SSM 2011: "When I Look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue" by Edouard Levé, from THE PARIS REVIEW 196

Edouard Levé's "When I Look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue" appears in the newest issue of The Paris Review not as a short story, but as a "document"—it's not even listed under fiction in the table of contents. Even if it is fiction (as other clues suggest it is), it's not technically a short story (despite standing alone quite well) but rather an excerpt: it's part of a larger, as-yet-untranslated-into-English book titled Autoportrait. The afterword of Levé's novel Suicide—his fourth book, but the first and only one to appear so far in English—calls Autoportrait "a novel without paragraphs consisting of facts about the author as well as his opinions," a format which The Paris Review preserves in print, although not online, where "When I Look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue" now has indents after each of the included photographs (presumably a mistake by their web designer, who also published the piece under the header "Letters & Essays," a further confusion of its genre). But is Autoportrait a novel? Can this excerpt be read as a short story? Does it really matter, to me, or to Levé? In "When I Look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue," he writes:

I do not write memoirs. I do not write novels. I do not write short stories. I do not write plays. I do not write poems. I do not write mysteries. I do not write science fiction. I write fragments. I do not tell stories from things I’ve read or movies I’ve seen, I describe impressions, I make judgments. The modern man I sing.

So perhaps this isn't a short story or a novel excerpt or an essay or a letter or an autobiography. Perhaps it is any of those things, depending on where you read it, and in what context, what mood. Whatever it is, it's one of the most affecting things I've read in a literary magazine lately, especially alongside Levé's Suicide, which I've also just finished.

Describing how Levé's writing works, here again is Suicide translator Jan Steyn, from the afterword to that book:

[A] stochastic, yet formally constrained, method of "picking marbles out of a bag" is present in all of Levé's writing. In this regard Levé owes a self-acknowledged debt to the writers of the Oulipo group, especially Georges Perec.

This is a helpful way of thinking about this piece—"A stochastic process is one whose behavior is non-deterministic, in that a system's subsequent state is determined both by the process's predictable actions and by a random element," according to Wikipedia—and Levé's debt is acknowledged when Autoportrait—and therefore "When I Look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue," which opens that book—references Perec in its very first sentence:

When I was young, I thought Life: A User’s Manual would teach me how to live and Suicide: A User’s Manual how to die. I don’t really listen to what people tell me. I forget things I don’t like. I look down dead-end streets. The end of a trip leaves me with a sad aftertaste the same as the end of a novel. I am not afraid of what comes at the end of life. I am slow to realize when someone mistreats me, it is always so surprising: evil is somehow unreal. When I sit with bare legs on vinyl, my skin doesn’t slide, it squeaks. I archive. I joke about death. I do not love myself. I do not hate myself. My rap sheet is clean. To take pictures at random goes against my nature, but since I like doing things that go against my nature, I have had to make up alibis to take pictures at random, for example, to spend three months in the United States traveling only to cities that share a name with a city in another country: Berlin, Florence, Oxford, Canton, Jericho, Stockholm, Rio, Delhi, Amsterdam, Paris, Rome, Mexico, Syracuse, Lima, Versailles, Calcutta, Bagdad.

This is perhaps the closest thing "When I Look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue" has to a plot, its only context: this piece perhaps springs from the narrator's journey to American cities which share their names with cities "share a name with a city in another country," but it does not follow it in any linear way, or even describe much of that trip. Instead, it continues moving around, the prose lighting on dozens of different topics, leaping by loose associations from subject to subject, each rendered in declarative sentences, most of which start with "I":

I would rather be bored alone than with someone else. I roam empty places and eat in deserted restaurants. I do not say "A is better than B" but "I prefer A to B." I never stop comparing. When I am returning from a trip, the best part is not going through the airport or getting home, but the taxi ride in between: you’re still traveling, but not really. I sing badly, so I don’t sing. I had an idea for a Dream Museum. I do not believe the wisdom of the sages will be lost. I once tried to make a book-museum of vernacular writing, it reproduced handwritten messages from unknown people, classed by type: flyers about lost animals, justifications left on windshields for parking cops to avoid paying the meter, desperate pleas for witnesses, announcements of a change in management, office messages, home messages, messages to oneself. I cannot sleep beside someone who moves around, snores, breathes heavily, or steals the covers. I can sleep with my arms around someone who doesn’t move. I have attempted suicide once, I’ve been tempted four times to attempt it. The distant sound of a lawn mower in summer brings back happy childhood memories. I am bad at throwing. I have read less of the Bible than of Marcel Proust. Roberto Juarroz makes me laugh more than Andy Warhol. Jack Kerouac makes me want to live more than Charles Baudelaire. La Rochefoucauld depresses me less than Bret Easton Ellis. Joe Brainard is less affirmative than Walt Whitman. I know Jacques Roubaud less well than Georges Perec. Gherasim Luca is the most full of despair. I don’t see the connection between Alain Robbe-Grillet and Antonio Tabucchi. When I make lists of names, I dread the ones I forget. From certain angles, tanned and wearing a black shirt, I can find myself handsome.

Forgive me the long block quotes, but there is no better way to demonstrate how Levé's prose works here, the way in which sometimes you can track the progressions, the jumps from subject to subject: moving from the list of cities in the previous excerpts to the way to be while traveling ("bored alone," "[roaming] empty places and [eating] in empty restaurants) to returning from being abroad, the in-between of the taxi ride ("still traveling, but not really") eventually linking to the "Dream Museum," another kind of in-between state, itself leading to the "book-museum of vernacular writing." But then the jumps get bigger for a while: sleeping preferences, suicide attempts, the memories invoked by "the distant sound of a lawn mower in summer," a list of writers, then then a critique of this listing: "When I make lists of names, I dread the ones I forget."

This is the way in which the entirety of the piece works, and so presumably the whole of Autoportrait. Often, the prose builds small mountains of meaning through accumulation—see the list of writers, the quick comparisons, promised earlier ("I never stop comparing")—but that meaning is often just as quickly abandoned, moved on from by the author, never to be directly referenced again. Of course, as readers we remember, and what comes after is inevitably influenced by what has come prior, even if the narrator has moved on and away. This sort of progressive building then abandonment also leads to highly quotable passages and one-liners and non-sequiturs, all individually as enjoyable as the whole from which they are lifted. Three such lines, each worthy of sharing, independent of their context:

Art that unfolds over time gives me less pleasure than art that stops it.

Not wanting to change things does not mean I am conservative, I like for things to change, just not having to do it.

When I ask for directions, I am afraid I won’t be able to remember what people tell me. I am always shocked when people give me directions and they actually get me where I’m going: words become road.

And one more favorite passage, before moving on:

Until the age of twelve I thought I was gifted with the power to shape the future, but this power was a crushing burden, it manifested itself in the form of threats, I had to take just so many steps before I got to the end of the sidewalk or else my parents would die in a car accident, I had to close the door thinking of some favorable outcome, for example passing a test, or else I’d fail, I had to turn off the light not thinking about my mother getting raped, or that would happen, one day I couldn’t stand having to close the door a hundred times before I could think of something good, or to spend fifteen minutes turning off the light the right way, I decided enough was enough, the world could fall apart, I didn’t want to spend my life saving other people, that night I went to bed sure the next day would bring the apocalypse, nothing happened, I was relieved but a little bit disappointed to discover I had no power.

This passage seems key to my understanding of this piece, and provides at least one way to look at what I've read of Levé's writing in general: Here he gives us a narrator who is compellingly self-obsessed, or at least obsessed with the self, spouting off hundreds of observations and opinions, all those Is that must make up the great bulk of the sentence subjects in "When I Look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue." Who else could be prompted to share so much of himself with others, except someone who was sure that he had the power to affect the world with his speech and his actions? Who else could be more disappointed than this person to find out that, for the most part, no matter what we do or do not do, the world goes on just as it always was, with or without us?

*

"When I Look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue" was translated by Paris Review editor Lorin Stein, who also published a smaller portion of this excerpt in Harper's, in 2008. The last part of The Paris Review excerpt is what was published in Harper's, but there Stein made other choices throughout—the punctuation is changed, and certain lines are rendered quite differently. For example, in Harper's, one line reads: "My memories, good or bad, are sad in the way of dead objects." In The Paris Review, it becomes: "My memories, good or bad, are sad the way dead things are sad." That's a fairly stark difference, both in subtleties of meaning and in rhythm, acoustics, and there are many such changes between the two versions of the passage.

Being able to compare these different translators and also translations is a good reminder that when we read in translation, we read the translator as much as we read the original author, and also that the translator's choices—like the author's—are not necessary absolute, permanent: they can be changed by time, by new understandings, by differences in aesthetics and editors, by new insights brought to the material at hand (at least as long as the author/translator is alive: Stein can change his translation of Autoportrait for a new edition, but Levé can no longer change the original words, having committed suicide in 2007). It is hard to say what influence Jan Steyn's recent translation of Suicide (or other factors in the critical understanding of Levé's work) might have had on Stein's choice to revise his translation, but it is worth noting that his translation in The Paris Review's "When I Look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue" has become much closer in tone and aesthetics to Suicide than it was in the Harper's excerpt from three years ago: repetitions are done in similar ways, and the overall feel of the prose feels closer to that novel than it does the Harper's translation (Suicide, because I read it first, seems more accurate to my sense of Levé's work than the Harper's translation, but I of course realize this is unfair, in any number of ways, not the least of which is my relative lack of experience with his writing, and complete lack of access to him in French).

For the sake of comparing Stein's two translations, here is the ending of the Harper's version:

Dangerous animals do not frighten me. I have seen lightning. I wish they had sleds for grown-ups. I have read more volumes one than volumes two. The birth date on my identity card is wrong. I am not sure that I have any influence. I talk to my things when they are sad. I do not know why I write. I prefer the ruin to the monument. I am calm during reunions. I have nothing against New Year's Eve. Fifteen years old is the middle of my life, whatever date I may die. I believe in life after death but not death after death. I do not ask people whether they love me. Only once will I be able to say without telling a lie, I'm dying. The best day of my life may already have passed.

And here, Stein's updated translation in The Paris Review, with changes in bold:

Dangerous animals do not scare me. I have seen lightning. I wish they had sleds for grown-ups. I have read more volumes one than volumes two. The date on my birth certificate is wrong. I am not sure I have any influence. I talk to my things when they’re sad. I do not know why I write. I prefer a ruin to a monument. I am calm during reunions. I have nothing against the alarm clock. Fifteen years old is the middle of my life, regardless of when I die. I believe there is an afterlife, but not an afterdeath. I do not ask “do you love me.” Only once can I say "I’m dying" without telling a lie. The best day of my life may already be behind me.

More has changed than stayed the same, and some of the changes are dramatic: "I have nothing against New Year's Eve" is an order of magnitude lesser than "I have nothing against the alarm clock," both in sound and in power, in potential universality, and surely, both cannot be "correct" in a literal sense. "I believe in life after death but not death after death" sounds glib, off-hand, whereas "I believe there is an afterlife, but not an afterdeath" sounds profoundly paradoxical, since an "afterlife" is typically what we assume comes after death, if anything at all. To me, The Paris Review is much, much better than The Harper's version, both aesthetically and in substance. But if that's so, then why? And even if The Paris Review rendition is a better read, then I'm still left wondering which is truer to Levé's prose, his original meaning? Is it possible that the second is closer to the meaning, but further from the literal sense of the prose, or vice versa?

Without access to the French version of Autoportrait (or the ability to read French), there's no way for me to go back to the original, to see what was written there, and no way to separate what the prose I've loved so much in Suicide and in "When I Look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue" from the translations of Jan Steyn and Lorin Stein, these still impermanent and inconstant lenses through with I am forced by my twin lacks of access and ability to read Levé's finished work. I am reminded of an anecdote I read recently, in Laird Hunt's review of Georges Perec’s The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise:

Martin Riker, editor at Dalkey Archive press, once crossed paths with David Bellos, and told him that Perec was his favorite writer. After pausing a moment, Riker remarked that, because he had read Perec exclusively in English, it was Bellos, in fact, who was his favorite writer.

Dalkey Archive is, of course, one of the great champions of translated literature in America (and the publisher of Suicide), and so Riker's twin acknowledgments—the love of the writer on one hand, and the recognition of the role of the translator on the other—certainly resonate here as well. In the end, my hope is that Stein's two versions of this passage are both accurate to Levé, in their own ways: the best literature rarely offers only one way to read any particular sentence, and so perhaps a variety of translations are necessary to recreate that good and deep ambiguity in a new language. Looking back on Stein's newer translation in The Paris Review, I'm drawn now to this sentence: "I would like to write in a language not my own," writes Levé, and of course that is what translation has allowed him to do, what Steyn and Stein are doing for him, in their translations of Suicide and Autoportrait: here is Levé's art—which drew so heavily on his own thoughts and feelings and movements through the world, those roamings through the "empty places and... deserted restaurants"—translated now into a language not his own. Hopefully nothing has been lost in that translation, but even if it has, how powerful what we have still remains: "The best day of my life may already be behind me," writes Levé, and of course this must now be true for him, if not necessarily for us. 

Of course, it is also important to remember that this sentence, the ending of "When I Look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue," is not the author's ending, but Stein's chosen stopping point, one chosen twice now, for two different publications.

Rather than ending there, Levé carried on without stoppage for the rest of that book, for another book afterward. The ending we are given here is one chosen only after Levé's suicide, and surely the poignancy of his biography influences the reading of this passage, and also its translation, and so again I wonder at Stein's revisions to his translation: What is the difference in Stein, as a reader and as a translator, between his two efforts, given the distance of years since Levé's passing? In 2008, when the Harper's version was published, Levé had been dead only five months, and so (given publications schedules and so on), Stein might have done his translation either just before Levé's death, or directly after. How different does the work read even to him, given another three years, some greater temporal distance from that event? If it is impossible to read Levé's work without mention of his biography, his art and his other writings and his suicide, then is not also impossible to read these different translations without mention of the same, their relation in time to the events of Levé's life?

Perhaps these questions are impossible to answer. Certainly they're impossible to answer for me, a writer who cannot read any other languages fluently, and who does not have the background in translation to even begin to more fully address the questions here. Still, just as I am moved by reading "When I Look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue" for what it is as a piece of literature, I am just as curious at the profound differences between these two translations, and what they might reveal about Stein as a reader, and about all of us, in a more general way: Of the books which I hold up in my own experience as profoundly lasting, very few of them mean the same thing to me on each reading, especially if those readings are separated by larger spans of time. Rather, their effects change as I change, with different parts of their syntax and diction and plots and characters rising to the fore, connecting with pieces of me that maybe did not exist the last time I read them. Although it had never occurred to me before reading Stein's two translations of this same passage, of course that same effect of rereading must also influence the art of translating, all the difficult choices that must be made in carrying a complex piece of literature across the barriers of language. Seen in this way, there are perhaps no errors at all in the differences between Stein's two translations, instead only a wonderful correctness, a willingness to recreate two different experiences of the same original, the words changing as the translator changes, even as the original remains the same, made static by its author, fixed in his death as he might not have been in life: "My death will change nothing," writes Levé, but that does not mean nothing has changed, that does not mean it will ever stop changing, not for all of us who still remain, eager to read and reread what words he left behind.

Read the story: "When I Look at a Strawberry, I Think of a Tongue" by Edouard Levé, from The Paris Review 196 (Full text available online, although in slightly different form than in print)