Landscapes of the day
The apartment is a little rectangle that can be divided in two. This is achieved by closing the door between two even smaller rectangles, or two little rectangular stickers:* the ‘bedroom sticker’ and the ‘living room sticker’. Every morning after breakfast we go about allocating the stickers, each of us, I think, finding what we’re looking for. In any case the division hasn’t caused the least bit of tension so far, and we want to avoid any kind of escalation during this moment of crisis. I must say that the ‘bedroom sticker’ is my favourite. It’s more cramped than the living room sticker, but I like its den-like quality and I feel more at home there. Once installed in our respective stickers we enter into our activities and non-activities and for me it's these, the latter I mean, that I'm most occupied with. I sit in the armchair and look at the sky-blue casing of the old vacuum cleaner standing just in front of me, then the roll of tape, then the caffeinated chewing gum I haven’t dared try, then the nice cover of the book Bois et forêts de France, etc. etc., one after another I look at the elements of the bedroom-den, their order doesn't matter, or rather it matters but no particular order is preferable to any other. Whichever sequence I follow I always end up seeing before me what I call a ‘landscape of the day’, which is never exactly the same as the one from the day before. The spirals of a notebook, the telephone charger, the sleeve of K.’s shirt on the pillow, the sleeping bag tidied away above, the rolled up poster, the suitcase… The light is mostly outside, in the courtyard, in the city, but a little bit of it always finds its way in and spreads itself throughout the sticker, which the landscapes of the day of course appreciate. I’m sitting in the armchair, my back to the courtyard, facing the sky-blue vacuum cleaner. To the right is the bed, to the left the radiator which reluctantly exhales its peppery heat, and beneath is the floor, below which is the neighbour in her own sticker (I wonder what her landscapes look like?). I’m sitting in the armchair and my eyes trace a horizon line from one thing to another, here to there, until midday when I will rejoin K. to begin preparing the lunch we will have together in the living room. She updates me on how things have been progressing in her sticker, and when she asks what I have been up to I lie, I say that I’ve been working on a translation, or that I’ve been reading a book, or listening to something on the radio, and I even go so far as to pretend I loved or hated the book or radio program; that the work was difficult or easy! I’m quite good at lying. I don’t think she suspects a thing. Later, when we will go out, I’ll tell her everything, but for now there is no need. The delicate balance of our little rectangle must not be broken.
Translation by David Price
* The dazed indolence of 'lockdown' has produced a strange and dreamlike text, and a correspondingly strange translation. There is a specificity to gommette that is missing in its rendering as 'sticker'. To me, at least, the Platonic ideal of the gommettes invoked here belong firmly to the stationers of France. Small rectangles with slightly rounded corners, sold in sheets with multiple colours arranged in columns: lemon yellow, tennis court green, red like the back lights of a bicycle (being led home by a friend through darkened streets at night), blue like the sky in one of Rohmer's summer holiday films (although I also think of the colour-coded leisurewear at the climax of L'ami de mon amie). I do not remember stickers of such gentle clarity and refinement from my own childhood, or from anywhere else I've lived. 'Sticker' is a correct mistranslation, just like Boyfriends and Girlfriends is for Rohmer's film. Samy and I began discussing the sticker-question almost the moment his text appeared in mid-April, when the intensity of France's lockdown was becoming more and more stifling. I was slightly delirious, an effect of living in something like a self-appointed lockdown in Stockholm, where confinement was not a matter of law. My first thought was that this text could be translated with an absurd degree of freedom. The word gommette made me laugh, and I thought of Robbe-Grillet and Les Gommes, imagining that we could create a nouveau roman for children called Les Gommettes. My proposal was this: Un élève, Daniel, remarque que quelqu'un a déchiré un de ses autocollants. Il colle l'autocollant quelque part et, avec l'aide d'un complice, se cache pour voir si un autre élève – ou prof – remarque la gommette… (A schoolboy, Daniel, notices that someone has torn one of his stickers. He sticks the sticker somewhere and, with the aid of an accomplice, hides to see if another pupil – or teacher – notices the sticker…) In thinking about this I came to a realisation, and raised the issue with Samy: “Stickers is a silly word, no?”. Samy agreed that the word would pose a problem (ça s'annonce compliqué en effet), and wondered if some other item just as cute and childish might suffice as a replacement. My delirium continued, I began to imagine that Les Gommettes could take the form of a comic book. I was imagining, to be precise, that it could be a comic in Tito's Tendre Banlieue series. Just like the settings of L'ami de mon amie, these gentle suburbs remain but have lost (or never had) the open-hearted innocence of their 1980s depictions. One of Tito's adolescents, in the course of mildly-but-genuinely wounding emotional turbulence, might have used the coloured stickers in question to categorise the primary emotions in the pages of her diary. At the same time we spoke about the Irish artist Pádraig Timoney, and a talk he once gave on the subject of 'Object-oriented ontology'. He wove a digressive tale about being an art student, moving objects around, substituting one object for another, substituting one style of art for another. I really couldn't think of anything to replace 'sticker'; dominos and mahjong tiles belong to a different world entirely, erasers stray too close to Robbe-Grillet (and would be an unnatural American word for me. 'Rubber' would be my equivalent, but that is also a silly word). Samy wondered about producing a new version of the text involving “semi-dominos”. He reported that the pollen-count was rising dramatically, but that it was pleasant to walk the empty streets of Paris. I imagined the streets of Paris, unable to picture them empty. I avoided the streets of Stockholm itself, remaining in what is, more or less, a gentle suburb. I asked Samy to draw the gommettes so I could perceive their exact form, their exact rectangularity. He replied with a beautiful floor-plan of the divided space. In the floor-plan the living room sticker is empty, white space, and the bedroom sticker is full of objects indicated by arrows. I started to imagine ways of translating the text that could defy its specificity. It describes a space of confinement seen from afar as if by closed-circuit television, the reader complicit in an act of self-invaded privacy, inside and outside collapsed, society rendered cellular: “The apartment is a small rectangle that can be divided in two. Doing so produces two very little rectangles, like two televisions placed side by side; the bedroom screen and the living-room screen…” I thought of translating the text by writing about my own interior space, as if the source text was in fact a formula for how to write about space: “The apartment is a squared-off S-shape that can be divided according to the utility of its zones. Doing so produces two small set-squares; the sleeping set-square and the living set-square…” Taking the text as a method rather than a source seemed like an attractive lyrical gesture; a means of engaging in the modest forms of the sublime made available by a locked-down existence (only thinking about what one has to hand in the place in which one is confined); I thought of Xavier le Maistre and John Smith, whose film Leading Light could have been made in such circumstances. In that film Smith's camera follows the light around a room through the course of a day. In this text, and in the text called Our Presidents that precedes it, there is one particular incursion of light from the outside. A great number of texts such as these could be used to plot a day's light very slowly, over the course of weeks and months stuck in the same space. I thought about dominos more deeply (a domino is rectangular, but its halves are square, unfortunately), blocks of watercolour paint (the right shape, but they never come in pairs), slices of processed cheese, the bread used to make croque-monsieur… Samy wanted to get out of Paris. I thought about blocks of Président butter. France began to loosen its lockdown. Time went by, the season changed (twice) and I decided to approach the translation again. I wondered about 'label', or 'sticky label' (laborious, labial), but Samy wanted to stick with sticker, the insistence on a word that isn't quite right correctly reflecting the narrator's perverse obstinacy. The time of this text seems equally unreal and continuous, at least to me, innocence lost in the blink of a tiny aperture.
