Colette

Hi everyone! I just wanted to send an update concerning my research on Colette. I have found a number of good quotes from a variety of sources, including Colette’s numerous literary works and an interview she gave in 1954. Here are two that I find particularly promising for the book – please feel free to send any and all comments!

1. L’heure de la fin des découvertes ne sonne jamais. Le monde m’est nouveau à mon réveil chaque matin et je ne cesserai d’éclore que pour cesser de vivre » (Colette en 1954 à propos du Blé en herbe)

My preliminary translation :

“The final hour of discovery never sounds. The world is new to me every morning when I wake up, and I will only cease to be born when I cease to live”

Note on the translation: “éclore”, translated here as “to be born”, also evokes the natural world in French, specifically the “birth” of plants and animals. Eclore can mean “to hatch” or “to flower”. In the case of an idea, it means “to take form.” I’m worried that the English translation of “born,” while correct, misses the “blossoming” quality underlined in the original. If anyone has any ideas on how to improve this, please let me know!

I chose this quote because the themes of continual rebirth and becoming are central to Colette’s life and work. Colette was a woman who was constantly re-inventing herself. She had several careers, (writer, performing artist, and later, beauty-product designer), was married and divorced 3 times, had numerous love affairs, and in general treated both existence and art as a series of great experiments. “Rebirth” also plays an important role in the experiences of Colette’s fictional characters. For example, in her novel La Vagabonde (The Vagabond), the heroine is named “Renée Néré” which is an anagram in French for the adjective form of the verb “renaître”, meaning to be reborn. The novel chronicles the experience of a woman “reborn” after her divorce from her husband as she seeks to re-define and re-construct her own identity. For Renée, writing is central to this quest. Needless to say, Colette’s La Vagabonde has a strong autobiographical element, and Colette often uses Renée as a vehicle to communicate her own thoughts about life, love and womanhood to the reader. In what is perhaps the most metatextual passage of the work, the protagonist declares her thoughts on writing:

2. Ecrire ! Pouvoir écrire ! cela signifie la longue rêverie devant la feuille blanche, le griffonnage inconscient, les jeux de la plume qui tourne en rond autour d’une tache d’encre, qui mordille le mot imparfait, le griffe, le hérisse de fléchettes, l’orne d’antennes, de pattes, jusqu’à ce qu’il perde sa figure lisible de mot, mué en insecte fantastique, envolé en papillon-fée…
Ecrire…C’est regard accroché, hypnotisé par le reflet de la fenêtre dans l’encrier d’argent, la fièvre divine qui montre aux joues, au front, tandis qu’une bienheureuse mort glace sur le papier la main qui écrit. Cela veut dire aussi l’oubli de l’heure, la paresse au creux du divin, la débauche d’invention d’où l’on sort courbatu, abêti, mais déjà récompensé, et porteur de trésors qu’on décharge lentement sur la feuille vierge, dans le petit cirque de lumière qui s’abrite sous la lampe…
Ecrire ! plaisir et souffrance d’oisifs ! Ecrire ! … J’éprouve bien, de loin en loin, le besoin, vif comme la soif en été, de noter de peindre… Je prends encore la plume, pour commencer le jeu périlleux et décevant pour saisir et fixer, sous la pointe double et ployante, le chatoyant, le fugace, le passionnant adjectif… Ce n’est qu’une courte crise, la démangeaison d’une cicatrice ! …

Here is my preliminary translation (to be revised!) of this passage:

To write! To be able to write! It’s the long reverie before the white page, the unconscious scribble, the games of the quill that turn in a circle around a stain of ink, that nibble at the imperfect word, claw it, [spike][1]it with darts, adorn it with antennas, with paws, until it looses its figure as a word, transformed into an fantastical insect, a fairy butterfly flying away…
To write…it’s the look fixated, hypnotized by the reflection of the window in the [inkpot of money], the divine fever that climbs to the cheeks, to the forehead, while the hand that writes [glazes/freezes] a blessed death onto the paper. It’s also the forgetting of the hour, laziness in the hollow of the divine, debauchery of invention wherefrom one leaves aching all over, addled, but already rewarded, and carrying treasures that one discharges slowly on the virgin page, in a little circus of light that takes shelter under the lamp…
To write! To pour out with rage all the sincerity of the self onto the alluring paper, so quickly, so quickly that sometimes the hand fights and grumbles, overworked by the impatient god that guides it…and to find again, the next day, in the place of the gold branch, miraculously born in a flamboyant hour, a dry branch, an aborted flower…
To write! Pleasure and suffering of idlers! To write!... I feel strongly, more and more, the need, sharp like thirst in summer, to note, to paint… I take the quill once more, to begin the perilous and disappointing game, to grasp and to fix, under the double and sagging peak, the shimmering, the fleeting, the fascinating adjective…this is but a short crisis, the itching sensation of a scar!...


Naturally, I chose this quote because it deals explicitly with writing. The passage illuminates Colette’s view of the writing process: it’s both a joyous and an agonizing activity, full of creative possibility but also of failure. Moreover, the excerpt is a great example of Colette’s singular writing style. We are confronted here with highly original imagery and unconventional pairing of words. The whole passage radiates energy and urgency, and it succeeds in evoking a wide range of emotions, often contradictory: furor desperation, rapture, exaltation. This is Colette at her best.

Natalie