Nathanael - Böcker

Hatred of Translation thinks through translation with an emphasis on its disaggregation. These pieces address, sometimes obliquely, often with effrontery, the works of René Char, Hervé Guibert, Hilda Hilst, Danielle Collobert, Frankétienne, Mizoguchi Kenji, Ingeborg Bachmann, Kobayashi Masaki, and Marguerite Duras. Resolutely resistant to anything resembling a theory of a thing, these pieces provoke a persistent commitment to thinking in the place of theorizing. Where the French pensée means both of aphoristic thought and of the pansy, Hatred of Translation seeks a garden in the midst of body such as it is occupied by language.FINALIST for the FIRECRACKER AWARDS

Here, Nathanaël engages the catastrophal-photographic, translative, architectural-calling to the scene a discrepant combinatory of voices including Ingeborg Bachmann, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Dmitri Shostakovich, to insist on the relational and seismic state of language and the image.

The Middle Notebookes began in French, as three carnets, written in keeping with three stages of an illness: an onset and remission, a recurrence and further recurrence, a death and the after of that death. But the narrative only became evident subsequently; the malady identified by these texts was foremost a literary one, fastened to a body whose concealment had become, not only untenable, but perhaps, in a sense, murderous. It is possible, then, that more than anything, these Notebookes attest both to the commitment, and the eventual, though unlikely, prevention of, a murder.

The talks gathered in Asclepias: The Milkweeds are all concerned with discrepancy and extinction. Polylingual and transdisciplinary, each essay addresses translation as a form of disagreement and photography as its mis-fitting corollary. Calling up an indiscriminate range of thinkers and artists - philosophers, composers, photographers, filmmakers, poets - including Ludwig Wittgenstein, Jacques Derrida, Dmitri Shostakovich, Galina Ustvolskaya, Sergio Larraín, Günther Anders, Alejandra Pizarnik, Antonin Artaud, and Friedrich HÆlderlin, among many others, the resultant montage repeatedly abandons the reader to an empty, incriminating, theatre.

With an English as ebullient as it is macabre, Nathanaël’s novel plunges its reader into a filmic world redolent of unsolved crime and suspicion. Part noir, part philosophical investigation, part literary subterfuge, Feder tenders image over evidence as it exfoliates the inside-out life of its protagonist Feder, at once aloof and queerly omniscient, with a propulsive intimacy that all but breeds a sense of the narrator’s complicity in the narrative’s central travesty. In this reality, municipal sewer systems are brimming with bodies drifted in with the tides, the last century’s architectures have gone unpeopled, and a minor mishap on a tram can cause the sudden death of a stranger across a continent. Feder offers no simple set of problems and solutions, but the texture of an electric curiosity at play in language.

Philosopher-playwright Alain Jugnon’s a body, in spite introduces this prolific French author to an English-speaking readership. The aphorisms that comprise this slight philosophy for actors are an inventoried body with and without its defenses. With incisive humor, Jugnon casts his intellect into the many-organed world, to draw from its semantic recesses a sort of divine putrescence. This work, written for the stage, and received as a presage, reads like an autobiography of Nietzsche’s last laugh. This bilingual edition features an afterword by the translator.

Frédérique Guétat-Liviani’s but it’s a long way is a peace treaty in the form of several soliloquies that, taken together, read like a death warrant or an obituary for an age that has never come. Transcribed from conversations with people of all ages living in public housing in the suburbs of Avignon, these narratives evoke itineraries between Morocco, Algeria, Albania, Spain, Mayotte, Côte d’Ivoire, and France. The result is a magisterial work, a continental chorus that articulates a confluence of humanities.

The body of the filmmaker is itself a discrepancy. This may be one of this book’s claims, if it were to advance something like an argument. Instead it writes its way through to a dry swamp, in the elusive company of Pier Paolo Pasolini, Mizoguchi Kenji, and the albatross, evincing procedures of extinction that owe something to both translation and photography. Its armament, approximating the latent architectures of the Berlin Wall, is held up against the declensions of film, its destructibility. What might otherwise be read as a criminal investigation whose many pieces of evidence reproduce a body whose principal characteristic is that it is found neither in language nor at the edge of a scrubby beach.