Pour chacun, la couleur de l'eau reflète les mouvements de son âme. Toute une palette changeante et mouvante, le ciel de nos humeurs : pour moi aujourd'hui la couleur de l'eau se confond avec les vibrations de l'air saturé de vert de Monk's House, une eau de rivière, miroir au mercure, où jouent la mousse les fougères et les iris.
Il n'y a pas de mot pour décrire l'enveloppement qui vous serre le coeur dans la maison verte de Virginia. Plus de Woolf, seulement Virginia dans l'étendue sans limite d'une existence toute entière là, de l'enfance à la mort, dans l'unité une et indivisée de son être éternel. De sa plume elle a forcé le mur d'eau qui nous sépare de l'invisible, elle a plongé toujours plus profond dans ces eaux dont la palette a fini par s'ajuster à sa vision. Des eaux ouvertes pour se refermer aussitôt après son passage, avec pour seul viatique vers l'au-delà,les poches emplies de lichens et de graines.
Après la visite de Monk's House et de son jardin de chintz, les pas de Virginia vous portent jusqu'à la rivière. De génération en génération, les grenouilles se passent le mot pour raconter au voyageur sa noyade dans les eaux de l'Ouse, un concert de voix dilatées aux basses instables,matériau organique qui dessine des ronds dans l'air comme une partition d'Horatiu Radulescu.
*Our garden is a perfect variegated chintz: asters, plymasters, zinnias, geums, nasturtiums and so on: all bright, cut from coloured papers, stiff, upstanding as flowers should be. VW
Finally, and most emphatically, words, like ourselves, in order to live at their ease, need privacy.
Undoubtedly they like us to think, and they like us to feel, before we use them; but they also like us to pause; to become unconscious. Our unconsciousness is their privacy; our darkness is their light...
Virginia Woolf
Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations — naturally. They have been out and about, on people’s lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today — that they are so stored with meanings, with memories, that they have contracted so many famous marriages. The splendid word “incarnadine,” for example — who can use it without remembering also “multitudinous seas”? In the old days, of course, when English was a new language, writers could invent new words and use them. Nowadays it is easy enough to invent new words — they spring to the lips whenever we see a new sight or feel a new sensation — but we cannot use them because the language is old. You cannot use a brand new word in an old language because of the very obvious yet mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate entity, but part of other words. It is not a word indeed until it is part of a sentence. Words belong to each other, although, of course, only a great writer knows that the word “incarnadine” belongs to “multitudinous seas.” To combine new words with old words is fatal to the constitution of the sentence. In order to use new words properly you would have to invent a new language; and that, though no doubt we shall come to it, is not at the moment our business. Our business is to see what we can do with the English language as it is. How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth? That is the question.
And the person who could answer that question would deserve whatever crown of glory the world has to offer. Think what it would mean if you could teach, if you could learn, the art of writing. Why, every book, every newspaper would tell the truth, would create beauty. But there is, it would appear, some obstacle in the way, some hindrance to the teaching of words. For though at this moment at least a hundred professors are lecturing upon the literature of the past, at least a thousand critics are reviewing the literature of the present, and hundreds upon hundreds of young men and women are passing examinations in English literature with the utmost credit, still — do we write better, do we read better than we read and wrote four hundred years ago when we were unlectured, uncriticized, untaught? Is our Georgian literature a patch on the Elizabethan? Where then are we to lay the blame? Not on our professors; not on our reviewers; not on our writers; but on words. It is words that are to blame. They are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things. Of course, you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. If you want proof of this, consider how often in moments of emotion when we most need words we find none. Yet there is the dictionary; there at our disposal are some half-a-million words all in alphabetical order. But can we use them? No, because words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind. Look again at the dictionary. There beyond a doubt lie plays more splendid than Antony and Cleopatra; poems more lovely than the Ode to a Nightingale; novels beside which Pride and Prejudice or David Copperfield are the crude bunglings of amateurs. It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order. But we cannot do it because they do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human beings live, by ranging hither and thither, by falling in love, and mating together. It is true that they are much less bound by ceremony and convention than we are. Royal words mate with commoners. English words marry French words, German words, Indian words, Negro words, if they have a fancy. Indeed, the less we enquire into the past of our dear Mother English the better it will be for that lady’s reputation. For she has gone a-roving, a-roving fair maid.
Thus to lay down any laws for such irreclaimable vagabonds is worse than useless. A few trifling rules of grammar and spelling are all the constraint we can put on them. All we can say about them, as we peer at them over the edge of that deep, dark and only fitfully illuminated cavern in which they live — the mind — all we can say about them is that they seem to like people to think and to feel before they use them, but to think and to feel not about them, but about something different. They are highly sensitive, easily made self-conscious. They do not like to have their purity or their impurity discussed. If you start a Society for Pure English, they will show their resentment by starting another for impure English — hence the unnatural violence of much modern speech; it is a protest against the puritans. They are highly democratic, too; they believe that one word is as good as another; uneducated words are as good as educated words, uncultivated words as cultivated words, there are no ranks or titles in their society. Nor do they like being lifted out on the point of a pen and examined separately. They hang together, in sentences, in paragraphs, sometimes for whole pages at a time. They hate being useful; they hate making money; they hate being lectured about in public. In short, they hate anything that stamps them with one meaning or confines them to one attitude, for it is their nature to change.
Perhaps that is their most striking peculiarity — their need of change. It is because the truth they try to catch is many-sided, and they convey it by being themselves many-sided, flashing this way, then that. Thus they mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person; they are unintelligible to one generation, plain as a pikestaff to the next. And it is because of this complexity that they survive. Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing to-day is that we refuse words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning, the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination. And when words are pinned down they fold their wings and die. Finally, and most emphatically, words, like ourselves, in order to live at their ease, need privacy. Undoubtedly they like us to think, and they like us to feel, before we use them; but they also like us to pause; to become unconscious. Our unconsciousness is their privacy; our darkness is their light. . . . That pause was made, that veil of darkness was dropped, to tempt words to come together in one of those swift marriages which are perfect images and create everlasting beauty. But no — nothing of that sort is going to happen to-night. The little wretches are out of temper; disobliging; disobedient; dumb. What is it that they are muttering? “Time’s up! Silence!”
Annie Leibovitz began chasing the ghosts after the death of her long-term lover Susan Sontag. After grief, mourning and bankruptcy she decided to make of Pilgrimage "an excercise in renewal." Taking pictures "in an abandoned way" with a digital camera provided a way of going forward in portraits.
"I discovered that with the digital camera I didn't need much light. It seemed like I could see in the corners. There was none of the colors and contrast distorsion that you get with film when you push it. The camera was rendering things almost the way I was seeing them. "
Annie Leibowitz, Pilgrimage
“I have a bit of a feeling that I’ve had it with people. But you don’t ever get away from people, really. And these are pictures of people to me. It’s all we have left to represent them. I’m dealing with things that are going away, disappearing, crumbling. How do we hold on to stuff?”
Annie Leibowitz, interview in The New York Times
"She, who believed in no immortality, could not help feeling that her soul would come and go forever with the reds on the panels and the greens on the sofa. For the room — she had strolled into the Ambassador’s bedroom — shone like a shell that has lain at the bottom of the sea for centuries and has been crusted over and painted a million tints by the water; it was rose and yellow, green and sand-coloured. It was frail as a shell, as iridescent and as empty. No Ambassador would ever sleep there again. " "Elle, qui ne croyait pas à l'immortalité, ne pouvait s'empêcher de penser que son âme ne cesserait d'aller et venir à tout jamais, avec les rouges des boiseries et les verts du canapé. Car la pièce - sa flânerie l'avait conduite dans la chambre de l'Ambassadeur - avait l'éclat d'un coquillage qui repose au fond de la mer depuis des siècles, caparaçonné et peint par l'eau d'un million de nuances ; elle était rose et jaune, verte et couleur de sable. Elle était fragile comme un coquillage, aussi vide et irridescente. Plus jamais un ambassadeur ne dormirait là."
*Sur les questions de traduction du genre grammatical dans Orlando, voir le très bel article de Isabelle Poulin dans la revue de traduction en ligne Palimpsestes.
Il existe deux traductions de Orlando en français, celle de Charles Mauron, 2001 [1929], Orlando, Paris, Stock, La Cosmopolite, la plus ancienne, et celle plus récente de Catherine Pappo-Musard, 1993, Orlando, Paris, le Livre de Poche, Biblio.
