- Piotr Rawicz, Blood From the Sky, trans., Peter Wiles (New York: Harcourt Brace and World, 1964). All citations will be from this edition and will appear parenthetically in the body of my text. The same will be true for the work by Charlotte Delbo, None of Us Will Return, trans., John Githens (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968). Citations from this edition and translation will also appear in parenthesis in the body of my text.
- Auschwitz et Après…(Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1970). This title refers to a trilogy of three works by Delbo, Aucun de Nous ne Reviendra; Une Connaissance Inutile; Mesure de Nos Jours.
- Jean François Lyotard, The Differend: Phrases in Dispute (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 13. Lyotard defines the invented term “differend” as the unstable state and instant of language wherein something which must be able to be put into phrases cannot yet be…This state is signaled by what one ordinarily calls a feeling: “One cannot find the words,” etc. A lot of searching must be done to find new rules for forming and linking phrases that are able to express the differend disclosed by the feeling, unless one wants this differend to be smothered right away in a litigation and for the alarm sounded by the feeling to have been useless. What is at stake in a literature, in a philosophy, in a politics perhaps, is to bear witness to differends by finding idioms for them.
- Jean Amery, At the Mind's Limit: Contemplations By a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities, trans. Sidney Rosenfeld and Stella P. Rosenfeld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 33.
- Delbo has been insufficiently appreciated in this country, although a number of recent and forthcoming translations (Yale has undertaken a translation of the trilogy by Rosette C. Lamont, and Cynthia Haft has translated some of Delbo's work) testify to a growing interest in her. Days and Memory (Vermont: Marlborough Press, 1990), also translated by Lamont, appeared posthumously. Other translations include “The Gypsy,” which appeared in 4 Centerpoint: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies (1980), 47–52; “Phantoms, My Companions,” which appeared in 12 Massachusetts Review (1971), 10–30; and “Phantoms, My Faithful Ones,” which appeared in 14 Massachusetts Review (1973), 310–315. All of the translations are by Lamont.
- The critical literature is also not extensive. Lamont has written several essays on Delbo. See “Charlotte Delbo's Frozen Friezes,” in 19 L'Esprit Créateur (1972), 65–74; “Charlotte Delbo: A Woman/Book,” Faith of a (Woman) Writer, (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), Kessler-Harris and McBrien, eds.; and “Literature, the Exile's Agent of Survival: Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Charlotte Delbo,” 9 Mosaic (1975), 1–17.
- See also Lawrence Langer, “Charlotte Delbo and a Heart of Ashes,” The Age of Atrocity: Death in Modern Literature (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), pp. 201–244. A recent dissertation by Lorraine Richards provides a lengthy discussion of Delbo's writing, “La Littérature de L'Angoisse totale: Trois Témoins de la Déportation: Wiesel, Delbo, Semprun” (Diss., University of Wester Australia, 1990).
- Robert J. Lifton, The Broken Connection: On Death and the Continuity of Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980), p. 175. See also Lifton's discussion of the “traumatic syndrome,” id., pp. 173–177.
- Victor Shklovsky, cited in Richard Weisberg, “Avoiding Central Realities,” 5 Human Rights Quarterly 151 (1983), p. 153.
- Czeslaw Milosz, The Witness of Poetry (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), pp. 56–57.
- A somewhat different version of this article, one that focused exclusively on the Delbo work, was presented at the Fifteenth Annual Meeting of the International Association for Literature and Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine, April 26–28, 1990 and was entitled, “The Body as Witness: An Examination of the Prose Style of Charlotte Delbo.”
Law & Literature
Volume 3, 1991 - Issue 2