Ravaging: an excerpted translation with critical introduction of Violette Leduc’s Ravages

Violette Leduc’s early novel Ravages was famously censored by its Gallimard editors for the initial 1955 publication; the excised sections included romance and graphic sex between women, sexual assault, and illegal abortion. In 2023, a group of scholars produced a restored version of the French-language text (again with Gallimard) that aims to reconstruct the novel as Leduc would have wanted it. My project is a translation of an excerpt from Ravages (2023), accompanied by a critical introduction that explains—selectively—the history of the novel’s editing and popular reception, and my approach to translating it.

Ravages tells the story of Thérèse, a misfit who gets romantically attached to both women and men with abandon and, remarkably for her time period, an apparently total absence of shame. Raised by a single mother who’s recently gotten married—in her daughter’s eyes betraying their closeness— Thérèse gropes toward independence through highly erotic relationships recounted in graphic, poetic detail. She forms erotic, obsessive relationships with lovers, yes—but also with specific places, with the wind, with her labor as a countryside lace peddler, with a baby (when she herself is a child), and with her own body, as she tries first to end her own life and then, later, to end the life of her unborn child.

In translating, I aim to recreate the cascading, often frenzied narrative prose, the naturalistic—though socially performative—dialogues, and to handle bodily realities, particularly the queer and feminine experiences Leduc here focuses on, with the utmost care.