Tuesday, August 03, 2004
Danielle Collobert
Notebooks 1956-1978
Translated from the French by Norma Cole
Litmus Press
2003
88 pages
Softcover, $12
The audacious ridiculousness of reviewing someone’s notebooks seems, of course, remarkably beside the point. Notebooks contain many things but are most generally the places for one’s private thoughts and swirling concerns, written in forms and styles undeterred by the hassles of public decorum and socialized punctuation.
Danielle Collobert’s fragmented, intensely sad and distracted notebooks reveal a traveler of the world and an investigator of self. The notebooks detail her joys and frustrations with life. But more than once she locates in herself:
lassitude
something broken—inside
She was a tremendously gifted poet—see her It Then and here, too, in her Notebooks 1956-1978—who took her life in 1978. Her notebooks are filled with the staccato delays and quick shifts of consciousness achieved by her use of the dash. The dash is the classic ambulating marker of Emily Dickinson, of course, but Dickinson used it much more for formal control, for creating near rhymes and concision, for instance. Perhaps the poet Aaron Shurin, and his use of the dash, with his deft digressions, would be a similar model to Collobert’s. Or Leslie Scalapino’s. Though Scalapino’s work seems more worked into shape. With Collobert’s writing, the sense of artifice sometimes seen in intention is gone, as if Collobert were dispensing with it to get to an urgency that literary forms sometimes mask. Here’s a section of her notebook entry from July 23, 1973:
Nothing—desert
a shift perhaps—the refusal to think anything whatever—close
—close—shut down—no more—disappear—would be time
—but no—to go on—go along with all/in all the petty daily
nonsense—nerves on edge—jumpy
insegnando il fredo agli sassi
not really cold—absurd tension—not even well in the sun at
the beach—empty head—long to go back to Paris shut myself
in rue de la Liberté—in the usual state of torpor up there—
no excuse to go on
But all my craft talk about dashes seems, as well, remarkably beside the point, as the pain and disconnection Collobert felt as a human being is really the deeply affective imprint one takes away from her notebooks. How does one comment on another’s anquish? How does one take the absurd leap into imagining what another is going through?
Whenever someone’s, especially a suicide’s, notebooks are published without his or her wishes being known, I sometimes feel like there is a sense of betrayal at work, of one’s inner worlds being pushed out into a world that didn’t have much use or care for the person in the first place. To read Collobert’s notebooks and to "see" her via the text, running all over the world, longing for some connection of importance to another human being, is excruciating enough. One can only wonder, with wonder’s sense of disconnection, what Collobert actually felt.
I said that I sometimes feel there is betrayal at work, but I also sometimes feel thankful to those people involved in making available notebooks that display such responses to life and living. I am mixed. Collobert’s focused explorations of her inner worlds on her various travels are at once her reactions to living and her expectations of death, but they also transcend her own private world and connect to a reader most powerfully by their inherent privacy and by her endlessly questioning mind, a mind that saw fractures everywhere and used the fracturing dash to show them.
Thank you to Litmus Press for bringing out these graceful, lonely notebooks, and thank you to Norma Cole for translating them. Cole translated Collobert’s It Then as well, and I—a shady monolingual (some German)—am profoundly in her debt.
Notebooks 1956-1978
Translated from the French by Norma Cole
Litmus Press
2003
88 pages
Softcover, $12
The audacious ridiculousness of reviewing someone’s notebooks seems, of course, remarkably beside the point. Notebooks contain many things but are most generally the places for one’s private thoughts and swirling concerns, written in forms and styles undeterred by the hassles of public decorum and socialized punctuation.
Danielle Collobert’s fragmented, intensely sad and distracted notebooks reveal a traveler of the world and an investigator of self. The notebooks detail her joys and frustrations with life. But more than once she locates in herself:
lassitude
something broken—inside
She was a tremendously gifted poet—see her It Then and here, too, in her Notebooks 1956-1978—who took her life in 1978. Her notebooks are filled with the staccato delays and quick shifts of consciousness achieved by her use of the dash. The dash is the classic ambulating marker of Emily Dickinson, of course, but Dickinson used it much more for formal control, for creating near rhymes and concision, for instance. Perhaps the poet Aaron Shurin, and his use of the dash, with his deft digressions, would be a similar model to Collobert’s. Or Leslie Scalapino’s. Though Scalapino’s work seems more worked into shape. With Collobert’s writing, the sense of artifice sometimes seen in intention is gone, as if Collobert were dispensing with it to get to an urgency that literary forms sometimes mask. Here’s a section of her notebook entry from July 23, 1973:
Nothing—desert
a shift perhaps—the refusal to think anything whatever—close
—close—shut down—no more—disappear—would be time
—but no—to go on—go along with all/in all the petty daily
nonsense—nerves on edge—jumpy
insegnando il fredo agli sassi
not really cold—absurd tension—not even well in the sun at
the beach—empty head—long to go back to Paris shut myself
in rue de la Liberté—in the usual state of torpor up there—
no excuse to go on
But all my craft talk about dashes seems, as well, remarkably beside the point, as the pain and disconnection Collobert felt as a human being is really the deeply affective imprint one takes away from her notebooks. How does one comment on another’s anquish? How does one take the absurd leap into imagining what another is going through?
Whenever someone’s, especially a suicide’s, notebooks are published without his or her wishes being known, I sometimes feel like there is a sense of betrayal at work, of one’s inner worlds being pushed out into a world that didn’t have much use or care for the person in the first place. To read Collobert’s notebooks and to "see" her via the text, running all over the world, longing for some connection of importance to another human being, is excruciating enough. One can only wonder, with wonder’s sense of disconnection, what Collobert actually felt.
I said that I sometimes feel there is betrayal at work, but I also sometimes feel thankful to those people involved in making available notebooks that display such responses to life and living. I am mixed. Collobert’s focused explorations of her inner worlds on her various travels are at once her reactions to living and her expectations of death, but they also transcend her own private world and connect to a reader most powerfully by their inherent privacy and by her endlessly questioning mind, a mind that saw fractures everywhere and used the fracturing dash to show them.
Thank you to Litmus Press for bringing out these graceful, lonely notebooks, and thank you to Norma Cole for translating them. Cole translated Collobert’s It Then as well, and I—a shady monolingual (some German)—am profoundly in her debt.
