Affirmative memories, resistant projections: Sylvie Germain’s La Pleurante des rues de Prague

Abstract

La pleurante: how are we to translate such a term? Perhaps as ‘the mourning woman’, ‘the female mourner’, ‘the weeping woman’. This would make a certain sense, in English at least, but there is clearly something in the singularity of the French, something in the French idiom, which troubles the translation, an excess or overflow, a certain ‘other’ quality which the English is troubled by, and for which it cannot account in its own tongue. Clearly, the French names an unknown mourner, who is identified in writing as female. This much is given in that untranslatable, resistant, yet affirmative definite article. The definite article projects the other of the identity, the other which is not to be recuperated comfortably in any apparent or obvious English term. There is no equivalent. This gendered definite article projects itself in writing, in a manner always strange to the anglophone world. We know what the definite article is, how it should supposedly function; yet, explain it as we might, we are at a loss to recuperate or domesticate it. Yet, in French, in the French I have written above, there seems so much at stake; as I have said, something other is affirmed, while, simultaneously, something other resists, though clearly not directly.

Otherness can survive in different ways in identity forming memories…

Gabriel Motzkin