Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1941

Wherein We Elect Our Favourite Novels of 1942

I loved studying Blanchot's criticism and had never read Thomas The Obscure, so I gave it a go. It is exactly the sort of book I usually love, but I found it lacking. A lot of the time I was drumming my fingers going "yeah yeah, everything contains its own negation, every self contains the other, get on with it". I thought that the death chapter and the final chapter had a bit more meat to them, but overall the writing wasn't beautiful enough to carry such a labouring of the point. I certainly didn't hate it, and I was reading on PDF which I dislike doing and that might have soured my mood, but my overall reaction is disappointment.

I hate reading Blanchot in translation, so I can't say I blame you. His writing is a balancing act – it threatens to vanish into its own putative neutrality at every step of the way yet somehow does not, so I certainly don't expect that effect to carry over well into another language. This is especially true of his fiction btw. That said, you might like Death Sentence more, it's less Lautréamont-esque than Thomas the Obscure, which I think of as a work of prose poetry first and foremost.

I did wonder if it might be an issue with translation as well, though I imagine a lot of the people who expressed admiration for it here read the same translation. Would definitely be up for trying more, or hell, even trying again with Thomas in actual book form (my attention does wander when I read things online).

I haven't even so much as skimmed the English translation of Thomas l'Obscur, so for all I know it's a stunning technical feat and my criticism is moot. It's best to take what I say with a grain of salt, since I tend to come down hard on translations in general ('traduttore, traditore' is 100% true as far as I'm concerned despite the superhuman efforts of critical theorists to argue their way around it).

Well, I agree that translations will never have the same meaning as the original. But I also believe that no reading will have the same meaning as the original either (yes, I am a crit theorist, how do you do?).

no reading will have the same meaning as the original

Oh of course, that goes without saying. You could even take it a step further and state – dons sunglasses – that there is no original either. :)

I mean, most things I read and literally everything I write have, at their core, the impossibility of true communication with any other. We do our best with the tools at our disposal, translation included.

xpost lol, YES.

Silly crit theory jokes aside, yeah, that's spot on, and Blanchot himself obviously agreed (see his essay on Benjamin's 'Task of the Translator', reprinted in Friendship). If anything, it's a hang-up of mine since I've done a fair amount of translation over the years and it's always a tremendously frustrating experience that requires you to own up to your inevitable failure (then again, when is that ever not true? Beckett knew a thing or two about this, incidentally).