““When he read the text for the first time, Alan Bass, who was far from being a novice, had the impression that it would be as complicated as trying to translate Joyce into French. Derrida acknowledged that the ‘Envois’ were very encrypted and agreed to provide Bass with explanations, comments, and suggestions whenever required. ‘Most of this work was done by letter,’ Alan Bass recalls. He would send me my pages back with many annotations. But we had at least one long session together in a railway station buffet, while he was between trains. There were many details that would have escaped my notice if he hadn’t drawn my attention to them. For example, in the sentence ‘Est-ce taire un nom?’ [‘Is this to keep silence about a name?’], you also have to read ‘Esther’, which is one of the forenames of his mother, but also a biblical name that plays a very active part in the book. In spite of all my efforts, many of these effects disappeared in the translation.15 Hans-Joachim Metzger, the German translator of The Post Card, would find the work equally demanding. ‘On reading your questions,’ Derrida wrote to him, ‘I see yet again that you have read the text better than I have. That’s why a translator is absolutely unbearable, and the better he is, the scarier he is: the super-ego in person.””
