The CounterText Conversation Notes on ‘Agony’: A Dialogue

Abstract

Patrick ffrench and Timothy Mathews discuss the affective dimensions of the practice and art of translation, and of translating Barthes in particular, in the light of the latter’s translations from Fragments d’un discours amoureux, included in this issue. The problems posed by ‘Agony’, one of Barthes’ ‘fragments’ indebted to Donald Winnicott’s notion of the fear of a disaster that has already happened, is a salient preoccupation. This is the starting point for exchanges around the dynamics of translation, as a process in which love, loss, fascination, melancholy and rage flow in and out of the transitional space between the ‘original’ and its ‘version’.