In these ways, Char’s “Feuillets d’Hypnos” creates a haunting paradigm of an important aspect of translation, even interlingual translation. Impossible yet necessary, translation inevitably entails a loss as well as a gain. Loss is nowhere more evident than in translation’s nostalgia for an original it can never fully render, nostalgia, that is, for a singular textual body it can never appropriate or recreate. A translation can at best inscribe a subsequent understanding, detailed in a new language that can never repeat the original but, at the most, touch it from the point of a tangent, allowing it to live into the future along a new and different line.

Though this may well be the condition of all translation, or even, if we follow a certain line of reasoning, of all linguistic meaning, Char’s “translation” of traumatic experience into the medium of language lays bare this more general yearning and loss. Here, the original toward which language yearns is not only inaccessible because it is in another language (assuming that memory is another language); here the original is inaccessible because it refers to an irretrievable

past, even as memory. Like the death it attempts to describe, the past this text“translates” lies beyond any tactile or visible certainties. A text translating the lived experience of the past can only be produced out of new and different cloth,

woven in the airy uncertainties of memory, affect and language. Char's "Feuillets d'Hypnos" shows the difficulty of this—the suffering, the mourning, and the complexity that are part of any such poetic trans-port, any such use of language.

But as I will attempt to outline briefly, it also shows its necessity and the linguistic “gain” that brings with it a difficult but clearly affirmative hope.

It is a loss and a gain that is best gauged by looking not only to individual poems, but also to the collection as a whole. For here it becomes evident that Char writes both of individual loss and also of a more general loss, or disillusionment. Opening the “Feuillets d’Hypnos,” one immediately sees each entry standing alone, a poetic particular, juxtaposed rather than logically connected to other poetic descriptions, exhortations, self-reflections. Though all are numbered, they follow no usual chronological or logical order. In this notebook, deeply inscribed by event but seemingly untouched by traditional beliefs in Providence, far from the Hegelian dialectic, and beyond—or before—usual realistic, linear “plotlines” or historical mythologies, we see a world of constant change and unpredictable reversals. It is a text with close ties to Nietzsche and Heraclitus, riven with a tragic pessimism that comes not only from the shock of horrific events but also from the loss of more general historical certainties. Nowhere in the collection does Char envision specific positive outcomes, or even a telos, a point of closure that would offer an end and therefore meaning to the individual entries. Quite the contrary. He asks at one point, “La vie commencerait par une explosion et finirait par un concordat? C’est absurde” (Life should begin with an explosion and end with a concordat? It’s absurd.) (140). Even more specific to his own time and frighteningly prescient of our own is entry #7:

Cette guerre se prolongera au delà des armistices platoniques. L'implantation des concepts politiques se poursuivra contradictoirement, dans les convulsions et sous le couvert d’une hypocrisie sûre de ses droits. Ne souriez pas. Écartez le scepticisme et la résignation et préparez votre âme mortelle en vue d’affronter intra-muros des démons glacés analogues aux génies microbiens.

This war will prolong itself beyond platonic armistices. The implanting of political concepts will be conflictingly pursued in convulsions and under cover of an hypocrisy certain of its rights. Don’t smile. Thrust aside skepticism and resignation and prepare your mortal soul for the intramural confrontation with icy demons analogous to mircrobial spirits.]

There is no foreseeable end to the agon Char describes, or even an easily vanquished enemy. The journal, though heroic in some of the acts it relays and in its persistence in relaying them, engages not at all in “patriotic” rhetoric. There is surprisingly little discussion here of Germans or French militia as enemy. Even the Resistance appears through a veil of irony and transience. In this poetic rendition of wartime, a time described without the usual mystifications or nationalisms, we note Char’s refusal of simple dichotomies of good and evil, heroes and enemies, or of a dialectics of trauma and revenge, to embrace instead what Nietzsche might call the “tragic,” a keen awareness of the fearful contingency, changefulness, and inevitable conflict at the heart of existence. This is certainly an important aspect of this journal, and one of its most honest and courageous themes. If it is essential to take arms against oppression and cruelty, an oppression and cruelty Char knew at close range, such war, even such oppression, is anything but a simple matter. It does not have a single face or a predictable end. Endemic to his time, perhaps to all time, it is ultimately fought against internal, intransigent, demons.

In this temporal context without anchors in historical patterns from the past or in clear expectations for the future, life is lived—and here portrayed—as so many individual, unpredictable, often harrowing moments. As in the entry on Bernard, which ends so provocatively with the word “instant,” Char emphasizes the war’s way of whittling experience down to the second: “On donnait jadis un nom aux diverses tranches de la durée: ceci était un jour, cela un mois, cette église vide, une année. Nous voici abordant la seconde où la mort est la plus violente et la vie la mieux définie” (They used to give names to the different portions of duration: this was a day, that a month, this empty church a year. Here we are approaching the second when death is most violent and life best defined.) (#90). It is in the individual, seemingly disconnected moment, that life and death precariously vie. Like so many clicks of the camera, each marking one event, one insight, one action, one instruction, Char’s entries attempt to give us time without myth, without the framing narrative, without the explanatory logic, without the distilling and distancing lens of history’s usual "realist" perspective. Etched instead in the “real time” of poetic enunciation, the “Feuillets”attempt to evoke the unadorned particularity that, ascribed to history since Aristotle, is ultimately its most haunting and most eagerly disguised quality.

Yet as Hannah Arendt eloquently notes in her preface to Between Past and Future, the time Char describes at this historical juncture was not only a site of radical disillusionment or courageous acceptance of the tragic. It was also a site of active conflict and of thoughtful action.11 In this space/time where past and future meet, a site no longer prepared by philosophical or political thought as also no longer channeled by a continuity of tradition, or its most cherished historical

myths, human action could—and did—choose to mark out new and unexpected meanings. In a time “out of joint,” yet in the only time there was, the physical and intellectual struggle of the resistance went on, outside the official government, outside its official history, in day-to-day—indeed in moment to moment—acts, always unpredictable, requiring discriminating decisions that held life and death in the balance.

In this context, Char claims that poetry itself has an important role to play: “la part imaginaire qui, elle aussi, est susceptible d’action” (the imaginary part which, also, is susceptible of action.) (#18). And it is in this poetic “action” that the“gain” to be found in Char’s translation of history is most clearly seen. If Char’s “Feuillets” provides a powerful “living on” of traumatic memory (fortleben) in some of the ways outlined above, it also acts in the “now” of language to offer a life after death, (überleben), a moment of renewal, a new beginning.

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