Co-presented by Alliance Française de Seattle: Cécile Wajsbrot

A meditation on loss and recovery through the act of translation and its recuperative powers.

An unnamed translator mourning the loss of a close friend retreats to Dresden to translate the “Time Passes” section of Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse. Translating this lyrical evocation of time and its devastations in a city with which the writer has no connections and where neither her language nor Woolf’s are spoken offers an interruption to the course of her life. She immerses herself in this prose poem of ephemerality.

The narrator delves into phrases from “Time Passes” and subjects them to the inexact science and imperfect art of translation. This, in turn, leads her to wide-ranging reflections on other instances of loss, destruction, and recovery—the Chernobyl disaster, the High Line in New York City, the bombing of Dresden and Wallmann’s commemorative Bell Requiem Dresden, the evacuation of the Hebridean island Foula, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photographs of seascapes, Debussy’s “La cathédrale engloutie,” and Ceri Richards’s series of paintings by the same name. She reflects on places that are destined for decay and yet are returning to life, broken worlds in which there is still strength for a new beginning. In Tess Lewis’s visionary English translation, Cécile Wajsbrot’s lyrical exploration of the role of the writer and translator becomes an exquisite meditation on loss and recovery.

About the Author

Cécile Wajsbrot was born in Paris in 1954. She writes novels, sometimes essays, radio dramas. In her five novels cycle about art the last one, Destruction, evokes a dystopic dictature in France forbidding all kind of arts except entertainment. Nevermore (2021 translated into English by Tess Lewis in 2024), deals with the process of translation. Plein Ciel (2024) with a personal inquiry about an unsolved air crash. Her seminaries in Berlin, Dresden or Innsbruck have been dealing with climate in literature and natural catastrophes as well as with migration. She translates from the English (Virginia Woolf) and the German (Peter Kurzeck), lives both in Paris and Berlin.

About the Organization

The Alliance Française de Seattle is a dynamic educational and cultural 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization incorporated in the state of Washington since 1987, whose mission is to promote the French language and Francophone cultures through diverse programs in the Puget Sound area. It is part of an international network of Alliances Françaises—832 in 131 countries, and 105 of them in 2021 in the USA alone.

AFSeattle offers French language classes for all ages and levels, with certified French as a Foreign Language (FLE—Français Langue Étrangère) instructors. It is also the largest French certification center in the Pacific Northwest, administering regular sessions for the DELF, DALF, and DAEFLE diplomas, and TEF and TCF tests.

AFSeattle's thriving cultural center proposes concerts, lectures, screenings, workshops, book launches and exhibits for a growing community of Francophones and Francophiles, as well as for the local arts and culture audience at large.

Purchase your copy of Nevermore here.

Host or Publisher Elliott Bay Book Company