Marguerite Duras published this brief sketch, “Ecrire,” in French in the spring of 1990, the year after the fall of the Berlin Wall. I’m leaving it here in my unofficial translation for those who might be interested.

*

There is the scandal . . . that of literature. I think literature is scandalous, because it is scarce and it drives people crazy.

In other times, I believed— I repeated this for decades—that anyone could write. I hymned this across every tonality.

I don’t believe it anymore.

I don’t know what it means to write, at all, but I know that everyone cannot do it.

I can have a written page, there. We can read it. The page is tangible. But I don’t know at all what will be on the next page before tackling it.

It’s very aleatory. Sometimes, we fear dying before the page is full, because we know, regardless. . . we know the benchmarks, we know the event we are aiming towards, but we must bring the text to that. One must make it happen, venture the entire voyage.

Writing, I think, is essentially an activity that requires one to think about death every day.

They have said I write about writing.

But I think everyone who writes, writes about writing . . .

Which is to say that this species of the word’s infinite indefiniteness, of the image, of the theme, of the memory, of love, these things must obstruct those people, those people who do not write.

There is a choice that operates, an organic choice that operates

When we don’t write, I don’t know what we do, I can’t even imagine, but we must continue in a forest that never closes, on you; because there, when we write, it is the forest that closes; you are trapped inside it.

I believe that by dint of writing, by living there, in the writing, I have arrived in a sort of monoculture, a mono-life, a life near monotone, the accidents being nothing but the books.