alternative life

In writing this autobiography, Mary Gilles tried to break out of the cloak of tradition towards non-tradition, where Roland Barthes appears. Mary tried to apply some lines of Barthesian structuralism (textual fragmentation, dualities, deep biographical recalls of the lineage, and many details taken as biographical signs) until she reached a dead end after more than five hundred pages of detailed gradual and biographical investigation of the writer. It is no wonder that Mary Gilles ends her book with a dangerous sentence: "I do not know Roland Barthes." It is as if she is reviving the dilemma of structuralism through one of its most prominent representatives in the twentieth century. Translating this huge book was, for me, an enjoyable, difficult, and even exhausting task at the same time. The archival phrases used by the writer, the details of names, people, and technical sentences with precise indications of the writer's life, were subject to the pulls of duality, open anxiety, and permanent loss. All of this made translation a journey that is more like the adventure of a sailor in a turbulent sea.