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Image from lesfugitives.com<\/p><\/div>\n
Yes, \u201chis\u201d. This is an interesting case study that pushes at the boundaries of how we might understand “translating women”: publisher Les Fugitives released it yesterday with the tantalising question \u201cCan a man write a feminist book?\u201d (my instinctive response to this is “yes” since, as I mentioned in an earlier post<\/a>, I believe that feminism is for everyone – but that’s a debate we can continue another day). Written by someone who knew her well, Now, Now, Louison <\/em>is a unique insight into the world of Louise Bourgeois \u2013 her upbringing, her decisions, and her art. Though famed throughout the world, it was only towards the end of Bourgeois\u2019 life that her work was celebrated (a point eloquently made by Fr\u00e9mon: \u201cYou can\u2019t make a move these days without someone\u2019s interpreting it in his terms. Above all, the French. They ignored you for fifty years, and when they finally noticed you existed, they couldn\u2019t wait to tell you what you\u2019d been doing\u201d). Now, Now, Louison <\/em>avoids the temptation to explain Bourgeois and her work in this way, and instead offers snapshots into the paths that brought her to fame. This is an intimate and emotional book, and above all a very beautiful one. The translator, Cole Swensen, is a poet, and this shows through in the translation. I ached with a kind of nostalgia while I was reading this book, and at first I couldn\u2019t put my finger on why \u2013 the nostalgia often hits me when I read in French, or about Paris, which was once my home \u2013 but this was in English, and not focused on Paris (indeed, much of the book is set in New York, where Bourgeois lived as an adult). About a third of the way through my reading, it hit me: the reason I felt this nostalgia was because reading Now, Now, Louison <\/em>was like reading in French. And this is not because of what you might call \u201cliteral\u201d translation or anything clumsy like that, but rather because the syntax and some of the vocabulary mirror the French in a way that is not \u201cEnglish\u201d but yet does not feel \u201cforeign\u201d in the translation. And yet there is nothing odd or affected about the translation: it\u2019s simply an immense achievement on the part of the translator, that the translation communicates the language as if through a lens. I\u2019m aware that this might seem as though I\u2019m advocating an \u201cinvisibility\u201d of the translator, so let me be clear: I am not of that school of thought. I see the translator as a co-creator, and Swensen is certainly not invisible here. Nor is the French book invisible beneath the translation \u2013 and that\u2019s why I loved it. But it\u2019s also why there was the occasional detail that didn\u2019t sit too well with me, words that have a reduced field of usage in English (such as \u201cparturient<\/u> spider at the bottom of the garden\u201d), a slightly odd use of syntax that mirrors the French (\u201cthere would reign a sepulchral silence throughout the house\u201d), even my own b\u00eate noire<\/em> for translation into English (using \u201cthe latter\u201d too liberally). The \u201cFrenchness\u201d of the text is not hidden, and apart from these few details, this was a good thing in my view. Sometimes the original French language is explicit: there is analysis of a French phrase \u201cmade of marble\u201d and its English equivalent \u201cpoker face\u201d, there are French song lyrics that remain untranslated, and French cultural references that are unexplained (from Charcot and the Salp\u00eatri\u00e8re to Varda, Sagan, Duras and the R\u00e9camier) \u2013 these add to the feeling of \u201cFrenchness\u201d that pervades the translation.<\/p>\n The \u201cspider woman\u201d<\/u><\/p>\n I couldn\u2019t write about Louise Bourgeois without mentioning spiders. They feature heavily in all of her exhibitions, and I was fascinated to learn how she became so obsessive about them. Fr\u00e9mon speaks as Bourgeois, explaining that they represent her mother: \u201cShe\u2019s always been in my drawings, in the form of a spider. People don\u2019t usually like spiders \u2013 they\u2019re afraid of them. Women leap onto stools and scream, and men step on them with the satisfaction of having done a good deed.\u201d The spiders take on a form of feminist resistance, instilling fear into other women and inciting men to crush them self-righteously, but Bourgeois made them ever bigger, stronger, and, crucially, pregnant, ready to give birth to more like them. The maternal image is present throughout: her own mother, weaving, attentive, and her female spiders, heavy with the life they will bring forth (or \u201cimmoderately maternal\u201d, as Fr\u00e9mon puts it). Spiders are observed, catalogued, praised, and then sculpted into her \u201cfamily\u201d, with an attention Bourgeois does not seem to extend to her own children \u2013 or perhaps this is simply not where Fr\u00e9mon\u2019s focus lies. Indeed, on the book jacket, Now, Now, Louison <\/em>is described as exhibiting \u201celusive, haunted excess\u201d, and I thought for a while about what exactly this meant. Haunted, because it is lyrical, philosophical, almost ethereal, Bourgeois appearing almost as a spectre; excess, because this is a big story in a small package, a story of the fragility behind the indomitable force; elusive, because there is so much that is not told, because Louise Bourgeois herself is always just out of reach. Her drawings \u201cscream in silence\u201d while she remains mute; she is likened to an \u201cempty house\u201d that she wanders through; the art she made is an expression of pain, love, and the questions she never articulated; her sculptures are \u201cself-portraits\u201d. Yet there is rarely any more detail than this: Fr\u00e9mon describes her sculptures as an equation with, on one side, \u201cpain, anxiety, and frustration\u201d and, on the other, \u201cwood, marble, bronze\u201d, and then, speaking as Bourgeois, offers the following realisation: \u201cThen one day I thought, you can always carve wood, mold clay, or polish marble better than anyone, but what good is it if you don\u2019t tell your own story? Lovely sculptures, gratuitous, idiotic, vain, and useless if they don\u2019t say what you have to say.\u201d Fr\u00e9mon, or Bourgeois-through-Fr\u00e9mon, seems to be saying that the key to understanding Bourgeois is in understanding her sculptures, and yet he avoids the temptation of telling us how to understand them. That is not to say that there are no revelations at all (there is a very interesting insight into the hanging headless figure of \u201cSingle II\u201d<\/a>); rather, there is an acknowledgement that \u201cwe are what others say we are.\u201d Neither Bourgeois nor Fr\u00e9mon tells us directly how to interpret her work, and this elusive understanding is deliberate: \u201cYou\u2019ll never know if it was ecstatic. I have my own ideas on the subject. And I will continue to have them.\u201d If there is one key to understanding how Bourgeois worked, and what her work \u201cmeans\u201d, then perhaps it can be summed up in my favourite excerpt from the book:<\/p>\n \u201cAim for beauty, and you get the vapid; you get fashion, beribboned clich\u00e9; aim for something else \u2013 encyclopaedic knowledge, systematic inventory, structural analysis, personal obsession, or just a mental itch that responds to scratching, and you end up with beauty. Beauty is only a by-product, unsought, yet available to amateurs and impenitent believers.\u201d<\/p>\n Neither Bourgeois in her work nor Fr\u00e9mon in his homage have \u201caimed for beauty\u201d, but rather, just as the personal obsession Bourgeois had with spiders gave way to knowledge and analysis, which resulted in beauty, so Fr\u00e9mon\u2019s obsession with giving Bourgeois a voice has given way to knowledge and analysis of his own, and he has ended up with beauty. A beauty that will always be incomplete and unsought, but that is there nonetheless, \u201cavailable to amateurs and impenitent believers\u201d in the pages of this book. It may have imperfections but, as we are told, \u201cperfection masks feelings\u201d, and if this book is anything, it is a book of emotions: this poignant tribute is just as it should be.<\/p>\n Les Fugitives have a very exciting list of titles forthcoming in 2019, that will probably be of interest to blog subscribers. You can browse the catalogue here<\/a>.<\/p>\n
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