Praise for Marguerite Duras
“Marguerite Duras leads us into her characters with such grace and power that we don’t know what she’s done until they take us over.”
—Judith Rossner
“A spectacular success. . . . Duras is at the height of her powers.”
—Edmund White
“The sentences lodge themselves slowly in the reader’s mind until they detonate with all the force of fused feeling and thought—the force of a metaphysical contemplation of the paradoxes of the human heart.”
—New York Times
“Duras stands perennial and relevant, effecting and fraught. Any chance to encounter her psychological terrain is cause to awe, to be shaken out of compliant identification, comfortable desire, and to slip the frame.”
—Douglas A. Martin
“Duras’s writing has real power. Her strength is in her images, in the music of her prose.”
—New Republic
“Duras’s language and writing shine like crystals.”
—New Yorker
“Duras writes exquisitely . . . with a brilliant intensity that is rare outside of poetry.”
—Daily Telegraph
Select Books by Marguerite Duras in English Translation
The Sea Wall
The Sailor from Gibraltar
The Little Horses of Tarquinia
Whole Days in the Trees
The Square
Moderato Cantabile
Ten-Thirty on a Summer Night
Hiroshima Mon Amour
The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas
The Ravishing of Lol Stein
The Rivers and the Forests
The Vice-Consul
L’Amante Anglaise
Destroy, She Said
L’Amour
India Song
Eden Cinema
The Man Sitting in the Corridor
Green Eyes
Agatha
Outside
Savannah Bay
The Malady of Death
The Lover
The War
Blue Eyes, Black Hair
Practicalities
Emily L.
Summer Rain
The North China Lover
Yann Andrea Steiner
No More
Copyright © Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1970
Translation copyright © Kazim Ali, 2016
First edition, 2016
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.
ISBN-13: 978-1-940953-40-3
Design by N. J. Furl
Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press: Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627
to Robert Antelme
to Maurice Blanchot
Contents
Abahn Sabana David
Acknowledgments
Night comes. And the cold.
They are on the road, white with frost, a woman and a young man. Standing stock still, watching the house.
The house is bare inside and out. The interior still unlit. Beyond the windows a tall man, gray-haired and thin, looks in the direction of the road.
Night deepens. And the cold.
There they are, in front of the house.
They look around. The road is empty, the sky dark against it. They do not seem to be waiting for anything.
The woman heads up to the door of the house first. The young man follows her.
It’s she who enters the house first. The young man follows.
She’s the one who closes the door behind them.
At the far end of the room: a tall thin man with gray hair watches them enter.
It’s the woman who speaks.
“Is this the house of Abahn?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Is it?”
She waits. He does not answer.
She is small and slim, wearing a long black dress. Her companion is of medium build, wearing a coat lined with white fur.
“I’m Sabana,” she says. “This is David. We’re from here, from Staadt.”
The man walks slowly toward them. He smiles.
“Take off your coats,” he says. “Please sit.”
They do not answer. They remain near the door.
They do not look at him.
The man approaches.
“We know each other,” he says.
They do not answer, do not move.
The man is close enough now to see them clearly. He notices that they will not meet his eye.
She speaks again. “We’re looking for Abahn. This is David. We’re from Staadt.”
She fixes her large eyes on the man. David’s gaze, behind his heavy lids, is inscrutable.
“I am Abahn.”
She does not move. She asks:
“The one they call the Jew?”
“Yes.”
“The one who came to Staadt six months ago?”
“Yes.”
“Alone.”
“Yes. You’re not mistaken.”
She looks around. There are three rooms.
The walls are bare. The house is as bare inside as it is outside. One side abuts the road, white with frost, the other borders the depths of a darkened park.
Her gaze returns to the