Synopses & Reviews
Available in English for the first time, Marie Vieux-Chauvets stunning trilogy of novellas is a remarkable literary event. In a brilliant translation by Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokur,
Love, Anger, Madness is a scathing response to the struggles of race, class, and sex that have ruled Haiti. Suppressed upon its initial publication in 1968, this major work became an underground classic and was finally released in an authorized edition in France in 2005.
In Love, Anger, Madness, Marie Vieux-Chauvet offers three slices of life under an oppressive regime. Gradually building in emotional intensity, the novellas paint a shocking portrait of families and artists struggling to survive under Haitis terrifying government restrictions that have turned its society upside down, transforming neighbors into victims, spies, and enemies.
In “Love,” Claire is the eldest of three sisters who occupy a single house. Her dark skin and unmarried status make her a virtual servant to the rest of the family. Consumed by an intense passion for her brother-in-law, she finds redemption in a criminal act of rebellion.
In “Anger,” a middle-class family is ripped apart when twenty-year-old Rose is forced to sleep with a repulsive soldier in order to prevent a government takeover of her fathers land.
And in “Madness,” René, a young poet, finds himself trapped in a house for days without food, obsessed with the souls of the dead, dreading the invasion of local military thugs, and steeling himself for one final stand against authority.
Sympathetic, savage and truly compelling with an insightful introduction by Edwidge Danticat, Love, Anger, Madness is an extraordinary, brave and graphic evocation of a country in turmoil.
Review
"Is the artifact worth such a weight of suffering and struggle? Whether any work of art can ever be worth even a single human life is a question that will never be settled — but this book is surely a masterpiece. Within the community of Haitian writers and writers of the Haitian diaspora it has been prized not only for its rarity but also for its great literary power. In her succinct introduction to the present edition, Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat ranks Vieux-Chauvet among a 'multigenerational triad' of the greatest Haitian writers (including Jacques Roumain and Jacques Stephen Alexis) and dubs the trilogy 'the cornerstone of Haitian literature.'" Madison Smartt Bell, The Nation (read the entire )
Synopsis
Now in English for the first time, this major work of Haitian literature is a powerfully rendered response to life under an oppressive regime.
Suppressed immediately upon publication in 1968 and finally released in France in 2005, this stunning trilogy, brilliantly introduced by Edwidge Danticat, is a scathing response to the powerful racial, sexual, and class struggles that rule Haiti.
In Love, three sisters entangle themselves in each others love lives, creating a complicated family dynamic that echoes the growing chaos outside of the house. In Anger, the daughter of a middle-class family terrorized by paramilitaries agrees to prostitute herself to save the others, but the guilt that ensues upon the sale of her body and soul reveals the profound fissures among them. And finally, Madness paints a terrifying portrait of a Haitian town that has been ravaged by troops. A young poet, trapped in his house for days without food, becomes obsessed with the souls of the dead that surround him. Love, Anger, Madness is an extraordinary, brave, and searing evocation of a country in turmoil.
About the Author
Marie Vieux-Chauvet, a seminal writer of postoccupation Haiti, was born in Port-au-Prince in 1916 and died in New York in 1973. She is the author of five novels, including Dance on the Volcano, Fonds des Nègres, Fille d’Haiti, and Les Rapaces.
Author Q&A
Q&A with Modern Library and translators Rose-Myriam Réjouis and Val Vinokur ML: How did you become translators? What made you want to translate this particular book? Why is it important?
RR: I became a translator my senior year at Amherst College when I decided to translate Patrick Chamoiseau’s novel Solibo Magnifique as my honors thesis. I loved that book because it depicted the struggles of a black intellectual in a humorous way. In a way, my translations are an anthology of depictions of black intellectuals, and this book fits perfectly. I’m from Haiti, so translating the work of a Haitian writer also meant a lot to me. Love, Anger, Madness is unique, and Marie Vieux-Chauvet does so much important work in this novel. To give one example: It’s amazing that in a society in which rape has been so common–from the rape of servants during and after slavery to modern political sexual violence–she is still able to write about masturbation, erotic fantasies, and sex. She refuses to allow sexual violence to make a taboo of sexuality. While working on Chauvet, I was reading about Haitian feminist activists and journalists who had been kidnapped, beaten, and left for dead not long after the election of François Duvalier in 1957. Many of these women never wrote a word after their ordeals. In a way, Chauvet speaks for them.
VV: Before I started working with Rose, I had come to translation through poetry. I was born in Russia and moved to Miami Beach when I was seven. English became my native language, and I never learned to write in proper Russian. But Russian literature reclaimed me eventually. I had been writing poetry in English for several years, when I took a course on Russian poetry with Joseph Brodsky and soon became obsessed with trying to translate Osip Mandelstam, the most exacting of twentieth-century Russian poets. So translation has always been a somewhat perverse aesthetic puzzle for me–the object being how to convey the literariness of a text into another language. If a translation–and here is where I disagree with Nabokov, who argues that only information and not aesthetic value can be translated–fails to convey the fact that a reader is looking at, say, a great poem, then nothing has been translated.
ML: What difficulties did you come across when translating Love, Anger, Madness? Was there anything you learned or discovered that you didn’t expect?
VV: Working together means that we are forced to articulate the mechanics of two different languages and their different “modes of intention.” It’s really fascinating to discuss why you can say something this way in one language but not in another. But it’s also shocking to discover how much one takes for granted about a language until one has to explain it to someone else.
RR: Chauvet wrote in French primarily because she was interested in securing a wide audience for the book. She does use Creole when necessary–usually to describe the peasants’ way of life–and does so without apology. On top of that, she sometimes uses words that have different meanings in French and Creole: for instance, bouillon in this book means stew (Creole), not a clear broth (French). Chauvet is aware of being a postcolonial writer who is borrowing another language to make a portrait of her own country. Conveying the narrator’s easy literary French alongside the somewhat stilted French of her “colonial” intellectuals was a challenge. I think about translation as the interpretation of idioms and non idioms. Idioms are impersonal. It is by attention to idiom that a translator puts one language’s way of meaning in dialogue with another’s. Non-idiomatic language, on the other hand, is a writer’s poetry and that’s always more difficult and interesting to translate.