In writing this biography, Mary Gaill tried to break free from tradition into non-tradition, where Roland Barthes appears. She attempted to apply some of Barthes' structuralist lines, until she reached what resembled a dead end after more than five hundred pages of phased investigation and detailed serial exploration of the writer. Translating this massive book was, for me, an enjoyable, difficult, and even exhausting task, as the archival phrases used by the author, and the details of names, people, and technical sentences with precise connotations about a writer's life, were subject to the pulls of duality, open anxiety, and permanent loss. All of this made the translation journey more like an adventure.
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Number of pages: 581 pages
