On a Sentence from “Mansour’s Eyes”

Chris Clarke

Aux côtés de Mansour, je demeurais apaisé face au déploiement des sables et des roches qui s’étiraient le long d’une immensité rouge et ocre et sous un soleil diffusant de douces lueurs qui s’étalaient en de longs étirements sur les falaises majestueuses du Najd qui elles aussi d’étiraient, se déployaient par vagues en de vertigineux escarpements qui filaient le long de cette vaste étendue de sable au-delà de laquelle se dressaient d’autres falaises majestueuses, comme les deux rives de l’immense fleuve qui coulait bruyamment des siècles et des siècles auparavant et qui n’était depuis qu’une gracieuse et onduleuse succession de dunes courbes et sèches et coulant vers cet infini qui se déroulait partout où mes yeux s’élançaient…

I stood at Mansour’s side, calm in the face of the unfolding of the sands and the rocks that sprawled the length of a red and ocher immensity below a sun giving off a soft glow that spread in long sweeps across the majestic cliffs of the Najd which also stretched out, rolled out in waves into dizzying escarpments that threaded their way across that vast expanse of sand, beyond which towered yet more majestic cliffs, like the two banks of the great river that flowed noisily centuries and centuries earlier and which had since become nothing more than a graceful and undulating succession of dunes, curved and dry and flowing toward the infinite that unfurled itself everywhere my eyes could turn…

I was sitting on the lawn outside of the Polytechnique in Tours, in the Loire Valley, reading nouveau romancier Alain Robbe-Grillet for the first time. I had picked up a copy of his La Jalousie (1957), which Richard Howard translated into English in 1959, and I read the short novel in one sitting. From a formal standpoint, it was a revelation: Robbe-Grillet repeats many iterations of the same passages throughout the book, adding to them at each occurrence, releasing information to the reader gradually and almost unnoticeably.

When I read Ryad Girod’s Les Yeux de Mansour for the first time, I was reminded of this formal play. Not right away, of course, but when certain sentences began to repeat later in the book, the déjà vu was striking: déjà vu for earlier iterations of the same sentences, and déjà vu for my decade-old reading of Robbe-Grillet’s novel. However, Girod had gone several steps beyond—he uses this formal device sparingly, so as not to overwhelm—and in this specific instance, I found one of the better examples of form-as-content I have come across in recent years.

On several occasions in Mansour’s Eyes, the two protagonists drive out into the desert outside of Riyadh. Mansour picks a specific sand dune a ways from the road, and, sitting at its crest, stares out into the desert, contemplating its immensity, reflecting on his own situation, turning inward and outward simultaneously in a moment of spiritual communion with everything at once. In these moments, Girod’s long sentence takes on the form of the desert itself, rising and falling, shifting with breath and wind, ever-changing but never changing. And, at each of three occurrences of this sentence, Girod expands it slightly, slipping in extra words, further repetition, additional description. For the sentence’s second iteration, Girod adds ten additional clusters, ranging from two to seven words; the dunes continue to roll, the immensity of the desert stretches yet farther, and Mansour, at the center of his circle, recedes even further inward. When the passage repeats for a third time, Girod again makes some slight modifications, adding a few clusters, removing a few others, changing tense and occasionally word order, all to come out only three words longer than the previous iteration.

Each version of this sentence became a mini-project excised from the whole, an exercise in breath and visualization: starting with the shortest of the three, I read the passage aloud again and again, tweaking it for breath, getting a feel for the rises and falls, the changes in tempo and dynamics. I tried to visualize this spatially, as the climbing up or rushing down of a progression of dunes. I then made matching changes to the next iteration, and started the process over to see how the rhythm held when confronted by Girod’s additions and modifications. Back and forth, like trying to pour three equal drinks in three tumblers, adjusting the rhythm with a little more here and a little less there.

The third iteration:

And whatever the case, I remained full of fear and full of rage and full of images that overlaid themselves upon the distribution, the undulation, the sinuation of the sands and the rocks that sprawled the length of a red and ochre immensity alongside a sun descending and diffusing its gentle rays that spread wide and setting in long sweeps across the majestic cliffs of the Najd which also stretched out, rolled out reproduced in waves forming gigantic dizzying ridges escarpments that threaded and dashed their way across that vast expanse of sand beyond which towered yet more majestic cliffs from another plateau like two banks two shorelines of the great river that had noisily flowed centuries and centuries earlier and which had since become nothing more than a graceful and undulating succession of dunes, curved and dry and flowing toward the infinite that unfurled itself everywhere my eyes could turn…

When I discussed this technique with Girod, he suggested that if there had been any influence that led to this experimentation, it had not been Robbe-Grillet, but one of his contemporaries, Claude Simon. I will have to dig into Simon’s work, and, in English, see how Richard Howard handled similar passages when he translated Simon’s novels in the 1960s and ‘70s.

Chris Clarke was born in Western Canada and currently lives in Philadelphia, where he teaches French at the University of Pennsylvania. His previous translations include work by Éric Chevillard, Patrick Modiano, Pierre Mac Orlan, François Caradec. and Ryad Girod. Chris was awarded the 2019 French-American Foundation Translation Prize for fiction in 2019 for his translation of Marcel Schwob’s Imaginary Lives (Wakefield Press). His forthcoming translations include What the Mugwig Has to Say & Silvalandia by Julio Cortázar & Julio Silva (Sublunary Editions) and The Skin of Dreams by Raymond Queneau (NYRB Classics).