ABSTRACT
The Channel, a pretty polluted and busy sea but a sea all the same, ebbs and flows between the author's two ‘countries’. The grey-breasted robin that keeps perching over a slender bamboo stake above some yellow wallflowers, tipping its pretty head and swallowing the odd fly as it goes by, cares nothing for death. The man who gave people a book about bird-watching was buried yesterday. Politically too, it’s very difficult to ‘be’ anywhere. Living so long in England and reading the English press, etc. makes people feel sympathetic to British positions, but at the same time people don’t stop being sympathetic to French ones. Adults, at school and home and church, watched people like hawks. The other children did too. For many bilingual women, Jacqueline Risset most notably perhaps, translation is an activity by means of which the ‘natural’ bond ‘meaning-language’ can be transgressed.
