Jamieson Webster I’m curious to hear from you, Sophie, about the process of coming to translate Angst – and why you think it fell out of print, given that it’s such a pivotal book in Cixous’ arc?

Sophie Lewis It probably wasn’t thought of as pivotal when it was first translated and published in English, although that was nearly a decade after it came out in France. That would be for a failure of Anglophone literary awareness of what was going on in France and the continent, which is a pretty standard pattern in the UK. It was published by John Calder, who was a pioneering publisher of experimental and avant-garde writing of all sorts and had a very European outlook. While it was to his credit that he picked up this book, it’s telling that no one bigger did so. I don’t know enough about the history of the publication in the US – it was published by Riverrun, and it seems there wasn’t even a second edition. I would have expected a kind of academic necessity at the very minimum to keep it going, because it’s an excellent translation by Jo Levy. But ultimately, it’s down to the vagaries of publishing houses, and the ebb and flow of funds. Plus, there is a resistance to get to grips with the importance of Cixous’s writing. It’s not a beach read!

JW I have a fantasy that you’ll see pictures on Instagram of
people reading Angst on the beach.

SL No, you’re quite right. Let’s have Angst on the beach.

JW The response has been robust, and people seem really excited about this new translation. One might think that avant-garde writing was more acceptable somehow in the 1970s or 1980s, when she published it and when it was translated, but I have a feeling that there’s more of an appetite for it now. It’s been framed by the preface as a psychoanalytically minded work, and there’s been a return to psychoanalysis in the cultural sphere of late.

SL I think you’re right that there’s a deliberate seeking out
of avant-garde work, particularly the avant-garde work of women
in the last century. Were you happy to put a psychoanalytical slant on it? Was that always how you would write the introduction?

JW When I read the text, what was clear to me was the dividing line that the protagonist sees herself crossing, between the moment of absolute angst and the moment she masters that angst, at a cost. I immediately went to Lacan’s idea of being held at gunpoint – you sacrifice something, and then you enter into neurosis proper. I loved Cixous’s version because it tells a very different version from the Lacanian idea, so I wanted to put the two together. I wrote it furiously, which came from the sheer amount of text in Angst, where pulling what I needed from it was such a wild, impossible process. I didn’t have the book, I only had it as printouts, and the pages were everywhere. When I turned it in, I expected you guys to push back a little but you were like, “Great, good to go!” I felt guilty, which might also derive from the relationship to Cixous, who’s such a sphinx and a formidable figure. She’s not explicitly referencing psychoanalysis per se, and her relationships with male figures in the field are complicated, and I didn’t want to fold her into that.

 I suppose angst is an ongoing wrench, a sensation of impossible, unbearable situations that are continually being inadequately addressed

SL It could have been for the publishing house to make you feel better by applying massive amounts of red pen and pushing back in some kind of semi-violent way against your proposed framework. I’m sorry that collectively we didn’t respond to your need for –

JW Prohibition and censure.

SL But that’s publishing, isn’t it? You put your work out, and other people respond, and you don’t get to say, “That’s wrong.” But Cixous called it Angst, she didn’t call it Anguish, so to my mind, she references psychoanalytic readings at multiple points. I mean, there’s the scène horriginaire [primal scene], which I have returned to several times, which is the abandonment of the baby-narrator. She calls it original with an H – it’s a horror scene of the starting point. I don’t see how that could have happened without psychoanalysis, and I don’t think she could have framed it that way otherwise.

JW I’m so curious about translating. When I looked at the original alongside your translations, they’re so different, and I wonder if you could speak about that. Let’s look at this passage: “If the mother you love lays you on the ground, at around three years of age, don’t move, ask for nothing. Whatever you ask for you will not have. ‘Wait for me.’ Above all, do not wait for her – she would never return. Childhood is over. Be the waiting. Crouch on the cold tiles, huddle, hunch smaller and smaller, I am the queen of compression, reduce yourself to the size of a tiny space, retract your legs, make your bottom and hips – all your fleshy parts – disappear inside the book” There’s this sort of pell-mell of words rushing out and the drip, drip, dripping of meaning. When you look at the two translations, yours is far more compressed – there are clauses you have taken out.

SL For me, an important element of faithfulness to Cixous and this book was to prioritise not just the sound of the words but also the pace. In fact, the pace was really more important than the sound of the words and sometimes more important than the sense of them. At certain points, the precise grammar matters so much less than its rhythm or pace, and so compression was super important. Her sentences come out like slaps or fists on a table.

JW You sent me the side-by-side of Jo Levy’s translation and your own, which was so amazing to read. One passage in her translation reads, “Two ideas occurred to me. The one with the head of a hooker at its tail end said to me, ‘It’s not the man who is wrong. It’s that you aren’t a woman anymore.’” You translated it, “Two ideas showed up. The one whose tail had a street bird’s face on it said to me, ‘Tart, tart. It isn’t the man’s mistake. It’s you. You’re no woman now.’” You can really hear the difference in the rhythmicity and the singsong quality, and taking out some of those staccato clauses makes it move really fast.

Cixous writes a different category that’s neither neurosis nor psychosis – it’s the way we go back and forth across the divide and thereby explode it

SL That’s beautifully put. I don’t want to say “coming to terms”, but there is a happier feeling to some of the parts. There’s a contentment glimpsed towards the end. She writes so: “This happened at the Absolute. Only when lost can one accede there. Having forgotten everything. Lost: ordinary life, time, sight. Goods. Possessions. Bodies. When nothing can be recalled ever again. No one there manages to leave it now; not starting out from a land; from a ground; from a city; from a desire. That can’t be decided here. You were called up... I’d paid. Liquidated. Killed. Lost. Link upon link sliced by knife, by soul, by teeth each detached from the human tongues. I no longer spoke my own. I was listening to the other language, I could understand it from far off. It was spoken only for me, I knew that. I didn’t know the language. I received it. It announced. It questioned. I gave my blood in answer. It reached me, touched me, I gave myself to it where it wished. Without holding back. All the time. In one leap to infinity with every instant. And in each instant, what distress, a leap, falling, such effort, a misfire, such ambition. I could never respond fast enough, fly high enough, and this inadequacy was the proof: my pain and my reward.” You say to read Cixous is to tarry with this open wound, and I think that’s correct.

SL Could you talk about the way you use the idea of psychosis 
in your introduction? 

JW I was asking the reader to question the way that certain oppositions have been posited in psychoanalysis, with neurosis versus psychosis, or a world of inhibition and blockage and alienation versus the experience of fragmentation in the body or wild energies, a world that doesn’t fit within the structuring spheres of representation and language. I’m not trying to dispose of these stark and important oppositions, but Cixous writes a different category that’s neither neurosis nor psychosis – it’s the way we go back and forth across the divide and thereby explode it, to a certain extent. There’s an experience of the price that you pay via language, but also the experience of wildness and fragmentation – both can be available. It’s a sort of overturning of the either/or. There are obviously experiences of great loss and losing yourself. But there’s also the experience of coming back, bringing one of those shards or fragments with you, and continuing to transform it.

SL  TANK asked us how we’ve come to be collaborators on the book, as opposed to simply individuals who have distinct roles within a publishing chain. The answer is that a far-sighted publisher, Sarah Shin at Silver Press, engaged you to write the preface and brought us together. We really are there in the absence of the author, who chooses what she does. We are matched from different worlds, so hats off to a publisher who can see what will augment a book and what will be fruitful. I just feel quite lucky that Jamieson said yes.

JW For me, I’ve been reading Lacan in French forever, but I just never have the French enough for full understanding. I have to read the late Lacan with the five contradictory translations to get a sense of it. But I love that, and speaking with a translator about what they love about a text, and how they work on it on that granular level. It’s a great honour to have this conversation, and I think it’s an amazing conversation for readers that should happen more often. .