Nevermore

A meditation on loss and recovery through the act of translation and its recuperative powers. An unnamed translator mourning the loss of a close friend retreats to Dresden to translate the -Time Passes- section of Virginia Woolf-s novel To the Lighthouse. Translating this lyrical evocation of time and its devastations in a city with which the writer has no connections and where neither her language nor Woolf-s are spoken offers an interruption to the course of her life. She immerses herself in this prose poem of ephemerality. The narrator delves into phrases from -Time Passes- and subjects them to the inexact science and imperfect art of translation. This, in turn, leads her to wide-ranging reflections on other instances of loss, destruction, and recovery-the Chernobyl disaster, the High Line in New York City, the bombing of Dresden and Wallmann-s commemorative Bell Requiem Dresden, the evacuation of the Hebridean island Foula, Hiroshi Sugimoto-s photographs of seascapes, Debussy-s -La