Thursday, August 25, 2005

Promised Land (Sam Rohdie)

I found a truly wonderful book written by the film critic Sam Rohdie: PROMISED LAND (bfi Publishing, 2001). Here is a short piece from a chapter called "Portraits."

Rosselini relates a story of visiting an Indian holy man when he was in India.
They sat together. The old man smoked cigarettes incessantly. He slowly massaged Rosselini's neck.
Rosselini began to cry, then he sobbed, out of control. (p.154)

The book has incredible amount of intertextual resonances with my own Columbus's Dog (1989), or so it seems to me. By the way they are written, by their écritures. May be this is a book I should translate into Japanese although I've been telling myself I'll do only French-Japanese translations in the future. Of French texts alone I don't have enough lifetime left to spend (Glissant, Le Clézio, Artaud, SJP, Césaire,...)