Roland Barthes’ Fragments of a Lover's Discourse: Translating Again, Writing Again

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Why did I want to translate Roland Barthes’s book again? A lot of humility? A lot of arrogance? In the end it comes down to love, and inclusivity. Love of a textlife, love and time. And openness to the loves of others, their engagements with a text, and their voices.
I feel like my translator’s witness involves having a voice and having it veiled all at once. Or my translator’s pleasure. If not pleasure, then aspiration: to have and have not, to have a voice and not have one, like having a place while not being placed. Perhaps I’m re-livingno, not re-living at all: living differently a central point in the drama of Roland Barthes.
I wanted a translation that shows how Fragments welcomes its readers, and welcomes commonality as much as loss. I was looking for an English text that both captures and lets go: an English immersed in Barthes’ idiom so as to find new air for it, and for its readers.


Timothy Mathews, 
from his Translator’s Note




Recent years have seen something of a renaissance in the study and appreciation of the œuvre of Roland Barthes in both French and English. The image of Barthes has been made mobile and fluid, it spreads out and folds back on itself, in all its nuance and singularity. The reservoir of references from which Barthes draws together his propositions has appeared to extend, across theology, history, philosophy, and psychoanalysis. 

Translating Barthes is not something one can do and have done with once and for all. To phrase this as a fall, a leap or a drift, or another kind of loss of ground or unmooring, is not to suggest that established translations can be denied, but more to work in dialogue with them. This sense of dialogue and oscillation is also at work between the fixed and the fluid, between Barthes, his translators, and those here who re-translate either in the specific linguistic sense, or in the wider sense of a move into a different idiom, register or gender positioning.

Patrick ffrench and Timothy Mathews, 
from their Guest Editors’ Introduction   




In addition to the ones by Patrick and Tim, the volume includes pieces by Agnès Thurnauer, Sophie Eager, Sharon Kivland, Jane Rendell, Brian Blanchfield, and Nathalie Léger. The pieces by Agnès and Nathalie are translated by Tim.