Migrants: the peril of using a s-c free e-mailprovider is that the one or
ones who operate said provider decides that their time is better spent
doing something else. Hence and wheretofore it becomes necessary to
resubscribe to lit-ideas, nee phil-lit, in a novel garment. All the while,
the person behind the keybord remains -- well,, let's get to the point ...
One of the wonders of literature is that it allows us to imagine ourselves
differently. The first time we read though a new and unknown text we won't
need to know anything about the author, not even that there is a known
author, and yet we are able to make some sense of what we read. Narrative
fiction and texts that present us with stories that have characters in them
provide us with a perspective on our being that we do not have access to
otherwise.
Is this not also the experience we get from _All that is Light and All that
is Dark_? What we have is a main character that so close to us, so real,
and yet so unexpected in its data. What it requires of us is to rethink how
we approach the signifies Father: does it matter that the protagonist is a
girl, so that we are confronted with a Father-Daugher relation and not a
relationship between Father and Son? Should we care that the author -- as
we find out more about him -- is of a different sex than his protagonist
(never mind that his name in Norwegian is homophonic to Gender)? Is there
some constancy to our devotion to the Father-Signifier that outlasts the
disappointments, disruptions, fragmentations that we experience in our
traffic with our closes relations?
On translating the excerpt from its original, there are some linguistic
peculiarities that make themselves felt: the penchant in the original for
what English-speakers would call run-on clauses. In the translation we will
have to make do with shorter sentences, which removes the reader from the
kind of childlike flow-of-conciousness-type effect the author has acheived
in the original. Further, there is one sentence in particular that is
posing questions. After Vibeke -- the girl -- has decided that she can tell
her father to go, her syntax breaks up:
So I said -- before I was really ready to -- while my heart ached that,Dad, now you can go, I said as quietly as I could. <
