Book record
Some Thing Black
Jacques Roubaud
Translated from French by Rosmarie Waldrop
Jacques Roubaud’s Some Thing Black, translated by Rosmarie Waldrop, is a major work of grief, constraint, and formal intelligence. Written after the death of Roubaud’s wife, the book’s title breaks “something” into “some thing,” making blackness both abstraction and object. Mourning becomes a thing in the room, a grammatical problem, a philosophical pressure, and a formal condition. Waldrop’s translation is especially fitting because she understands the relationship between experimental procedure and emotional intensity. I would read this book as grief refusing the expected lyric script. It does not simply pour feeling onto the page. It examines the structures that remain after loss, the spaces where thought continues because the beloved does not. Its darkness is exact, not vague.
- Publisher
- Dalkey Archive
- Language
- French
- Country
- France