Sphinx

by Anne Garréta

  And actions that were not continuous? Garréta makes the passé simple work for her. The passé simple is the literary past tense, meaning a past tense used only in written French. It has no real equivalent in English, as it comes off as much higher in register and more unusual than our commonly used simple past tense (e.g. I went to the Apocryphe). Best of all, it does not require gender agreement, as do certain verbs in the passé composé. But it’s not as simple as that. As I said, the passé simple is not commonly used. It sticks out. It wouldn’t have been possible for Garréta to insert it wherever she needed to and then leave the rest of the verbs in the passé composé. In order to become natural, not to signal a linguistic constraint, it had to become a part of the text, but more than that, a part of the narrative. And so it becomes part of the narrator’s identity—he or she is a rather pretentious, bourgeois(e) scholar who does not shy away from praising his or her own intelligence. One would expect for someone like je to use the passé simple in a memoir. And so even though in my Sphinx the narrator does not need to use a high literary style to avoid revealing his or her gender, this aspect of the narrator’s personality is a part of Garréta’s text that cannot simply disappear in translation.

  In the same vein, although the English-speaking narrator might simply go places in my translation, my text has been inexorably infected by the strategies Garréta employed in hers. Lacking a good English equivalent to the passé simple, my text had to sway in a different way to craft the same personality for the narrator, accommodating elevated or unusual vocabulary when possible in order to keep the tone and register the same in English as in French. For example, by translating the French word immondices on page 45 of Garréta’s text as “putrescence” instead of the more banal “filth” or “waste.”

  Similarly, Garréta often uses sentence fragments in order to avoid the verb altogether. Garréta turns this, too, into a part of the story, and the fragments enact what is being stated within the chopped clauses: je can only remember moments with A*** through fragments. Memory blurred, je can only describe bits and pieces of their time together, bits and pieces of A***’s body. And it doesn’t stop there: the narrator is often in the company of men, whose gender takes precedence for agreement even if the narrator is a woman; je is often being dragged along places by other people, making je the object of the verb instead of the subject, requiring no gender agreement. None of the linguistic means Garréta employs to avoid using gender markers for the two lovers is obvious, nothing sticks out, everything is woven into the fabric of the narrative itself.

  Including the language used to describe A***. The narrator can never describe A*** directly, as almost all adjectives in French have to agree with the gender of the person being described. Therefore, A*** is described indirectly. The narrator talks about A***’s skin, arms, shoulder, scent, residual imprint, thighs, mass of hair, curved neck, so that the adjectives agree with the gender of that particular body part in French and not with A***’s gender. A*** is also referred to as various nouns, including a spirit, a being, an other, a beautiful creature, a strange character, a phantomlike figure, a child, a vision, a funereal existence, a cadaver, a living cadaver, a life, a body, a beloved body, an inanimate body, an ephemeral body, a parasitic body, so that the adjectives agree with these nouns and, again, not with A***’s gender. Sometimes A*** is missing from the sentence altogether where there normally would be an object, for example when the narrator says, “Je me surpris à desirer, douloureusement” (“I was surprised to find myself desiring, painfully”), or “Qu’était-ce? Regarder si longtemps dormir” (literally: “What did I get out of watching [ ___ ] sleep?”)—desiring who? Watching who sleep? Based on context, the object of these sentences is obvious, but there is still something missing—A***.

  Because of the constraint Garréta chose for herself, A***’s character barely exists in the novel; A*** almost never speaks in his or her own words and doesn’t seem to have a developed personality. The reader notices, and A*** notices too. Garréta doesn’t gloss over this, but rather makes it the focal point of the novel. One night A*** reproaches je for dooming their relationship to failure from the start by engaging with only an image of A***, an image that did not correspond with reality, that forced je to mentally kill off the real A*** in order to enjoy a particular vision that alone was able to bring about je’s satisfaction. A devastating vampirization that happens in relationships no matter the genders of those involved.

  Until now, there did not exist an English translation of a full-length work by a female Oulipian. And excluding this translation there does not yet exist a genderless love story written in English. Why not? And how can stepping into a universe where a relationship can be described without using gender markers expand our ways of thinking about love, desire, relationships? About gender? About identity? If our pre-conceived notions about all of these things are defied by this text, what does that say about our pre-conceived notions? Reading Sphinx is one way to think about these questions, to question our ways of thinking.

  I owe an enormous thank you to Anne Garréta, Bernard Turle, and especially to Dan Gunn and the professors and students in the Masters of Cultural Translation at The American University of Paris for encouraging me to think and rethink these questions over the past year. My perceptions, my ideas, and my bookshelves are the better for it.

  Emma Ramadan

  Marrakech, 2015

  ANNE GARRÉTA (born 1962) is the first member of the Oulipo to be born after its founding. A graduate of France’s prestigious École normale supérieure, Garréta received her PhD from New York University in 1988. A lecturer at the University of Rennes II since 1995, Garréta has also taught at numerous American universities, and currently teaches at Duke University as a Research Professor of Literature and Romance Studies. Her first novel, Sphinx (Grasset, 1986), published when she was only twenty-three years old, was unanimously hailed by critics. Her second novel, Ciels liquides (Grasset, 1990), tells the fate of a character losing the use of language. In La Décomposition (Grasset, 1999), a serial killer methodically murders characters from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. She met Oulipian Jacques Roubaud in Vienna in 1993, and was invited to present her work at an Oulipo seminar in March 1994 and again in May 2000, which led to her invitation to join the Oulipo. She won France’s prestigious Prix Médicis in 2002, awarded each year to an author whose “fame does not yet match their talent” (she is the second Oulipian to win the award—Georges Perec won in 1978), for her most recent novel, Pas un jour (Grasset, 2002), and she has served on the Prix Médicis judging committee since 2013.

  EMMA RAMADAN is a graduate of Brown University, and received her Master’s in Cultural Translation from the American University of Paris. Her translation of Anne Parian’s Monospace will be published in the fall of 2015 by La Presse (Fence Books). She was awarded a 2014–2015 Fulbright grant for literary translation in Morocco.

  DANIEL LEVIN BECKER is literary editor of The Believer and the youngest member of the Oulipo. His first book, Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature, was published by Harvard University Press in 2012.

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