Translation Review - The University of Texas at Dallas

The Station Hill Blanchot Reader.Lydia Davis,
Paul Auster, and Robert Lamberton, trans.
Barrytown, NY: Station Hill, 1999. 527 pp. ISBN 1-
886449-17-1 From the original French texts:
Editions Gallimard 1941–1969, Editions de Minuit
1951–1983, and Editions Fata Morgana 1973.
Joanne H. Stroud, Reviewer
The Station Hill Blanchot Reader, published in
1999, brings together the literary essays and parts of
most of the books of fiction of Maurice Blanchot
that Station Hill has translated over the past 20
years. For the reader unfamiliar with Blanchot, born
in France in 1907 and author of some 35 books of
fiction and literary and philosophical discourse, this
collection provides an easy access. His enormous
importance for contemporary literature and thought,
like that of his fellow countryman, Gaston
Bachelard, is just now being recognized by Englishspeaking
readers. A chronology of his works in
French and lists of his works and secondary literature
in English may be found on the Web at
http://lists.village.virginia.edu/~spoons/blanchot/blan
chot_mainpage.htm.
When one picks up the Station Hill Reader, it is
difficult to decide which to read first, the fiction or
the nonfiction sections. Although they are listed second,
I found myself first reading the literary essays,
with their provocative and subtle discussions of how
writing means. Many of these are from The Gaze of
Orpheus and Other Literary Essays, translated brilliantly
by Lydia Davis. Blanchot’s line of thought in
many of these is dense and complicated, so it is
greatly to her credit that she is clear and precise in
rendering them from French into English. Blanchot’s
complicated sentences could have become tedious
instead of intriguing. In “Literature and the Right to
Death,” Blanchot questions why one writes at all.
Here is part of his musing: “Let us suppose that literature
begins at the moment when literature
becomes a question.” The “why” of writing is only
the writer’s personal problem until the page is written.
But “as soon as the page has been written, the
question which kept interrogating the writer while
he was writing—though he may not have been
aware of it—is now present on the page; and now
the same question lies silent within the work, waiting
for the reader to approach—any kind of reader,
shallow or profound; this question is addressed to
language, behind the person who is writing and the
person who is reading, by language which has
become literature.” The baroque sentence above is
just one example of how easy it would have been to
completely lose the interest of the reader without the
skillful control of the material by the translator. In
the process of putting words to page, the work has
gone, Blanchot reminds us, from “what Hegel calls
the pure joy of passing from the night of possibility
into the daytime of presence.” Blanchot enjoys discussing
the process of writing.
As in the essay “Literature and the Right to
Death,” Blanchot’s meta-text in his works of fiction
often is the subject of how death plays into the daily
living process. Thomas The Obscure, a work of fiction
that I would call a novelette but that he calls an
ecrit, blurs the line between the living and the dead.
I kept being reminded of the poet W. B. Yeats’s line
about living each other’s life and dying each other’s
death: “Birth-hour and death-hour meet,/ Or, as
great sages say,/ Men dance on deathless feet.”
Time, eternity, and the obscure separation between
reality and imagination are also subjects of equal
profundity that Blanchot has the courage to pursue.
The awareness of death, unique to the human race,
both unites us with others and at the same time,
reminds us that we are always actually alone:
Therefore it is accurate to say that when I
speak: death speaks in me. My speech is a
warning that at this very moment death is
loosed in the world, that it has suddenly
appeared between me, as I speak, and the
being I address: it is there between us as the
distance that separates us, but this distance is
also what prevents us from being separated,
because it contains the condition for all
understanding. Death alone allows me to
grasp what I want to attain; it exists in words
as the only they can have meaning. Without
death, everything would sink into absurdity
and nothingness. (380)
Translation Review 79