On the difficult work of translating translation; or, the monolingualism of translation theory. Languaging acts in (and after) Marie NDiaye's Les Serpents

Award-winning playwright Marie NDiaye's language is, arguably, foreign to itself: Les Serpents (The Snakes) stages an implacably harsh world, meticulous precision, turns of phrase nearly stilted - inhabiting French like a stiff cloak, a rough mantle, a too-parched frock NDiaye's language is fastidious: every comma provokes a breath, a shift in rhythm, replicating the stultifying spirit of longing and wait the author's three protagonists subject one another to in the hot sun - a transgenerational game of radical dispossession. In this article, reflecting on my translation of the play, I probe questions of language and alterity, seeing in the author's work subtle occupation of nationalistic fantasies of monolingualism, as well as the ambivalent time and place of revolutionary America/France, neither of which emerges exactly on the page, as much as do the crisp clarity of a blazing sun, a cage, an open horizon, moulting, an impossible landscape. Rather than stage, naturalistically, a heterogeneous dialect or slang, or setting the play in one realm, NDiaye inhabits the French language so completely it becomes nearly rebuffing: at once the place and medium of performance, and the occasion for criticism itself, against the grain of theoretical monolingualism, also to moult.