Translating Jean Améry | Adrian West

Translating Jean Améry | Adrian West
Excerpt:
[...]
If the French then is airier, more refined and expository, is this infidelity to Améry’s text, or merely a hewing to the French Améry might have written, had he been capable, or, if he was capable, as I believe him to have been, had he not been consumed by intimations of his own worthlessness? Might such a translation then comprise a service rendered to the spiritual reality of this deeply frustrated writer?
I have used the word expository on purpose here, to inspire thoughts, not only of exposition, but also of exposure, of denudement. The need to be known is a profound one and yet the trust in others, in continuity, and even in one’s own psychic and physical integrity necessary to lay oneself bare is often shattered in those who have been subject to trauma and degradation, and in many cases it can never be repaired. When I read Améry, particularly his fiction, the at-times misplaced curtness, the refusal of elaboration, is off-putting, and in translation, there is a temptation to smooth things out. Whether this is right or not, one cannot say; it is a question of the writer’s ultimate identity, his ontology. When we cry at a child’s dying, it is not only for the impotent immaculate being lying vulnerable on white cloth but also for the many-petalled flower of its possibilities that minute by minute are extinguished. Our voice is not our ideal voice but nor is it merely the distortions that have been effected upon this ideal by material forces that were directed toward our destruction.
[h/t Pykk]