In the Environs of a Film collects together three previously untranslated works by Danielle Collobert, the author of Murder and It Then. The works here, selected by the translator, see slowly, are scorings of scattered voices, and take the form of a scenario—”Research”—a radio play—”Polyphony”—and a poem—”That of Words.”
Danielle Collobert
Nathanaël
Praise for Danielle Collobert
Danielle Collobert was one of the strongest, yet also one of the most subtle—and the most marginalized—poetic voices to emerge from post-WW2 France.
— Cole Swensen
In the language of film there are often extraordinary divergences between English and French, which prove at times to be irreconcilable. If this tendency toward discrepancy is true of translation as a rule, it reveals itself to be particularly true in the case of this work in translation. Danielle Collobert’s Recherche, rendered as Research… makes salient such divergences, through the implied camera movement panning over the evacuated faces of A and B and the marked distances especially that define the space of their bodies, in proximity and in remove, as though the text were annotating a form of recusal that is implicit in the spaces of desire to which their mortiferous movements owe everything; an intimacy of anticipated death, and seizure, from which the camera extracts movements of degradation through violent stillness.
— Nathanaël, PhiloSOPHIA
This is a writer who has left all security behind and is inching her way along a frazzled tightrope suspended over the most desolate abyss imaginable. Think of Samuel Beckett’s “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.
—John Taylor, “Reading Danielle Collobert”