as if the music were the story (sylvia)

Back To Black, Amy Winehouse

Anna Valenn / VO

I wrote and I wrote, and I tore up everything, and I wrote some more. After a while I didn't know why I was writing. My original desire, complicated enough, became a grueling compulsion, partly in spite of Sylvia. I was doing hard work in the cold room, much harder than necessary, in the hope that it would justify itself.

Writing a story wasn't as easy as writing a letter, or telling a story to a friend. It should be, I believed Chekhov said it was easy. But I could hardly finish a page in a day. I'd find myself getting too involved in the words, the strange relation of their sounds, as if there were a music below the words, like the weird singing of a demiurge out of which came images, virtual things, streets and trees and people. It would become louder and louder, as if the music were the story. I had to get myself out of the way, let it happen, but I couldn't. I was a bad dancer, hearing the music, dancing the steps, unable to let the music dance me.

Writing in the cold room, I'd sometimes become exhilarated, as if I'd transcended all difficulties, done something good. The story had written itself. It bore no residual trace of me. It was clean. A day later, rereading with a more critical eye, I sank into the blackest notions of my fate. I'd wanted so little, just a story that wouldn't make me feel ashamed of myself next week, or five years from now. It was too much to want. The story I'd written was no good. It broke my heart. I was no good.

"Going to your hole?"

I felt I was digging it.

Sylvia by Leonard Michaels (traduit de l'américain par Céline Leroy pour les éditions Christian Bourgois, disponible en format poche.) - New York, les années sex & drugs. Elle est cinglée, il veut être écrivain. Leonard Michaels revient sur sa relation passionnelle avec sa première femme. Un texte court, et fort.

about Leonard Michaels (from The New York Times) : Himself the son of Polish Jewish immigrants, Michaels was born in 1933 (the same year as Roth) and grew up on the Lower East Side. Until he was 6 he spoke only Yiddish. His mother bought a complete set of Charles Dickens. “If you can imagine a little boy ... listening to his mother, who can hardly speak English, reading Dickens hour after hour in the most extraordinary accent, it might help account for my ear,” Michaels recalled. 
Jusqu'à l'âge de 6 ans, Leonard Michaels ne parlait que yiddish. Sa maman, émigrée juive polonaise, se débrouille comme elle peut en anglais. Un jour, elle achète l'intégrale des oeuvres de Dickens, et se met à les lui lire avec l'accent qu'on imagine.