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Translator’s Preface

This translation of Andrée Chedid’s novel Le Sommeil délivré is based partly upon a literal rendering of the work from French to English by Roselyne Eddé. I am very grateful for the existence of this earlier text, for it facilitated my own work by providing a very useful foundation on which I was able to build a more literary version of the novel.

Le Sommeil délivré depends for its poetic artistry upon certain rhythmical patterns which are composed into a music for the ear. The original French is incantatory and obsessive, as befits Chedid’s subject and her protagonist’s situation. Throughout, I have attempted either to preserve or to simulate the rhythms of the original creation as well as the equally important classical and timeless nature of the novel’s elegantly simple language and imagery. The most difficult problem was to select for the title a phrase which would suggest the complexity of Le Sommeil délivré, which alludes not only to awakening and to release, to the sudden liberation in action of accumulated rage and resentment, but also to the crucial “deliverance” of the birth process. “From sleep unbound” suggests the essence of Samya’s definitive action at the same time that it emphasizes the novel’s unifying metaphor, that of sleep.

I undertook the translation of Le Sommeil délivré in a spirit of admiration for this book which now offers English language readers an intimate view into the soul of a woman whose life is its own tragic comment and whose ultimate destiny is oddly satisfying when one considers the brutal conditions she was compelled to experience as her life.

If these words seem enigmatic, they are soon to find explanation in the pages that follow.