ABSTRACT

Alta Ifland’s writing raises important questions about the legitimacy and practice of autobiography that are too often taken for granted by American writers. In an alert literary age, the fifty-three thought-provoking short prose texts of her Voice of Ice / Voix de Glace would have attracted attention outside the circles of small magazines and bookshop readings, in which this book indeed attracted attention when it came out in 2007. The author, described in a back-page résumé of this bilingual edition only as having been born in Eastern Europe, having studied literature and philosophy in France, and currently living in California, remains somewhat mysterious as a person. Yet this autobiographical discretion—so rare among contemporary writers—is justified thematically; it creates the possibility of speaking with an “im-personal” authorial voice, one of the several essential philosophical issues raised in this volume, which was first written in French, the author’s second language, and then self-translated into English, her third. Moreover, there are indications that “Ifland” is a pseudonym, even perhaps a heteronym in Pessoa’s sense, with its imaginable literal meaning of an “if-land,” a “place of conjecture,” and a lofty one at that. Apropos: “My language doesn’t belong to me. All that belongs to me is a long, flowery absence at whose edges roses are growing alongside my legs, encircling them, climbing and covering my body like a tomb. Deep in the absence, my language unearths its words of fog, dead like me, and holds them for an instant above the tomb, then lets them fall like petals.”