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

Jennifer Solheim: In your beautiful introduction, Kazim, you write, “_��’A���dzܰ�_, 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.” So what is the story behind the translation of ��’A���dzܰ�? Why now? Did you approach Open Letter Books, or did they approach you? Why hasn’t 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 – 1984, roughly) when she started recycling plots throughout her books. I happened upon ��’A���dzܰ� in a Paris bookstore and found it immediately charming and powerful—in 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—the most well known of these is The Malady of Death—but essentially did not write another novel until The Lover.

I can’t 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 ��’A���dzܰ� 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 “Anglicize” the syntax very much, so the sentences still have that sometimes ornate overdone word order of a French sentence. In ��’A���dzܰ� Duras writes very simply, very plainly. So I found an inspiration in Gertrude Stein’s English. But unlike Stein, Duras is in love with the comma—her 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—eventually—seemed 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—it couldn’t 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’s many mouths. Somber sky.

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

��’A���dzܰ� forgets. Of course, this is a novel about forgetting—and 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’s previous novels, The Ravishing of Lol V. Stein (1964) and The Vice Consul (1965). Sometimes known as the “India cycle,” this extended text, relayed across three books, performs its own forgetfulness, and imposes a frustrating—even terrifying—amnesia on the reader. But to read ��’A���dzܰ� 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 ��’A���dzܰ� 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’s own, implanting memories in us. But like the dead dog on the beach to which ��’A���dzܰ� returns with unsettingly frequency—as if this corpse structures the narrative space—these are figures in the course of deterioration. Memory is erasing itself. The dead dog, mentioned once in The Ravishing, reappears repeatedly in ��’A���dzܰ�. Around this dreadful site/sight, a hole in sense, circulate the unnamed residues of characters that the reader “remembers” from previous texts. Remembering here means fleshing out these haunting ghosts—worn to nubs, “sanded down,” to cite the translators—transposed from The Ravishing and The Vice Consul: Lol V. Stein, her fiancé, 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—translates them—into film, the medium that will preoccupy Duras in the coming years. Haunted by its shape-shifting textual ghosts (in French revenants; literally, one’s coming back), ��’A���dzܰ� 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 désert (1976). Situated at the join between the prose cycle and the cinematic one, ��’A���dzܰ� produces a site of translation, a space where everything keeps turning into something else. Hence this text’s 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.

��’A���dzܰ� 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’s work in general, and that emerge within _��’A���dzܰ�_’s 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 . . .)

Is ��’A���dzܰ� then a novel? Yes, in the ordinary and hardly helpful sense that there is a story (or rather, several intermingled, fragmentary stories) and that the book, with its 98 pages of text, is longer than a novella. But from onset, the writing is novelistic in no mainstream way whatsoever. It is script-like without being a script, focused on the real world and on an initial character without being realist and hauntingly poetic without being a poem. [. . .]

Whatever the puzzling blend of hazy or composite characters and fragmentary storytelling there is in ��’A���dzܰ�, I would suggest that Duras is closer to truth than to fiction. Life can be like this. We see a woman or a man, and another woman or another man superposes him—or herself on the former. We project ourselves into others and project others into others—especially when amorous attraction and attachment is at stake. Duras was fascinated by the force and the pain of amorous emotions, as well as by indeterminacy as one of the fundamental aspects of our being in the world and our being with others. Because the voice of the narrator is so essential to and salient in a book like ��’A���dzܰ�, it can be deduced that this narrative indeterminacy accurately reflects the levels of consciousness of this outside observer who speaks so enigmatically yet authoritatively. [. . .]

For those of you who have never read Marguerite Duras, ��’A���dzܰ� is an invigorating place to start.

You can directly from our website, or, if you want to try your luck, we’re giving away 5 copies through GoodReads—just click below to enter yourself in the contest.