“Où est le centre du monde?” Marie Darrieussecq’s Tristes Pontiques: Movable Centers and Migrations of Being

In the introduction to her Tristes Pontiques, Marie Darrieussecq asks: “Where is the center of the world?” Her translations of Ovid’s poetry of exile engage with narratives of center and margin, migration and exclusion. Banished from Rome to Tomis by Augustus, Ovid writes his creative survival into epistolary elegies: a portable form that invites dispersal. For over 2000 years, successive translations have continued this momentum, both decentralizing and regenerative, a form of literary rewilding that resists the extinctions built into necropolitical systems. The materiality of the modes of transmission – from papyrus to laptop – is also part of what Donna Haraway calls “otherworldly conversations.”