"Leave me alone", author: (France) Marcel Sauvageau, translator: Tang Yangyang, version: one page folio｜ | Guangxi Normal University Press, July 2021.
one
It’s a little magical. It is the annual "520". In a training class, teachers who speak the Internet are talking passionately about the future of "digital city". On the one hand, there is a heated discussion about "the era of lying flat" in the circle of friends of mobile phones, and on the other hand, there are various "520" business copywriters; I, on the other hand, finished reading Marcel Sauvageau’s Leave Me Alone.
In the history of French literature in the 20th century, Sauvageau’s name is generally not found, because it is Sauvageau’s only work. She was born in 1900 and died of tuberculosis in 1934. She spent almost five years in various nursing homes before she really entered the literary circle. The limited information can be said in a short space: in the first half of the 20th century, a middle school teacher from another province had to recuperate in a nursing home because of tuberculosis, but while living in a nursing home, he was "broken up", so he wrote this film "Leave me alone". To be exact, it is not a novel, but four intermittent "letters" from November to Christmas Eve-just because it takes the form of letters, and the "confidante" in the letters is the person who made her suffer from love. But at the same time, it is not a real letter, because she wrote these so-called letters and didn’t intend to send them. Because this is by no means her prayer to "save" love.
Fortunately, Sauvageau has stepped into the literary circle with half a foot, which makes Leave Me Alone not buried. When she was preparing for the teacher qualification examination in Paris, she made friends with many people, including the surrealist small group, which was very avant-garde at that time. Because of illness, but also because she still retains some classical interests, she finally did not "go out of the circle" under the label of surrealism; But while she was living in a nursing home and writing "Leave Me Alone", through her friend René Crevel, she could still hear some noises about surrealist cliques from time to time. By understanding this connection, it is not difficult for us to understand the persistence of freedom and the slightly modernist narrative technique embodied in Leave Me Alone.
So Leave Me Alone didn’t suffer the fate of being abandoned-although it came from the pain of being "broken up". Only 163 copies of the first edition were printed and read in the circle of friends, but some time later, when the author lived in a nursing home in Davos, Switzerland, the second edition was already in the pipeline. Sauvageau’s friends persuaded the critic Du Bos to preface this edition of Knowledge Publishing House. Du Bo even went to the nursing home where Sauvageau was at that time and read the preface he wrote to her.
There are many writers in the tuberculosis sanatorium in Davos, and there are many writers in the tuberculosis sanatorium in Zaovos, including RobertLouis Stevenson in Britain in the early days, Paul Eluard, a French surrealist poet, and Thomas Mann, who accompanied his wife with tuberculosis. The sad smell of death in "Magic Mountain" may be regarded as an annotation to Sauvageau’s "Leave Me Alone", although Sauvageau did not live in Davos when he wrote it. Sauvageau died shortly after Du’s visit and didn’t see his book reprinted. From the first edition in 1933 to the latest edition in 2004, there was an interval of 70 years. Interestingly, if Sauvageau did not enter the history of literature, this thin work, which comes from a little woman who is also unknown—compared with the magnificent history of French literature, and even has a little privacy, has not completely fallen into oblivion. Since the first edition, there have been five editions in 1934, 1936, 1943, 1986 and 1997 in the past 70 years, and the titles all follow the "commentary" in the first edition-literally translated as "commentary", or if it is not another book, but an event, it can also correspond to the one in Chinese."Remembering" is a kind of "experience"-only in the 1943 and 1997 editions, the subtitle was "reproduced pages" in the 1943 edition and "lost love" in the 1997 edition. Indeed, in a strict sense, "commentary" is not a title, but it seems to be more like a category of text: for example, Antoine Berman’s "The Time of Translation" is a "commentary" on Benjamin’s "The Translator’s Task", and he did mark "un commentaire" on the cover. Caesar’s The Battle of Gaul also uses the word "commentaire", which is a description, a retrospective, an analysis and a reflection. The edition published in 2004 no longer used the abstract "commentaire", but chose "Laissez-moi" (leaving me alone) and used "commentaire" as the subtitle (in the translation of this edition, it was translated as "Analysis of Love"). The new edition in 2004 sold 60,000 copies in that year, which seems to be somewhat inconsistent with the main theme of the new century that began to disdain love.
Indeed, what does "commentary" or experience mean? It means a woman who takes a step back in front of love and examines the process before the end of love. Because of the distance-when Sauvageau wrote at the end of this letter on November 7, 1930, "I will write to you tomorrow, I can’t use the name’ you’ any more, I will write to you, but I can’t tell you everything I confide in my heart", this distance has been truly displayed in front of us-so I can see clearly the love, and see clearly the love (or the end of love).
Cover of "Let Me Be Alone" in Foreign Languages
two
After seeing clearly the men and women in love, Sauvageau came to the conclusion: Let me be alone. Leaving me alone is a declaration on two levels: the first level is that love is no longer there, and "I" choose to be alone with dignity, review and face up to my love, otherwise "I" once lost all its value; The second level is that as a woman who is seriously ill, "I" still has the right and ability to choose to be alone.
Different from the so-called love letter, "Leave Me Alone" does not show the specific grievances of two men and women. There are no stories, so there are no real heroes and heroines and characters. The words "you", "you" and "I" in the commentary have no identity. Apart from the occasional flash of "sanatorium", "cough" and "Versailles", readers can connect the "I" in the book with Sauvageau in life, and there is no other exact connection with real life and real experience. In fact, even if these clues that may be pursued point to a specific person and a specific love or not, the specific direction behind them is meaningless in the final analysis. Who was it, and which man in which "college" ever loved that woman named Marcel Sauvageau? Why on earth did you stop loving vaguely, wrote a letter saying that you were going to marry another woman, and said, "We are still friends"? All this is actually not important.
It is only important to know why almost all men and women, after falling out of love, should solemnly say that we are still friends; But you know, after the fog of love fades, what a sober woman sees is a man who has lost his aura. Not abuse, not resentment, not counterattack, but simply the word "know". When Sauvageau said, "I am very willing to lose my mind, but I am also willing to grasp the moment of losing my mind and constantly explore the boundaries of consciousness until I lose my consciousness. We shouldn’t be absent from our own happiness, so we don’t doubt that we are stuck in her grasp of "the moment of losing our mind".
The word "love" in the world is fascinating because even if the so-called common law is removed from all the situations-it is not necessarily impossible in today’s era of big data-it is not enough to provide any experience and warning for reference. It will be transformed into different forms in different situations and between different men and women. We are keen to describe it, but we just want to know whether it is possible for people to provide happiness for each other and how this fragile happiness is shattered. Isn’t it? If there is no happy experience, even if love only meets the physiological blind and irrational needs, why on earth should people love? We have 10,000 more convenient ways to be satisfied. There are people in love, and there are people whose subjects exist, and there are love experiences that are regulated by language, which in turn affect language and love, so love becomes a reciprocating cycle from the real world to the imaginary world, and becomes a road for the two worlds to meet each other and be rich.
Memory is also a part of the imaginary world, so love, or happiness, belongs to the past tense and belongs to memory. Sauvageau told us that happiness is like a fragrance. "If we like a fragrance, we will try our best to keep it and pursue it; We will not let ourselves indulge in it, analyze it, and gradually immerse ourselves in it, so that we can only awaken our body’s feelings about it through memories; When the fragrance reappears, we will breathe it more slowly and gently and feel the most subtle breath. " The same meaning is also found in Proust’s Memories of Time Past, and sometimes it is summarized into a simple sentence, such as "Life is just a series of isolated moments, with memories and fantasies, many meanings emerge, then disappear, and then reappear"; Sometimes it will form an eternal scene, such as the famous little Madeleine cake. But "Let Me Be Alone" is definitely not as ambitious as "Memories of Time Past" as it is. It’s basically just about love.
So it still lets us see clearly some small games and tricks in love. All this clearly emerges when love is no longer there. Are women really blind in love? No, blindness in love is just selective neglect. Now open your eyes and look back at "you" at that time, and you can clearly see the true appearance of "you": "Your lips are slightly upturned, slightly blackened teeth are exposed, and your head is stretched forward. When you explain the brilliant ideas you have just discovered, or when you come up with any way to reduce the whimsy that others think to mediocrity, you will put on this look. " However, although I know this very well, I believe that the true value of love is not to fall in love with perfection and become perfect, but to "enter the lover’s heart through shortcomings and deficiencies, the soul that is often lost because of imitating others."
Let Me Be Alone should also attract the attention of the best thinkers in the 1930s by virtue of this rational analysis. Paul Valéry believes that it "shows an extraordinary spiritual life, in a strange way of leaving yourself to see yourself"; Paul Claudel also thinks that it is "almost one of the representatives of women’s writing"; At that time, Robert Brasillach, a famous right-wing writer, also noticed this pamphlet, and he praised it: "All people who like real and simple short narratives will like … this plump work, because, in any case, this is first and foremost a work worthy of love and about love."
But besides love, there is dignity. The dignity of women. "Leave me alone" does not shy away from the female perspective, and even more or less wittily says, "Many sentences in your letter have awakened my feminist thoughts". Indeed, it seems that it is difficult for men all over the world to understand the truth that even if a woman happily says or writes, "When she met him, she became very low, as low as dust", it is just a gesture that a woman has chosen. Moreover, how can it be written by a woman who is really "as low as dust" to find some fun for herself? If one day, I want to force such a woman to say "then I don’t love" again, although I won’t be mean in public, I have seen a transparent man in my heart, but I may not be able to show my intellectual differences between them to return my independent personality. Therefore, Zhang Ailing can help Hu Lancheng financially after breaking up, and Sauvageau can also ask the other party to return his photos after being "broken up" and calmly say, "But this is not because I love you, but because I still want to enrich myself, because I don’t want to destroy myself and become someone else’s favorite, and I don’t want to improve myself any more. I just immerse myself in my lover’s childish love and let him push me around."
Clara Malraux has an accurate evaluation of this. She thinks that this essay "should have epoch-making significance in the history of women’s literature … it is the first book written by an unruly woman; As men’s eyes are generally accurate, they are also enemies and friends, and there is no servility. ….. is a book with simple sadness, facing death, facing the weakness of men who pretend to be authoritative, a book full of dignity ".
Cover of "Let Me Be Alone" in Foreign Languages
three
Leave me alone was written in the early 1930s, and it has been nearly a century.
In the early 1930s, France had not been completely dragged into the vortex of war, but a new generation of novelists had already felt the approaching crisis. Surrealism, Salina, malraux, etc., although in different ways, all declared a break with the previous generation such as Valerie, Gide and Proust, and their works obviously paid more attention to social reality than literary reality.
It can be seen that tuberculosis is like a special barrier, which not only isolates Sauvageau from the noisy life, but also isolates her from the writing that should belong to her generation, so that Sauvageau’s writing still stays in the middle of the two generations to some extent: she does not approve of the later generation’s over-exaggeration of the crisis and faces the real and individual death-although the exaggerated death in surrealism or absurdism soon became a reality in the war-nor does it. There is no trace of intentional innovation in Sauvageau’s works: for example, the interweaving use of different personal narratives, the freedom of access between dreams and reality; As the theme of love, it has become an entrance to one’s inner world here. The most crucial thing is still the motto engraved on the temple of Apollo more than two thousand years ago: Know yourself.
This may be one of the reasons why Leave Me Alone has not lost its value after nearly a century. In this nearly a century, a lot of things have happened, except for the brutal war, which Sauvageau should not have seen and could not have foreseen. With the invention of streptomycin, tuberculosis is no longer a "white plague" that can easily take away life and thus love. The war broke out and ended. However, there will never be an end once and for all, and human beings are still entangled in disasters that can’t be solved by any order because of the same greed again and again. Humans have overcome one disaster after another, and they have personally concocted one disaster after another. Today, nearly a century later, what humans who thought they were extremely powerful never expected was that another kind of "plague" that invaded the lungs would jump out suddenly and warn humans that you were far from "knowing yourself".
We don’t have to repeat such irrelevant nonsense as "God’s punishment". Sauvageau also strangely gave some symbolic answers in the few words left. In her comments on The Last Supper, she talked about her dislike of this painting, which was mixed with strange sadness:
His (Jesus) smile and eyes reveal disillusionment. Miao Yan, who had just finished his sacrifice and atonement, said, "Take it and eat it. This is my body." "Take it and drink it. This is my blood." He felt lonely because he knew that no one really understood. ….. His eyes drooped and he didn’t look at anyone, but he was dissatisfied with the emptiness after the hope disappeared: his face was tired and bitter, as if he had lost faith. We can’t feel the existence of God here: he is absent. He should come here, give confidence to his sons, give light to mankind, help them understand themselves, or just believe in themselves. However, God stayed in heaven, and there was a faint touch of sky outside the window.
It was Jesus who came to the world. He was alone.
No god can guide us, no matter whose people are in the final analysis, human beings are doomed to be lonely. This is the information that Sauvageau read in The Last Supper, and it is also the conclusion she drew from the "broken-up" love. Isn’t it a universally applicable conclusion that human beings may draw after disasters! However, because of this, we can interpret Let Me Be Alone from another angle: the conclusion that human beings will eventually be lonely does not prevent us from trying our best to find the possibility of not being lonely, even if it is only temporary. This should be what Sauvageau thought when he mentioned the Japanese legend. She said:
A Japanese legend claims that when a person is born, the moon will tie the feet of a man and a woman to be married in the future with a red ribbon. In life, this ribbon is invisible, but these two people will look for each other. If they find it, their happiness will come to the earth. There are also people who can’t find them, so their lives will be full of worries and they will die miserably: for them, happiness can only begin in another world, when they will see who the red ribbon is tied to. I don’t know if I can find a ribbon to tie me in this world; I think this legend, like all legends, gives us poetic comfort.
Poetic comfort. Therefore, even if the era of lying flat will come, let us stand and love, because as long as we are still alive, we need comfort and need to establish a dignified and not lonely existence. The dignity that women seek in love may be closer to the essence of human dignity.
Original author | Yuan Xiaoyi
Excerpt | Zhang Jin
Edit | Zhang Jin
Lead proofreading | Wang Xin
