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Interview

Nevermore: Chernobyl, Virginia Woolf and catastrophe

Destruction, loss and time intertwine in Cécile Wajsbrot's novel, Nevermore, which masterfully frames translation as a journey of recovery.

Photo: Makar Artemev

When Cécile Wajsbrot was growing up in post-war Paris, she decided to learn German at school. This might not have seemed so natural for the child of Polish Jewish migrants in an era when Franco-German relations remained mistrustful, to say the least. But she wanted to be able to understand Yiddish –the language of her grandmother – and German was the closest available option. From there, Wajsbrot’s border-crossing literary life has seen her become a major figure in both France and Germany, celebrated for her translations into French from both German and English as well as her essays and novels, several of which are set in Berlin.

This month, Wajsbrot’s work is available in English for the first time, with Seagull Books publishing Tess Lewis’s English translation of her magnificent novel Nevermore. Here an unnamed woman, mourning the death of a friend, travels to Dresden in the hope of translating the haunting middle section, ‘Time Passes’, of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse.

Obsessed with questions of loss and recovery, the narrator reflects on Woolf and the act of translation between long considerations of topics like the Chernobyl exclusion zone, the fate of Dresden’s bells, and the New York City High Line. We visited Wajsbrot, who lives between Berlin and Paris, in the French capital.

The narrator of Nevermore is translating Virginia Woolf into French. Looking at your bookshelves, I can’t help but notice that you have also done so, and not just once…

My first real literary translation was of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, in 1993. I’ve since published two other versions of it, so you could say I’ve spent over 25 years of my life translating that book – it’s crazy! 

How did you first encounter Woolf? 

She was not my first influence. Before her, I was already reading Marcel Proust and Marguerite Duras. Soon, though, I discovered Virginia Woolf. I was a student and we had to translate an extract from Orlando, and the English teacher said that this was the most difficult writer to translate. Already I wanted to know more about her (laughs).

I read her in French, and then in English. There were three different things drawing me to her: one was her biography, another was the feminist movement, which mainly spoke of Woolf as a figure rather than her work, and then there was her writing. She seemed like a complete, and very lively, literary figure. I felt close to her. And I began to read everything – the novels, the essays, the letters, the unabridged diary. She has ended up being my biggest influence. After my first translation of The Waves, I wrote a novel – and this novel was very, very much influenced by Woolf’s way of writing, so much so that I then stopped reading her for many years, because I was afraid I could not get enough distance to find my own voice.

I’m always looking for new ways of writing fiction.

Years later, though, I was able to read her safely again. Something that I admire about her – and that I’m trying to do, in my own way – is that she was always in search of something else, always in search of what could become a new kind of literature. 

In ‘Time Passes’, which takes place over a decade, death strikes the Ramsay family; their summer house falls into disrepair but then gets fixed up again, with the wounded family eventually returning. In Nevermore, ‘Time Passes’ stands alongside many other fascinating strands – Chernobyl, Dresden, bells, a certain requiem. What inspired you to bring these various elements together?  

As I said, I’m always looking for new ways of writing fiction. Nevermore came about because I was researching Chernobyl, and I was watching a documentary about the forbidden zone there. The images are really striking. There are all these empty houses where you can see the vegetation, the trees, growing into the houses. At the same time, I was teaching a seminar about climate change and literature, with To The Lighthouse on my syllabus.

It occurred to me that what occurs in ‘Time Passes’ was something very similar. I thought it might be an essay idea, but then I decided to include the translator – and the element of translation – and so it felt like an idea for a novel, the kind of novel I have been trying to write, with different pieces brought together but no real plot. The idea came to set the novel in Dresden, where I had spent some time teaching. And I started seeing the common points – it’s all about destruction, loss and time, but about recovery as well.

I thought of ‘Time Passes’ as a core, with different avenues leading elsewhere. I found out that Woolf herself spent some time in Dresden, and she stayed on Prager Straße, which was destroyed in World War II – things come together like that. The whole work was about trying to arrange the different elements, not adjacent but together, like a jigsaw puzzle where you can see the different pieces but your impression is a feeling of unity. You can say it is made up of fragments, but those fragments stick together.  

Dresden is, to most English speakers, iconic for its destruction. But of course the city still exists, and by setting the book there, you seem to pose the question of aftermath – what comes in the wake of a catastrophe. 

Yes. Dresden is a metaphor. But at the same time, especially on the northern side of the Elbe, there is a very lively city with a lot of young people and an alternative way of life. Another of Nevermore’s “avenues” has to do with bells. For a few years I had been considering writing something about bells – and then I discovered [Johannes] Wallmann’s Bells Requiem, and the story of Dresden’s bells. When you begin to research, you discover connections that you hadn’t thought of early on.

And this translation is a further step for Nevermore because the novel is about translation, and Tess Lewis’s translation is by no means ordinary. We had two public conversations together, and one of us came up with the idea that, while this novel sounds quite disheartening, there is hope and there is recovery, and mostly that arrives in the act of translating. The translator despairs, at times, but there is still a way forward, because although there is loss, it is still possible to proceed – and to achieve something. 

Photo: Makar Artemev

In Nevermore, the historical catastrophes are interwoven with ecological disasters in the present – usually these things are considered separately. I think of your essay ‘Collisions’, where you argue that authors who think about the 20th century might need to turn and face a “new horizon” of present and future dangers…

I was born in 1954. I spent the first part of my life under the spell of past events that I did not experience but had been told to me. For my generation, and for the one preceding mine, the catastrophe was behind us. And I have long believed that working on the past, working on memory, could help prevent certain things from coming back.

But at a certain point – I would say it began after the fall of the Berlin Wall, sometime in the 1990s – things started to feel like they were changing. Instead of seeing the catastrophe as a kind of shadow following us, I began to see it as something lying in wait for us, like the beast in the jungle in that Henry James story.

It wasn’t obvious at first what this catastrophe was, but it became clear quite quickly that it was the ecological catastrophe that is awaiting us, not just awaiting us but partly already here.

What originally made you feel so driven to write about the past?  

For a large part of my writing life, my biography has felt like a rucksack, something that I had to carry around on my shoulders, although I never chose it – it had just been given to me. I can never say I totally got rid of this burden. But now I feel a little freer than I did at the beginning. It never seemed obvious to me that I might be allowed to consider my life as my own. It was burdened down with other generations’ lives; my life was led and seen in terms of those other lives, of all those stories about persecution, death, and Auschwitz, which the nation was silent about.

I had the impression in France that I was living in two different countries – one inside the family, and one outside, with no connections between them. I think one of the things I try to do while writing is to build those connections, those bridges – not walls. 

We are living in a very polarised world.

You spoke about Germany having done more – and earlier – than France in coming to terms with the past. How do you feel about the current German memory politics discourse, especially in the context of war in Palestine and Germany’s response to it? 

First of all, I really do believe that talking about the past is something vital, something that does help us in the present. It is important to speak about the past, about the Holocaust, and to do so bluntly. But it’s also important not to let oneself be hypnotised by it – because other things have happened in the world, and other things are continuing to happen.

In my first year of living in Germany, I was so relieved to be in a country where I could finally have conversations about the past. It’s still difficult for me to speak about it in France, maybe because the things that happened to my family occurred here, in Paris, with French police, not in Germany. Still, I felt that in both places, we who were born after the war had something in common because of this past, a shared question that I thought we should all be answering: What are we going to do with this inheritance? This was being asked in Germany, not in France, so I felt more at home there.

Over the years, though, I began to get a different feeling. Whenever my novels were translated into German, no matter what they were about, critics would always find a way to bring it into connection with the Holocaust. I was labelled a “Jewish writer”, and I never wanted that – I never felt like that. Of course, it is a part of my writing, but it is only one part. I also noticed people sometimes speaking to me as if I were made of glass, as if I were some kind of frail object, which made it impossible to have a natural exchange. And I found it shocking to see all these descendants of Nazi perpetrators publishing books about their families – very critical books, of course, but still. Germany is haunted by this past. They can’t get rid of it; they’re hypnotised by it. And what’s been happening over the last year with Israel doesn’t help at all.

First of all, there is this confusion between being Jewish and being Israeli – it’s not the same. I don’t live in Israel, and I don’t ever want to live in Israel; it is not my country. But many people think that if you’re Jewish, you belong to that country – there is a kind of propaganda from Israel that supports the idea. And this cancel culture that is happening in Germany, on both sides, it isn’t good. I feel helpless because, for the time being at least, I can’t see a way forward where people can look at each other and listen to each other. We are living in a very polarised world.

Sometimes I ask questions of myself, too, because in the 1970s and 1980s, both in my own life and in my writings, I was searching for an own identity where my female and Jewish identities could exist without me being drawn into some kind of universal concept, which was for a long time the official discourse in France. But now I’m wondering whether this question of identity didn’t unwillingly lead to where we are now, into an identitarian world, where no more universality exists, no more common ground, no more common wealth, only particular interests, only separatism.

That’s a sad thought…

It does sound a little despairing. But that’s why we must go on with our translating – because translation is a way of building bridges, a way of saying that we don’t live in separate worlds with zero connection between them – a way of insisting that we really can give people access to each other.  

  • Nevermore is available now from Seagull Books in Tess Lewis’s translation.