Accusation

 

You let me down, I feel. I thought that you would see me through that difficult period, thought that your ability to dig and make things flow and free up laughter would be enough, thought that you were in touch with some layer in me that simply needed visiting for the day-to-day to right itself. I have lost faith in you, but not completely. Otherwise I would not be writing this. Now that I want to return to you, need to, all I can do is trust you more blindly than before, give myself over to you to speak and dance and play.

 

This is a letter, short, to the writer in me whom I believed could unlock, sentence by sentence or page by page, me.

Here is a paragraph from Roland Barthes (If you need me to translate it, please leave a comment):       

 

Mais en même temps, écrire (au sens curieusement intransitif du terme), écrire est un acte qui dépasse l’œuvre: écrire, c’est précisement accepter de voir le monde transformer en discours dogmatique une parole qu’on a pourtant voulue (si l’on est écrivain) dépositaire d’un sens offert; écrire, c’est remettre aux autres de fermer eux-mêmes votre proper parole, et l’écriture n’est qu’une proposition dont on ne connaît jamais la réponse. On écrit pour être aimé, on est lu sans pouvoir l’ être, c’est sans doute cette distance qui constitue l’écrivain. (From his essay  Littérature et Signification, published in Tel Quel in 1963, reproduced in Essais critiques, Editions du Seuil, 1964, p. 275)

 

I am writing this in an attempt to love myself.  Perhaps you cannot write to be loved without doing so to also love yourself and, perhaps, if you can't love yourself, you cannot write. 

Comments

[Jian]

Can you translate the sentence "c’est précisement accepter de voir le monde transformer en discours dogmatique une parole qu’on a pourtant voulue (si l’on est écrivain) dépositaire d’un sens offert"? Actually I can't figure out what kind of role "dépositaire" plays grammatically in this sentence.

Thanks.

[Conor]

Very sorry, Jian. I have been very slow to answer this. Here is the half-sentence now in English:

"it is to accept seeing the world transform into dogmatic discourse speech that one wanted in fact (if one is a writer) to be the depositary of a proferred meaning."

That is my quick-shot attempt. Translation is so difficult, at least good translation is! 'Dépositaire' is an adjective here, I'm pretty sure ('dépositaire' can be either a noun or an adjective) but there is no such adjectival form in English so you have to use the noun form, I think.

I hope this helps and best of luck with Barthes. You're right to be reading him in French. He is such a beautiful writer and his French is so French!