K.B. Thors Converses With Nathanaël at BOMB

A new co-edition of Nathanaël's Je Nathanaël serves as the springboard for K.B. Thors's interview with the prolific translator and author. "Nathanaël writes and translates l’entre-genre in English and French, creating literature that exemplifies and challenges our uneasy relation to narrative and meaning," explains Thors. "Je Nathanaël (first published under the prior name Nathalie Stephens) in French in 2003 and English in 2006, is a hybrid English/French text written and translated by the author." Diving into Thors's introduction: 

Re-issued by Nightboat and Book*Hug with a new postface by Nathanaël, the book continues to exist as an impossible echo of its own making. Spare prose, divided into sections that include an epigraph by André Gide’s Les nourritures terrestres, layers lyricism with a sense of analytic memoir. Intimate scenes are described, circled back upon, and interspersed with recurring address to the self and the erotic other—musings on what is happening, what could happen, what is already becoming past and what slips through the sieve of writing and recollection. 

To say anything is to be decisively trapped in one dimension, one language, a moment gone as soon as it is asserted. To write anything is to create an immediately outdated, inherently limited record. Yet Nathanaël does write, demonstrating the longing and impossibility of communication as well as the beauty that abounds. Through speech and what cannot be said, the text dissects the ways language circumvents the body, fettering the subject with gender and faux intimations of fixed identity. Now with an incisive afterword by Elena Basile, Je Nathanaël resumes its address, embodied in a paradoxical text of desire and assertion.

Begin reading Nathanaël and Thors's conversation at BOMB.