Translating Sexual Awakening in Marie Darrieussecq’s Clèves

Marie Darrieussecq describes her novel Clèves as a form of ‘organic writing.’ Understanding this type of writing as a mode of translation, I trace how Darrieussecq translates corporeal lived experience into language in order to express the ‘inédit’ of female adolescent sexuality and construct an autonomous, desiring self. Thereafter, looking to Penny Hueston’s English translation, All the Way, I explore what happens when this newly constructed ‘self’ is displaced by another self, namely, a translator, when it journeys into a different cultural and linguistic context. In both cases, I consider their translation to be an embodied, situated praxis.