Nevermore

A meditation on loss and recovery through the act of translation and its recuperative powers.

An unnamed translator mourning the loss of a close friend retreats to Dresden to translate the “Time Passes” section of Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse. Translating this lyrical evocation of time and its devastations in a city with which the writer has no connections and where neither her language nor Woolf’s are spoken offers an interruption to the course of her life. She immerses herself in this prose poem of ephemerality.

The narrator delves into phrases from “Time Passes” and subjects them 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. She reflects on places that are destined for decay and yet are returning to life, broken worlds in which there is still strength for a new beginning. In Tess Lewis’s visionary English translation, Cécile Wajsbrot’s lyrical exploration of the role of the writer and translator becomes an exquisite meditation on loss and recovery.

‘Nevermore gives readers the rare opportunity to go inside a translator’s mind. We get a glimpse of Wajsbrot’s own journey of translation, as a Woolf specialist, but the story in some ways reflects every translator’s journey, as we laboriously enhance our work while meticulously choosing the precise words and sentences.’—Lachhemi Rana, The Linguist. Read the full review here.

‘For a reader unengaged with literary canons, divorced from historical thought and alienated from emerging discourses of translation, the book can be all over the place. But Wajsbrot’s novel is an achievement in writing and translating time; its passage, halts and resurfacings  [ . . . ] Lewis’s translation shines and makes the sentences written both in French and English a feast to indulge in regardless of the little labour that might be involved.’—Rahul Singh, The Hindustan Times. Read the full review here.