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A review by sidharthvardhan
At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop
4.0
It's strange how few World War Accounts actually mention the soldiers from Africa and Asia fighting battles that could have little to do with them.
"Yes, I understood, God’s truth, that on the battlefield they wanted only fleeting madness. Madmen of rage, madmen of pain, furious madmen, but temporary ones. No continuous madmen. As soon as the fighting ends, we’re to file away our rage, our pain, and our fury. Pain is tolerated, we can bring our pain home on the condition that we keep it to ourselves. But rage and fury cannot be brought back to the trench. Before returning home, we must denude ourselves of rage and fury, we must strip ourselves of it, and if we don’t we are no longer playing the game of war. Madness, after the captain blows the whistle to retreat, is taboo."
*
"You might say that with Mademba’s death, a big metal seed of war fell from the sky and cracked my mind’s shell in two. God’s truth, a new suffering joined with the old one. The two contemplated each other, they explained each other, they gave each other meaning."
*
"But now that I think deeply about it, now that I take on God’s truth as my own, I know, I understand that Alfa left me a place in his wrestler’s body out of friendship, out of compassion. I know, I understand that Alfa heard the first supplication I uttered in the depths of no-man’s-land on the night of my death. Because I didn’t want to be left alone in the middle of nowhere, in a land without a name. God’s truth, I swear to you that now, whenever I think of us, he is me and I am him."
*
"To translate is never simple. To translate is to betray at the borders, it’s to cheat, it’s to trade one sentence for another. To translate is one of the only human activities in which one is required to lie about the details to convey the truth at large. To translate is to risk understanding better than others that the truth about a word is not single, but double, even triple, quadruple, or quintuple. To translate is to distance oneself from God’s truth, which, as everyone knows or believes, is single." ... That kind of thinking sure can't help with winning a prize half of which is for translator
"Yes, I understood, God’s truth, that on the battlefield they wanted only fleeting madness. Madmen of rage, madmen of pain, furious madmen, but temporary ones. No continuous madmen. As soon as the fighting ends, we’re to file away our rage, our pain, and our fury. Pain is tolerated, we can bring our pain home on the condition that we keep it to ourselves. But rage and fury cannot be brought back to the trench. Before returning home, we must denude ourselves of rage and fury, we must strip ourselves of it, and if we don’t we are no longer playing the game of war. Madness, after the captain blows the whistle to retreat, is taboo."
*
"You might say that with Mademba’s death, a big metal seed of war fell from the sky and cracked my mind’s shell in two. God’s truth, a new suffering joined with the old one. The two contemplated each other, they explained each other, they gave each other meaning."
*
"But now that I think deeply about it, now that I take on God’s truth as my own, I know, I understand that Alfa left me a place in his wrestler’s body out of friendship, out of compassion. I know, I understand that Alfa heard the first supplication I uttered in the depths of no-man’s-land on the night of my death. Because I didn’t want to be left alone in the middle of nowhere, in a land without a name. God’s truth, I swear to you that now, whenever I think of us, he is me and I am him."
*
"To translate is never simple. To translate is to betray at the borders, it’s to cheat, it’s to trade one sentence for another. To translate is one of the only human activities in which one is required to lie about the details to convey the truth at large. To translate is to risk understanding better than others that the truth about a word is not single, but double, even triple, quadruple, or quintuple. To translate is to distance oneself from God’s truth, which, as everyone knows or believes, is single." ... That kind of thinking sure can't help with winning a prize half of which is for translator