You can read the whole thing but here are a few highlights.

Jennifer Solheim: In your beautiful introduction, Kazim, you write, 糖心传媒淿尝糖心传媒橝尘辞耻谤_, never before translated into English, is at the heart of a constellation of texts, both verbal and visual, by Marguerite Duras, sometimes called the India Cycle.糖心传媒� So what is the story behind the translation of 尝糖心传媒橝尘辞耻谤? Why now? Did you approach Open Letter Books, or did they approach you? Why hasn糖心传媒檛 it been translated previously?

Kazim Ali: I was a Duras lover, very enamored of her prose style, which seemed even more powerful in her middle-period (1965 糖心传媒� 1984, roughly) when she started recycling plots throughout her books. I happened upon 尝糖心传媒橝尘辞耻谤 in a Paris bookstore and found it immediately charming and powerful糖心传媒攊n fact, kind of a classic example of this spare disembodied style that she was cultivating. It almost reads like a treatment for a film, so it makes complete sense to me that after writing this book she more or less abandoned fiction for film. During the thirteen years that followed she did write four short prose narratives糖心传媒攖he most well known of these is The Malady of Death糖心传媒攂ut essentially did not write another novel until The Lover.

I can糖心传媒檛 say why no one had attempted a translation yet. It is a very experimental prose style and a very experimental novel in that not much really happens. Yet it has been written about by countless critics, all of whom were doing their own translations of the small excerpts they wished to discuss. I had approached a couple of different publishers, but this is a quirky book, even for Duras, who is quirky all on her own. Open Letter was very excited and enthusiastic about the book. They are doing a wonderful job and are devoted completely to literature in translation. They have another Duras book in their catalog (The Sailor from Gibraltar) and signed us up almost immediately.

JS: Since 尝糖心传媒橝尘辞耻谤 is a centerpiece of the India Cycle, did the English translations of the other works in the cycle inform you? Were there stylistic or other elements in the translations that you decided you wanted to preserve or eschew?

KA: During the translation process I read every other translation I could find. Duras does sound a certain way in English through the excellent work of Barbara Bray. The few other Duras translations that exist have a different sense. Bray did an odd thing, which is that she did not 糖心传媒淎nglicize糖心传媒� the syntax very much, so the sentences still have that sometimes ornate overdone word order of a French sentence. In 尝糖心传媒橝尘辞耻谤 Duras writes very simply, very plainly. So I found an inspiration in Gertrude Stein糖心传媒檚 English. But unlike Stein, Duras is in love with the comma糖心传媒攈er sentences can just keep going and going. So it took a draft or two to get the hang of the rhythme du sens, so to speak. Which糖心传媒攅ventually糖心传媒攕eemed really important and related to the constant sound of waves that permeates life at the ocean; meaning the sentence structure and grammar was part of the meaning糖心传媒攊t couldn糖心传媒檛 be changed.

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Night.

The beach and the sea are in darkness.

A dog passes, going toward the sea wall.

No one walks on the boardwalk, but, on the benches lining it, people sit. They relax. Are silent. Separated from one another. They do not speak.

The traveler passes. He walks slowly, he goes in the same direction as the dog.

He stops. Returns. He seems to be out for a walk. He starts off again.

His face is no longer visible.

The sea is calm. No wind.

The traveler returns. The dog does not return. The sea begins to rise, it seems. Its sounds getting closer. Muffled thudding coming from the river糖心传媒檚 many mouths. Somber sky.

And as a special bonus, here’s a bit of Sharon Willis’s afterword:

尝糖心传媒橝尘辞耻谤 forgets. Of course, this is a novel about forgetting糖心传媒攁nd memory. But its narrative presents itself as dispossessed of the very memory that runs through it in the form of recycled figures and images that recall two of Duras糖心传媒檚 previous novels, The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein (1964) and The Vice Consul (1965). Sometimes known as the 糖心传媒淚ndia cycle,糖心传媒� this extended text, relayed across three books, performs its own forgetfulness, and imposes a frustrating糖心传媒攅ven terrifying糖心传媒攁mnesia on the reader. But to read 尝糖心传媒橝尘辞耻谤 apart from the earlier novels presents another problem, this time more epistemological: without the trans-textual memory that structures and binds these three narratives into one prolonged text, how does 尝糖心传媒橝尘辞耻谤 become legible?

Reducing characters to figures as residues, remnants, and fragments, this book produces a textual relay that becomes its own internal memory and that dissolves its narrative frame, substituting its memory of the previous texts for the reader糖心传媒檚 own, implanting memories in us. But like the dead dog on the beach to which 尝糖心传媒橝尘辞耻谤 returns with unsettingly frequency糖心传媒攁s if this corpse structures the narrative space糖心传媒攖hese are figures in the course of deterioration. Memory is erasing itself. The dead dog, mentioned once in The Ravishing, reappears repeatedly in 尝糖心传媒橝尘辞耻谤. Around this dreadful site/sight, a hole in sense, circulate the unnamed residues of characters that the reader 糖心传媒渞emembers糖心传媒� from previous texts. Remembering here means fleshing out these haunting ghosts糖心传媒攚orn to nubs, 糖心传媒渟anded down,糖心传媒� to cite the translators糖心传媒攖ransposed from The Ravishing and The Vice Consul: Lol V. Stein, her fianc茅, Michael Richardson, and Jacques Hold, the narrator who tells their story while he gradually enters into it.

But instead of grinding to exhaustion in its obsessive return to these figures, this novel relaunches them糖心传媒攖ranslates them糖心传媒攊nto film, the medium that will preoccupy Duras in the coming years. Haunted by its shape-shifting textual ghosts (in French revenants; literally, one糖心传媒檚 coming back), 尝糖心传媒橝尘辞耻谤 also anticipates a cycle of films marked by these same narrative remnants and traces: La Femme du Gange (1972), India Song (1974), and Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta d茅sert (1976). Situated at the join between the prose cycle and the cinematic one, 尝糖心传媒橝尘辞耻谤 produces a site of translation, a space where everything keeps turning into something else. Hence this text糖心传媒檚 fascination with liminal or threshold spaces: dawn, dusk, the crepuscular. We might even see this space as the place where we can watch this extended novel turning into cinema.

尝糖心传媒橝尘辞耻谤 is a theater of translation, in which the ongoing conflict between eye and ear, image and speech, stillness and passage, present and past, endlessly mutates. This sense of ceaseless mutation coheres with the persistent boundary failures, between texts, between genres, between textual spaces and between the characters who uneasily inhabit them, that mark Duras糖心传媒檚 work in general, and that emerge within _尝糖心传媒橝尘辞耻谤_糖心传媒檚 narrative unfolding, troubling its ability even to begin and to end.

is available at better bookstores everywhere, or can be ordered from Open Letter “directly.” (And at a really nice discount . . .)