On the Point of Becoming

On the Point of Becoming: A Conversation on Co-translating Marguerite Duras

by Emma Ramadan and Olivia Baes, with art by Olivia Baes

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Olivia Baes and Emma Ramadan met nearly a decade ago in their Masters in Cultural Translation program at The the American University of Paris, where they quickly bonded over a shared love of Marguerite Duras, among other things. They went on to co-translate Duras’s Summer 80, a piece of long-form journalism, which was gathered with a selection of her hybrid and nonfiction pieces for the collection Me & Other Writing, published in 2019 by Dorothy, a publishing project. On the occasion of their second co-translation, this time of Duras’s second novel The Easy Life, originally published in 1944 by Gallimard and now available to English-language readers from Bloomsbury, they reflected on the book, Duras’s ongoing influence, and their evolving co-translation relationship.

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Olivia Baes: The Easy Life is fragmented into three distinct parts that represent the three distinct stages of Francine’s coming-of-age. The first part, on the family farm, is contained: it is the wave about to break. Chaos, boredom, chaos. It’s almost the exact structure of a sea—with the calm in between the waves. In terms of style and narrative, the story is contained the same way that a whole family, the Veyrenattes, but especially its daughter, Francine, is imprisoned by a structure, a house, a town: Les Bugues.

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Emma Ramadan: Contained but simmering, about to boil over. There’s a tension, you can feel everyone pushing against their own individual walls, straining to break out of whatever sinister swamp of boredom is keeping the whole family, the whole town, trapped in Les Bugues. The atmosphere of this section feels like something only the Duras of The Easy Life could have written. A dangerous joy choked him; sometimes it spurted from him in a word, a laugh, a gesture that he couldn’t hold back. It seemed like he might die of it. Emotion felt in such extremes it kills. The stifling atmosphere in Les Bugues is so intense that the tiniest thing can set off an explosion. And that’s precisely what Francine does.

Although Francine as narrator feels unique to early Duras, there is a current running through this book that is present in her later work—a young woman’s premonitory feeling of age, of fatigue, of already being ruined, old with all my future years, similar to the narrator of The Lover. The way we women who have lived too much life carry it all around with us, all that has passed and all we feel is still to come.

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OB: Duras shows us that it’s not as easy as pairing the old with boredom and ease, death with the calm after the storm. Life and youth and chaos are not so intrinsically bound, either. There is a certain fluidity between these concepts, the fact that we are—much like Proust writes in In Search of Lost Time—every age we have ever been, a remark Francine also makes with regard to her brother Nicolas, whom she perceives as aged with all the ages he had been in succession, on the precipice of some happiness Francine will not be a part of. Chaos, boredom, life, death, old age, youth: all of them coexist in a mess as sticky as the end of August, reeking of rot. If you smell of rot, it means you’re alive. If you’re old, you’re already dead. If you’re young, you’re still going to die. It’s all connected. As translators, we have to make it all coexist, too.

ER: As a Virgo born in this August-before-September vertigo, I love this idea, that August carries within it all the scents of the months, a hot, rotting month before the newness of fall. Like when we mix colors together and get a muddy brown. Like when Francine makes Les Bugues implode so she can create something different. August is a month that feels unreal; in our childhood it’s the pause before the new school year, it’s full of possibility, we can still reinvent ourselves before our classmates see us walking down the halls. We can suspend life—and it’s often in that suspension that I feel most myself. Francine describes herself as “nothing” in August but I think it’s more that we are in fact everything. Francine and her family are accumulating ages and fatigue, they are rotting and about to burst, about to become something else.

Francine describes the family home—I heard time gnaw at us like an army of rats—and all of them trapped within it—We no longer knew how to want to be free, we were dreamers, degenerates, people who dream of happiness, a true happiness that will overwhelm it all. I wondered what you would think of my translation of vicieux. Francine describes her family this way in Part One. Stubborn, ornery, lecherous…I chose “perverts.” You fought me on it during editing and we ended up at “degenerates,” which I love even more. Time eats away at them and eventually gives way to chaos and violence. The Veyrenattes dream of this chaos, which they call happiness. They dream of being obliterated by it.

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OB: Are you a degenerate if you’re a dreamer? In this book, the Veyrenattes are a family of perverts and hypocrites. That’s what makes their ease, their boredom in Les Bugues so unsettling. When someone is at ease, they will eventually stir.

I translated this book in my house, an empty house I used to inhabit with others. When I sleep, sometimes, I feel the rooms all around me creak with lost time. I even once wrote a poem about minutes being mice. They poke holes in everything. When you live in such solitude, time feels suspended, and yet, on the contrary, every space becomes infested with the passing of time. Often, you wake up in the middle of the night and wonder when those minutes, those mice will come for your limbs. When they will obliterate you too, prey of flesh and of dreams.

At times, Les Bugues feels like a prison, like a place meant to contain these “perverts” from their possible crimes in a possible future. They are of course imprisoned there because they have already committed one: the family stole money from the government of the town they used to live in. Their shame hangs over Les Bugues like a malediction. But they would rather see Uncle Jérôme, who manipulated them into embezzling, killed off than heal, than own up to their sins. There is no happy medium between boredom and chaos; both the book and Les Bugues are made of extremes.

In that house that simultaneously keeps Francine safe from the outside world and places her on a straight path to life’s utmost danger, death, she is a fallen flower (…) already rotten. As the rot seeps in, she realizes that if something drastic doesn’t happen, she will soon wake up an old woman.

ER: I think it’s not the fear of being an old woman as much as waking up to find she has done nothing significant with her life, that there is a world in which she lets time gnaw at her and never takes hold of her existence, never harnesses the force within her to do… something, anything, other than sit around waiting for time, or boredom, or chaos, to wreak its havoc, as her family does. It is unbearable that she might never become the person she feels in her bones she is supposed to be. I think you and I connected so deeply to this book because this notion resonates very strongly within us. The idea that even though we are by all accounts still young women with our lives ahead of us, we are constantly terrified that our possible lives are slipping away, the clock ticking, doors closing, rats chomping. Especially in the last few years, you and I have gone through this very intensely. Making decisions that inevitably block off certain paths, saying goodbyes that leave marks when we look in the mirror. Like Francine I feel ancient, and it scares me to think that all of that life heaped up in me could have been the wrong life.

OB: Some people ask me why, at such a ripe age, I moved away from bustling Paris to take refuge here in Alt Empordà, an old Catalan rectory in the middle of nowhere. I never answer this outright, but in some sense, it is because I was afraid of myself in the city. It’s a place that sometimes, through its multiplicity, multiplies you so that you no longer know who is the real you. Or, at other times, outright drains you so that it feels as though there is none of you left. If I took refuge in the country, it’s because I have always wished for enough peace to surround me so that I could get to know myself before it’s too late. This house has been that peace, the place where I have been the most alone, the place where I was forced to come face to face with myself.

It’s funny because in a way it’s a reverse movement for Francine, who has to flee her house in the countryside, with the looming shadows and voices of her family, to come face to face with herself. For her, it happens in a lonely hotel room, its mirrored armoire. But I think that Duras, who wrote this book during the Second World War when she was part of the Resistance in Paris, was maybe dreaming of the peace of a house, of the countryside, as she wrote it. As she later says about the big isolated house she wrote in at Neauphle-le-Château: it consoled her “every childhood sadness.” I was looking for that consolation too when I moved to my house in Cabanelles. And I think Francine sought it too, in some ways, when she made her pilgrimage to T.

And, as Duras said, the house in Les Bugues kept a visible thread of Francine’s self running so that it would not snap from one second to the next and plunge [her] into madness. This is one of the concepts that, as I translated, hit very close to home. Isolating in a house in the country forces you to confront yourself, but it also irrevocably cuts you off from every version of you that you could have ever become, from being a thousand times different from what [you are]. And don’t you think that this is also what translation is like? You choose words, and in doing so keep the text from becoming a thousand times different from what it could have been.

ER: Yes, we pin down a version of the text, a version of Francine, just as she is confronted with all her possible selves in part two of the book and must choose which one to go back home as.

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OB: If Part One of the book is a contained space, a house, Part Two is an infinite sea. In the wake of tragedy on the family farm, Francine travels to the the coastal city of T. In this infinite mirror, Francine (who has never actually been to the sea before and daydreams constantly about its boundless possibilities) is reflected an endless amount of times, to the point that she no longer recognizes herself.

ER: When she finally breaks free from Les Bugues, from the stifling, constrained, limited person she is in Les Bugues, she is overwhelmed, assaulted by all her possible selves.

Duras’s writing about the sea in this book is so different from her later work. She is famous for her descriptions of the sea but here something interesting is happening. Francine is drawn to the sea for how it might reflect her inner being. In later books I feel Duras’s narrators learn from the sea, but do not try to capture its infinite vastness within them. Another reason why you and I love Duras’s writing so much is her connection to the sea and the ways it mimics our own. I spend all year thinking I’m myself and then I go to the sea, I am alone in the sea, and I realize, oh, it’s really me. Just like Francine, I feel tenderness and gratitude for the me who has brought me to the sea. And it’s amazing to think that anyone, including myself, could think they know me the rest of the year. But for Francine, it’s not just the sea that serves as a mirror. Soon after she arrives in T., she stares at her reflection in the actual mirror in her hotel room and watches herself dissolve.

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OB: The mirrored armoire opens like Pandora’s box, unleashing the selves Francine has never become, never even dared to imagine. In that moment, when the entire bedroom seem[s] to be populated by endless companions just like [the girl in the mirror], Duras and Francine are unleashed in a dissociative crescendo that takes us all the way to Francine’s elemental realization: I am flower. It is one of those prophetic statements. She is not literally blooming. And yet, are we not, each of us, membranes taking shape under the sun? Ironically, though she lives on a farm, I think Francine’s time in T. is the first time she finds herself truly connected to the natural world.

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Like us, Francine has to go to the sea to find herself. Duras must take Francine to the sea to find her, but first she has to lose her there. And she does so through radical stylistic, structural, and grammatical twists in the narrative that allow her and Francine to find themselves and us to find them in English. To me, it was a bit of a drowning, but the kind that gives you the possibility of taking your very first breath. What grounds me, always, is Duras’s voice, her inescapable rhythm, the way she makes use of repetition, her idiosyncratic shifts in perception, her Delphian sentences. She is the voice in my head as I translate, the buoy I hold onto for dear life.

Here, in my room, it’s me. It’s as if she no longer knows it’s her. She sees herself in the mirrored armoire; she’s a tall girl with blonde hair, yellowed by the sun, a tan face. In the bedroom, she takes up too much space. From the very small open suitcase, she pulls out three blouses to look natural before the girl watching her.

ER: This splitting of the self is the real core of the book. All of Francine’s different selves emerge and she is faced with a choice. She finds herself by the sea but it is this disconnect between who she has always thought she was and this new self she finds there that creates this violent split, this fragmenting of her inner being. Who is the right version? Away from the farm, from the self she is at the farm, she is able to see the breadth of herself and what she might become, who she might be. I know this feeling well. In the summer of 2019 I was on my way to the sea and stopped in Paris first and saw you. We met at one of your favorite restaurants and ate duck and chocolate mousse. Away from my life, and opposite you, you who have always been a form of mirror for me, I was pierced with the knowledge that the real me was no longer the version of myself I was struggling to keep intact at home. It all came crumbling down. It is when Francine is by the sea, on her own, that she sees she is not living her true self, and therefore that she is letting life pass her by, and she knows what she has to do: she has to find a way to grab hold of it.

You and I have known each other for nearly a decade now, a decade during which we’ve both felt time slipping through our fingers. Every so often we’ll wake up and send each other messages: suddenly I’m three years older, I had set these goals for myself, what have I been doing all this time, where did the time go, where did that potential for a different self go, the self I thought I would be by now, by this arbitrary age when I said I would have done certain things, but that age has come and gone. Francine tells us, once you lose the ability to forget, you are permanently deprived of a certain life. I think she means that as we move through life we accumulate memories, yes, but also ideas, dreams, for ourselves. We think up versions of ourselves like we did as children, including some we can’t forget, and, as we make decisions that take us further away from those selves, it leaves a mark. When we close a door there is a sundering from a potential version of us that then only appears in mirrors. As Francine says, Everything that has happened to me has drowned in my skin.

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OB: In the third and final part of the book, Francine has found her place of air—that space in the world she didn’t think she occupied when in the Part One she writes: I was no one, I had neither name nor face. In T., Francine surfaces. Only then can she return to Les Bugues with a voice, a body, a purpose. This third part opens with an interior monologue, set apart in italics. Reminiscent of the picnic in Part One, when Francine glides down the Rissole in a dreamlike daze, it is perhaps Duras’s finest form of stream of consciousness. Francine, a quiet girl, cannot shut up. She describes her thoughts as “chatterboxes,” but they might as well be rivers, each stemming from the sea in T. She is, of course, running a fever. But something about having broken out of her nineteen-year lockdown in Les Bugues has allowed Francine to find herself. When she returns to live what she calls “the easy life,” she is no longer talking about the containment of the wave, of boredom before it breaks into foamy chaos, like Jérôme’s mouth before taking his last breath. Here is a girl who has found her place of air (who has maybe even robbed it from another). Though Francine doesn’t know it, her place has been returned to her by Duras’s writing, Duras’s force, Duras’s refusal to be contained by Les Bugues or any conventional narrative structure—as some might say, her lack of control. This is what sets us free, too.

ER: I wonder if you’re implying that Francine returns to Les Bugues to embody “the easy life” because she is now fully herself, has found her place in the world, and is therefore less erratic, less brimming with brains and blood and boredom and chaos, and as a result, things will be easier? To me, she caught a glimpse of her power in T., and then returns home to Les Bugues, to her lover Tiène, satisfied, knowing the full scope of her force, but having decided to bury it in Les Bugues. The easy life is marriage, a nuclear family, Tiène and the farm. It is holding that power at bay, hidden within you, like a secret, to keep you company and allow you to feel as though you are somehow above or different from everyone else, even as you choose to endure the same life as them. The easy life is resignation. And you can only “choose” the easy life when there is another path to take—a more difficult, but more exciting, more forceful and more violent life. Francine seems to choose the easy life, but I predict her wild lifeforce will tear through the dreamskin again before too long.

OB: I think for Francine, returning to Les Bugues is not necessarily only the nuclear family, the marriage, the resignation. She wants to return there because of what she described as she lies on the beach, when she decides Les Bugues is where she wants to live out the rest of her life. Of course, it could be my own projection, but she writes about [watching] the earth cover itself back up alternately with snow, with fruit, with mud, sometimes with white betrothals, with milk, with catastrophes, with tears. I think there is something beautiful about living with the land, about choosing when to enter the core of modern civilization, the city, and about living on the outside, which to me is the forgotten heart of it. And I think there are ways to be powerful within that life. As I translated, I got the feeling that as the book closes, Francine is the one in control, in charge. She decides when she and Tiène will get married, she decides when the sharecroppers will reap the fields. She is now the head of the household—not her father, not Tiène, not Nicolas. And that all stems from Part Two, when she stole her place of air. Not easy to do for a woman, and especially in that time. And, in some ways, Tiène was the one who suggested it when he helped Francine go to the sea. He seemed to know she had an amorphous force inside her, like the power of the wave needing to take shape, but also that she needed to sort through her grief, her insecurities, her endless thoughts, her longing for chaos, her boredom. He knew that all of it needed to find an outlet, a crest. You could call it a proof of love.

ER: Throughout the book, Francine claims to love Tiène, but I remain unconvinced. She is too wild and self-obsessed to sincerely love another, I think. Tiène awakens in her a realization about herself, about her own power, because he represents the outside, what is beyond her family farm and its stasis, and, as you say, she is able finally to exert control over something she formerly perceived as being out of reach, unattainable, a challenge. I wonder—is she falling in love with Tiène, or with herself, through Tiène? She obsesses over Tiène, and then describes forgetting him entirely, even as he lies sprawled on his bed upstairs. He’s painfully handsome and yet she can’t remember at all what he looks like. As we edited this translation, you pointed out that I had mistranslated a particular phrase. In part two, she says, on s’ennuie de Tiène. I had translated it as: I’m bored of Tiène. She says countless times, je m’ennuie, which does mean that she’s bored. But in this context, this phrasing actually translates to: I miss Tiène. It’s quite fitting that I mixed them up, and their syntactical proximity allows for an almost seamless flitting between Francine’s contrasting emotional states. Earlier in Part Two, she even says, On ne peut pas dire que je m’ennuie de Tiène. I think she misses him and then forgets him so easily because he is ultimately not what is important. He occupies her field of vision and then she remembers—oh, it’s me I’m looking at, through him. He is just there for her to use, to better understand herself and her power. He’s all she has, out there in Les Bugues. So she has to use him, not let him slip away before she has a chance to know herself. As we translated this book, we described it as an unraveling. But the more I think about it, the more I think it’s about Francine discovering her own force.

It’s this same force that allows her to set Nicolas and Jérôme against each other, to set off all the action of the book. She’s toying with her power. Tiène offers her an opportunity to test herself in a new way. She is capable of death. Is she capable, also, of loving, of being loved? Does she set her brother and her uncle against each other to have the memory that she was capable of doing it? Her violence is all a show, a spectacle—for herself. She needs him to awaken her force for her, but he is incidental. At one point she says, What was Tiène doing here, in Les Bugues? What did he want from me? What was he doing here, alive? How could he be alive? I suddenly looked at him without recognizing him, without love, there in his unapproachable solitude.

This flitting between loving him and thinking of him suddenly as a stranger feels very real to me. Sometimes, when we think we are in love but we are only infatuated, we grab onto someone for what they show us about ourselves, how they allow us to feel, we forget that they are their own person and not just a way to feed our sense of self, and then suddenly we realize the cruelty of it. How is it you’re here, your own being, with your own needs, and not just a mirror for me in this moment? And then love and familiarity vanish and leave behind guilt (though I don’t think Francine feels much of that. I say this sincerely: she is, I believe, a sociopath). For much of the first part of the book, she describes him as being out of reach in his solitude, but it’s Francine who pushes Tiène away by clinging to an image of him that she’s made up in her head, in her swamps of boredom. After all, towards the end of the book she says that loving Tiène is the beginning of a poor solution to this unhappiness. This is why I believe that even if she makes the “easy” choice and lives out life with Tiène in Les Bugues, ultimately she will remain unhappy, simmering, and before too long her chaos will rise again.

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OB: Regardless of what “the easy life” might mean for Francine, we were both in agreement that this would be the translation for the title, La vie tranquille, as opposed to any other translation using an alternate word for “tranquille.” “Easy” kaleidoscopes in our translation, we are being hum-drummed into a worrisome ease, which, like Duras’s “mot-vague” (wave-word), always seems to break into chaos. Every time ease settles with the Veyrenattes, and particularly Francine, chaos is just around the corner. A lot of times it is even provoked by her, so that something about her existence [can] change. Paying attention to these moments of boredom and ease as they lead into chaos within the text were my key to the rhythm of Duras. That wave we are on: you, Francine, and I. We are prey to her swell and swelling with words. They are hers, really, but by way of the strange force that writes and the strange force that translates, they are Francine’s and ours also.

ER: Yes, the book’s chaos-boredom-chaos pattern swept us up in it, and as translators we had to make sure we were allowing the crescendo to build and then the boredom to bloom in all the right places. And how do you allow for chaos as a translator? It’s a difficult balance.

OB: I find really losing control is hard for the translator; in some ways, we are forced to be a lifeguard in Duras’s turbulent sea: her reader, her editor, her proofreader. It has always been my number one challenge when translating Duras or any other writer: how exactly do I lose control with the process? In writing, I can disappear, drown, but in translation, I have to be present.

ER: We want to replicate the disorder, the confusion, the abrupt changes and splinterings—but for us it comes with the risk of it being seen as a mistake, as clumsy, as a mistranslation, or, worse, as too calculated, too in-control, because we are pinpointing Francine within all of it, tracking her as she loses herself. Even in the midst of her fragmentation, we never lose sight of her, we see her in her entirety.

In the beginning, she is whole, cool. As I was translating Part One, I was struck by the cruelty and coldness of Francine’s prose as she describes Jérôme’s excruciating, slow death. There is a distance and a detachment, almost a woodenness to the prose that feels so different from a book like our previous co-translation, Summer 80. There is none of the ethereality of her writing about love, writing, or the sea. I was drawn to staccato, monosyllabic, harsh vocabulary. The harshest-sounding word of all the choices for a given phrase. Hot instead of warm. Fat tears instead of large tears. Chaos instead of disorder. Boring instead of dull. Words like drag and scrape. My skin is sealed like a sack, my head hard, brimming with brains and blood. Through this alliteration we created in Part One, you can feel Francine’s anger, her resentment, her force, her clawing at the “dreamskin” of Les Bugues. It’s a slow, tense section of the book full of violence and rupture. We can predict what will happen through the force of her words. Unlike the breakdown of proper syntax in Part Two, Francine’s voice in Part One is very in control. This Duras prose style is very particular to this book. You can feel her attempts to exert control over her own internal chaos through her writing. There is less meandering, less pondering, less grasping at big questions and more urgency. As though she’s under threat. Writing as an attempt to fight back against some premonition, rather than an opportunity to reflect, relive. There are so many experimental, exploratory lines that strike me as different from the Duras of later works.

OB: In this book, Duras experiments by abruptly changing pronouns and tenses in order to fragment the reader’s perception. The neutral French pronoun “on” is a good example of this. We quickly saw that there was a pattern, some sort of evolution with how Duras was using the word “on” from Part One to Part Three—the “on,” which can either be translated as “we,” “you,” “one,” or in the passive voice, seemed to indicate Francine and Duras’s shifting sense of self and power. In Part One, “on” is mostly used as the traditional pronoun signifying “we.” It is the shared Veyrenattes malediction employed by the all-knowing Francine as she determines her family’s fate. But in Part Two, “on” starts to become tricky, to operate as a more radical, existential pronoun. As Francine unravels in her hotel room, Duras uses it as such: I am not responsible for this age or for this image. You recognize it. (On la reconnaît.) It must be mine. Here, the psychological fragmentation of the character is reinforced through our choice to translate that French “on” as “you,” as if Francine is addressing another her, another girl. However, it could easily have been translated as the passive “It is recognizable” or “One recognizes it.” The splitting effect of the “you” reinforces Francine’s inability to pin herself down. There are two, even more, Francines in the room. Just some lines later, she reaffirms it: I can’t even hold myself in my arms (…) I wish I could embrace the girl that I am and love her, signaling directly to that “on,” that “you,” but this time in the third person. This “on” shadows Francine throughout her entire stay in T. Just lines before pronouncing I am flower, she shifts to this “on” again: I traveled to the hot and muddy vestibules of the earth that spat me out from its depths. And now I’ve arrived. You come to the surface (On vient à la surface). It’s from that “you,” that French “on,” that Francine emerges as one of the sea’s hatchlings. In part two, as Francine comes unhinged, Duras finds her voice as a writer, and as her translators, we get to find it along with her.

But much like Duras, who needs to lose Francine in T. in order to find her, for us to find Duras’s voice in translation, we first have to be swept along with it, get lost in the wide Durassian sea, the thousand different changes in tone, rhythm, syntax. We have to go to T., return from it with a fever, come out of it alive. We have to come out cohesive, yet amorphous. We have to always be just about to take shape. That’s how we translate Duras: we have to remain on the point of becoming. We have to leave Francine open to multiple readings, even as we make choices as translators, our words have to be kaleidoscopic. This book, then, had to be as messy as all the things that encompass life. For me to be there with Francine, it was necessary to see with her successive sets of eyes, to be usurped by her boredom, her chaos, her youth and inherent old age. To feel fatigued, contained, fragmented, turn after turn. To feel life and death equally in my bones, I had to go there along with her. By the end of it, I felt her cruelty, her tenderness, her everything. I felt Francine, you, and Duras all in my veins.

ER: You and I first became friends, and later co-translators, because of our strong bond to Duras’s work, the way we felt she ran through our blood and brains. You and I have, from Francine’s age, felt as though we were lugging around a thick and ancient fatigue. I think we are able to translate her, and even feel a need to do so, because of this boredom, chaos, youth and rot already coursing through us. Translating Francine, we get to live alongside her and allow Duras to guide us through our own fragmentation. But we had to lean into the ways we are Francine, the girl confronting her own dissolving; we had to become one of Duras’s dreamers and degenerates.

OB: And I think we did.

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Originally published on Hopscotch Translation
Tuesday, March 7, 2023

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