English / Sample translations /

/Translated by Andrew Oakland/

First she wrote poems which revealed certain images when the sun was shining and others when it was raining or snowing. These were poems whose meaning resided in the stirring transitoriness of letters which were incapable of resisting the elements, which were dependent on the weather, which brushed against the passage of time in the simplest present, drawing from it the subtle powers of origin and expiration... Later she wrote several pieces of prose to which she applied different varnishes for directions the plot might follow, so that the heroes would meet, or would miss one another, would die, or would keep going, subject to the weather at the time of reading. Her three friends liked the way her sentences spilled over into tenses which were not those attributed to them, the way they took on rhythms which were not those of the line and the page; they liked the wait for the moment the hand would reveal itself... But for Valerie writings such as these were just exercises and games, the experimental meeting of two different times - the time of the reading and the time of the story - where she explored their behaviour and mutual relationships; they were just a form of preparation for a personal mission whose contours would emerge in the writing of meteorological prose." "Have you seen any of this changeable writing?" "No. None of this has survived either. Could be that Valerie destroyed them herself, once the idea of a disappearing book matured into its final form." "A disappearing book?" We seemed to be approaching the heart of Viola's story.