“. . . I experienced Lê’s style of writing as the smooth gliding of a sharpened pocketknife along the surface of the skin, with moments when the tip of the blade would puncture the flesh.”
Linda Lê’s “Reeves C.” is about the kind of encounters that are staged but feel fortuitous, and those that are adventitious but appear designed. Lê’s unnamed narrator chances upon an anonymous man on Rue Pierre Charron in Paris who will later tell her over the phone the story of the anguished relationship between writer Carson McCullers and the “writer who never wrote,” Reeves McCullers. It is on Rue Pierre Charron, in Hôtel Château Frontenac, that Reeves committed suicide in 1953. In a dream, Lê’s narrator sits in the back of a taxi and asks the cab driver to ferry her to this street. He refuses, even though she’s clenching a coin between her teeth. This allusion to Charon, the ancient Greek psychopomp, is one of the many subtle references that Lê interweaves in the text without explaining, leaving the striking nature of the image, rather than its origin or signification, to make an impact on the reader.
And it is its imagery that struck me first when I encountered “Reeves C.” in the spring of 2023, a year after Lê’s death. Sitting outside at a Think Coffee in New York, surrounded by a sea of honking cars and yellow taxis, I began reading the text as a last-minute preparation for a French class I was about to teach at Baruch College. In one of the many acts of folly that come with adjuncting at three different universities, I had assigned “Reeves C.” on a whim, without having read it first, not knowing what I would say about it or whether it would be suitable for the class, beguiled simply by the title of the novel it is part of, The Gospels of Crime, and the fact that it was written by arguably the most eminent Vietnamese-French writer.
It has become expected of writers striding two or more national backgrounds to serve as ambassadors of these cultural contexts, as spokespersons of the way they become entangled. To an extent, I myself harbored such an expectation when I embarked on reading “Reeves C.” Yet what I stumbled upon was Lê entering the minds, via a proxy, of two Americans who had for the most part lived before her own birth; there was no mention of Vietnam anywhere to be found. To me, this anachrony felt electrifying.
At the same time, “Reeves C.” is also about haunting, interference, doubles; about two elements that don’t quite know how to mix even though they still do, as announced in the epigraph by Carlo Michelstaedter with its Hegelian undertones: “The determination of one substance affirms itself in the affirmation of the other, since each one has seen in the other but its own affirmation. Their love is hatred, just like their hatred is death.” Thus “Reeves C.” is very much about betrayal. Reeves may be a failed writer, a loser, but in Lê’s text, he is also the traitorous failure betrayed, the loser who never got the chance to redeem his flaws through literature and become great. Vietnamese, the tongue her father spoke, is a language that “haunts” her French, Lê says, a language that is “absent” but “always/still there.” French, the language her mother pushed her to learn from a very young age, is the language Lê would go on to write all her celebrated texts in. It is also the language of her physical separation from her father when in 1977 she moved from Vietnam to France with her mother alone—a language of betrayal. Lê never wrote in Vietnamese.
She did write about Vietnam in French and I was drawn to her sensibility of feeling like a “double agent,” as Lê calls it. A native speaker of Albanian, I felt a certain amorphous expectation—perhaps much more self-induced than externally imposed—that my first translation ought to be from or into my native Albanian. Translating from French into English felt like a betrayal on more levels than one, a betrayal of sound judgment, no doubt, but also of an allegiance to a concrete lived history. But this pestering sensation was assuaged by two circumstances. First, the fact that French has played a prominent role in Albanian culture and history from Ottoman times through communism (as Lea Ypi illustrates vividly with one personal example), a role itself often suffused with betrayals of various kinds (Enver Hoxha was an avid Francophile, for one thing, while Ismail Kadare’s novels were for the longest time translated into English from their French translations, the Albanian language figuring in this transaction as a phantom presence.) Second, French was the only living language I had consciously chosen to learn, prompted by a high-school love for Arthur Rimbaud and Jean Genet.
Just like with those two writers, I experienced Lê’s style of writing as the smooth gliding of a sharpened pocketknife along the surface of the skin, with moments when the tip of the blade would puncture the flesh. It is this sensation that led me to the conscious decision to translate “Reeves C.” into English. In the French original, this effect was often achieved, among other techniques, with the proliferation of comma splices, quite common for that language. This kind of rhythm, whereby a sentence begins innocuously in its first clause only to become lacerating in its second or third or fifth, with no advance warning other than an unimposing comma, tends to disturb Anglophone reading sensibilities, the puncture, as it were, would be too deep. I therefore sought to convey this rhythm primarily with an interplay of colons, em dashes, and especially the ambiguous semicolons.
Semicolons, which Lê herself deploys not infrequently, have been by turns maligned and rehabilitated, for reasons that are dubious as much as they are cogent. Conceptually and visually, they lent themselves well to Lê’s story of doubles—their spurious porosity indexed the text’s preoccupation with pairs of dissimilar components that nonetheless function as a unit, in manners both constructive and destructive. They are the punctuation mark of those inextricable doubles that are never quite perfect doubles, of determination that parades as contingency; and vice versa.
Erag Ramizi holds a PhD in comparative literature from New York University and an MFA in fiction and literary translation from Columbia University. He currently teaches in the undergraduate writing program at Columbia University. His first book, Ecological Time, is forthcoming with Verso Books in 2027. He is currently writing another book on Joris-Karl Huysmans, Léon Bloy, Raymond Chandler, and Flannery O’Connor.
Erag Ramizi’s translation of Linda Lê’s “Reeves C.” appeared in NER 46. 3-4.