If an author’s work is by definition hopelessly entangled in language, one might be justified in wondering whether a translation into another language is worthwhile, or even possible. If language itself is the investigation, how does one transpose this investigation from one language to another, in this specific case from French to English? The question becomes perhaps even more troubling when one considers the fact that it is rather debatable whether The Hatred of Music is indeed a work written entirely in French. “French does not derive from Latin,” Quignard writes in “Languages and Death,” and then affirms: “It simply is Latin.”5 This appears to be true in particular when it comes to the way he himself makes use of his native tongue. Even if one leaves aside the frequent occasions when classical citations are given in the original, one is often tempted to say that Quignard’s prose is as much Latin, or even Greek, as it is French, as if these languages were lurking just beneath the linguistic surface. In the same essay he suggests that, through erosion and degradation, a living language might become incapable of properly serving our needs. It might consequently little by little lead us “to the use of the dead languages from which it came in order to express what it no longer feels.”6 Thus the death of a language does not lead to its decay. On the contrary, death can reinvigorate it and allow it to reacquire a certain sharpness and purity of expression that our everyday parlance lacks.
Quignard’s own use of dead languages is not limited to quotations and untranslatable philosophical terms: at times it permeates every aspect of his writing, from his frequent use of paleologisms to a more or less perceptible syntactic distortion. Elucidating the precise nature of this relationship would be a task for classicists, which we unfortunately are not. Suffice it to say that Quignard’s speculative rhetoric constantly strives to make language an endeavor of disorientation. For language itself, any language, is always already a metaphora—a word that, as Quignard likes to remind us, is today to be found on the sides of moving vans in Greece — a translation, literally a transference from one place to another: from the pure sounds produced by the vocal cords, or the mere marks traced in the dirt or on paper, to their interpretation as signs of something else.
Language — not least of all French, “this language more weighed down than others by the history that carries it”7—is also always a translation of itself and of its former selves, making it impossible to speak without repeating what has already been said. Quignard’s nostalgia for the lost expressivity of dead languages could be read as the most fundamental condition of translation, which is to say the awareness of another language whose absence defines our own. What he evokes is a life in translation that was already well known in ancient Rome, where Latin was never the only language, but merely the language of daily life, as opposed to Greek, which to the Romans was already half-dead. Similarly, in Quignard’s essays, the past always insists on its presence. His texts are an endless conversation with voices that have long since been silenced, voices that nevertheless still echo, not only in his own work but in literature as a whole. Montaigne, the Nestor of the French essay — whose work is similarly interspersed with classical citations and for whom Latin was anything but a dead language — insists that, as writers, “we do nothing but comment upon one another.” Quignard gives voice to a more violent and perhaps frustrated version of this sentiment when he speaks of the “hatred of what is original.”8 There is nothing to be gained from trying to be original, he notes: intimacy and sincerity of thought can be achieved only by reinterpreting and commenting upon previous texts, just as dead languages alone can express feelings that have been buried deep beneath the communicative sediments of our native tongue.
Quignard’s various techniques of disorientation — linguistic and otherwise — give his prose a sort of refined coarseness, out of tune with the present, which we have tried to retain in English. He denounces what he sees as a narcissistic and anxious tendency in modernity, which compels the author to break with all precedent in an act of constant reinvention that disregards the strength that literature has been able to draw from millennia of “memories, shadows, behaviors, legends, transgressions, masks.”9 And yet it would be inaccurate to simply describe his style as classicizing or antimodern; more than anything it comes across as atemporal, an immersion in a present past. This dive into the waters of the history of thought, of languages, is vertiginous, and not only for the author. Quignard writes of readers: “Those who read run the risk of losing the little control they have of themselves. They let themselves become totally subjugated as they read, almost to the point of losing their identity, at the risk of disappearing. They lend their soul and body.”10 The Song of the Sirens is as much a literary experience as it is a musical one. The reader, entranced like the mythical Butes of the Argo, abandons his ship and crew for the half-bird/half-maidens. “Butes, alone, jumped,” Quignard writes in a book dedicated to the figure.11 To Orpheus’s song, which maintains the social bond amid Jason’s sailors, Butes prefers the ambiguous isolation of a more original music, that of the womb. We once found ourselves in complete isolation, in our mother’s belly, in which we heard her muffled voice sing. This was before we knew music, before we knew language, before we could tell the difference between the two. We, alone, were fascinated by her vocal presence. Music enthralls. This is Quignard’s stern warning in The Hatred of Music. But readers beware, for the warning comes in the guise of literature, a less pernicious form of expression to be sure, but nevertheless one capable of pulling us down into its depths like a maelstrom as soon as we jump ship.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
PASCAL QUIGNARD is an award-winning French novelist, essayist, critic, translator, and musician. He is the author of more than sixty books and in 2002 won the Prix Goncourt, France’s top literary prize, for The Roving Shadows, the first volume of an ongoing series of genre-defying works entitled The Last Kingdom.
MATTHEW AMOS has held the position of visiting assistant professor of French at Bard College since 2014. He received his Ph.D. in the same year from New York University with a dissertation entitled “Sharing Absence: Experience and Entretien Through Maurice Blanchot.”
FREDRIK RÖNNBÄCK holds a Ph.D. in French literature from New York University. He has published on Michel Leiris and Georges Bataille and is the translator of several works by Georges Perec into Swedish.
NOTES
1. Trans. note: Panickea translates Quignard’s paniquée, a noun derived from the feminine past participle of the verb paniquer (“to panic”). The word, not to be found in French dictionaries, refers to a state of panic inspired by the god Pan, who is often conflated with Dionysus.
2. Trans. note: Worry.
3. Trans. note: Hum, here and elsewhere, translates Quignard’s recurring use of fredon. Whereas the verb fredonner usually means “to hum,” the noun can also designate a refrain or an improvised melodic ornamentation or embellishment performed by a singer.
4. What strikes only the ears makes less of an impression than what strikes the eyes.”