Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2002. Vol. 8. Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 28)
Studies - Zoltán Abádi-Nagy: Conversations with Raymod Federman: Take It or Leave It and The Voice in the Closet
text always behind the other. I went on like that for almost a year. I was going crazy in that hotel room, because gradually the twin-texts not only were feeding each other but also destroying one another. It was a most interesting and revealing experience. I don't think I have yet recovered from it. It has affected everything I have written since then. Q: Destroying in what sense? FEDERMAN: In the sense that the two texts were not only feeding one another, but eating one another (to pursue a bad metaphor). Or if you prefer, they were cannibalizing one another. Damn, I can't get out of this culinary metaphor! You see, there were things which did not work in one language but worked in the other. Let me explain. From the window of my hotel room (by the way the hotel was on rue Jacob, right next door to Les Editions du Seuil —all this is in the book), I could see inside the building across the courtyard, I mean inside the offices of the Editions du Seuil, the famous French publishing house. And there, one day I saw the guys from the TEL QUEL GROUP — Philippe Sollers, Jean Ricardou, Marcelyn Pleynet, and so on. They were all there, having a heated discussion. The TEL QUEL GROUP was in power then in the literary milieu of Paris. And it occurred to me as I watched them that the French version of the book I was writing was addressed to them, that in fact they were the "listeners" of that text. But of course, that did not work in the English text. In Take It or Leave It , the listeners became, perhaps, the guys from the Partisan Review clique. In any event, it is then that I realized that these listeners (whether from the TEL QUEL GROUP or the Parisian Review clique) were activating the text I was writing, feeding it material and inspiration with the questions they were asking of the narrator. They became an integral part of the text. As I said, Amer Eldorado was published in 1974, and I worked for another two years on the English text of Take It or Leave It before it was ready for publication. There are other important differences between the two books. For one thing the French version is about 200 pages long, whereas the English version is close to 500 pages (I don't really know exactly since there are no page numbers in that book). This means that the English version more than doubled in size. This is because a 93
