where the writing explores alienation and loneliness.

Translation, the author writes, “is a crossing with a point of departure and a point of arrival, but what lies between the two… is known by only one person, the one who has passed through every stage”. Throughout the novel, these rumination on the act of translation — its art and science, its skill and intellect, its politics and logic stand out. These philosophical renderings of the translator can either be the pedestal on which the text stands or fractures that cause trepidation. Julian Barnes’s postmodern novel, Flaubert’s Parrot, follows the story of a biographer who attempts to write on Flaubert. Barnes’s subjectivism and Wajsbrot’s attention to the search for a connection are pedestals that make their stories grittier while also providing ample space for their protagonists to grow.

The translator’s engagement with Woolf’s text, an obsession almost, is also reminiscent of Patrik, a young researcher’s interest in Paul Celan, the Romanian-French poet, in Yoko Tawada’s Spontaneous Acts, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky. Both the protagonists are undergoing isolation that is somewhat self-imposed in the first instance. It is when one stays with the characters and their relation to a dead writer that their isolation begins to appear as alienation. For Patrik, it is the question on his citizenship post-lockdown; for Wajsbrot’s translator, it is loss and memory; the death of her dear friend, the ‘leopard-spot contamination’ of Chernobyl on the map, and memories of war. Wajsbrot unearths the plotlessness of existence as Woolf does in her novel. Borrowing from the ‘H’ shape of the lighthouse, the appearance of Mrs Dalloway’s “two blocks joined by a corridor”, and writers like Virgil, Edgar Allen Poe, Thoreau and Proust, Wajsbrot weaves a story that speaks emotionally. In the afterword, translator Tess Lewis writes that the novel is as much about a ‘possibility of renewal’ as it is about loss and homesickness.

Cécile Wajsbrot (Wikimedia Commons)
Cécile Wajsbrot (Wikimedia Commons)

For a reader unengaged with literary canons, divorced from historical thought and alienated from emerging discourses of translation, the book can be all over the place. But Wajsbrot’s novel is an achievement in writing and translating time; its passage, halts and resurfacings. She has lived a life translating texts and understanding history publicly and privately too from her Jewish family’s experience of war. She has also emphasised the relevance that art and culture hold to life and this novel is an exemplar of that. Lewis’s translation shines and makes the sentences written both in French and English a feast to indulge in regardless of the little labour that might be involved.

Rahul Singh is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Presidency University, Kolkata. He is @rahulzsing on X and @fook_bood on Instagram.

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