Black Sun: By Julia Kristeva. Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. 1989. Pp. 300 + vii.

I had great difficulty in reading this unusual book. At first I attributed the bewilderment it produced in me to a clumsy translation, but a review in The New York Times informed me that it is 'nearly as transparent as Ms. Kristeva's French allows'. I do not doubt that the original must present formidable obstacles to comprehension: some years ago, when I told a French colleague that I could not follow one of his books even after checking every ambiguity in my dictionary, he laughingly confessed that in Paris it is considered déclassé to be too easy to decipher!

I am convinced, nonetheless, that Roudiez's translation needlessly compounds the problems of this text. To begin with, he is seemingly unconcerned about rendering Kristeva's technical vocabulary in terms of accepted English equivalents—to mention only one instance (because I found it most annoying)—the common word 'association' (or did Kristeva mean 'linkage'?) is replaced by the barbaric latinism 'concatenation'. You remember, of course: catena (L.) means 'chain'. I did, thereby justifying the US Book Review Editor's propaganda that I am uniquely qualified to assess this work. Perhaps, after all, he was right: a reader less obstinate than I would have refused to complete the assignment. Do I sound unreasonably hostile? Let me try to document my contention by quoting a few characteristic passages from the first chapter.

'[Melancholic] despair is not a revulsion that would imply my being capable of desire and creativity, negative indeed but present' (p. 3). By training, Kristeva is first and foremost an expert in linguistics. I need her help to explicate the syntax of the foregoing sentence. Further, 'A sad voluptuousness, a despondent intoxication make up the humdrum backdrop against which our ideals and euphorias often stand out, unless they be that fleeting clear-mindedness shredding the amorous hypnosis that joins two persons together' (p. 5). Are 'they' the backdrop or the foreground phenom