A Novel in Translation: Translation as a Novel

In the acclaimed French writer Cécile Wajsbrot’s novel Nevermore, a translator haunted by her past moves to a city with its own dark history in order to translate Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse. Working on the section “Time Passes,” she embarks on a series of reflections on the passage of time and the movement of history and risks losing herself entirely in this new realm where time, space, and language–much like waves at sea–overlap. Immersing herself in this prose poem of ephemerality, the narrator subjects Woolf’s sentences to the inexact science and imperfect art of translation. This, in turn, leads her to wide-ranging reflections on other instances of loss, destruction, and recovery—the Chernobyl disaster, the High Line in New York City, the bombing of Dresden and Wallmann’s commemorative Bell Requiem Dresden, the evacuation of the Hebridean island Foula, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs of seascapes, Debussy’s “La cathédrale engloutie,” and Ceri Richards’s series of paintings by the same name. Cécile Wajsbrot will speak with Tess Lewis about the task of the translator, the intricacies of capturing a particular style and finding the language to recreate destroyed epochs, and about the porous boundaries between art and life.