There were many things I wanted to say in this letter. But I won’t. Only translations. Everything I haven’t said I will leave to the fourth letter. Simone Weil says, “The real way of writing is to write as we translate”. What does she mean by this? I’m not really sure. In the fourth letter, I’ll try to figure it out.

Even under the most favorable circumstances translation is a difficult process, punctuated by moments of stark and alarming impossibility. In Against Sainte-Beuve, the work that grew into In Search of Lost Time, Proust declared that “les beaux livres sont écrits dans une sorte de langue étrangère”—“beautiful books are always written in a sort of foreign language.” Proust did not, of course, have in mind actual foreign languages, nor was he alluding to the exceptionally rare phenomenon of a beautiful book written in another language than the author’s native one (as would be two of the finest novels of the following generation—both inspired by Proust—Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita and Beckett’s The Unnamable). Instead, the foreign language Proust had in mind was one he was in the process of inventing—the foreign language that is every great artist’s own. Proust experienced that foreignness himself when he translated John Ruskin’s The Bible of Amiens and Sesame and Lilies into French. His sense of the idiosyncrasy of the task was so strong, and his doubt as to whether he had sufficient mastery of the language to accomplish it was so pronounced, that he once remarked, “I don’t claim to know English. I claim to know Ruskin.” [http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/leland-de-la-durantaye-style-over-substance-translating-proust]

We can see more clearly the effect of literature on language: as Proust says, it opens up a kind of foreign language within language, which is neither another language nor a rediscovered patois but a becoming-other of language, a "minorization" of this major language, a delirium that carries it off, a witch's line that escapes the dominant system. Kafka makes the swimming champion say, I speak the same language as you, and yet I don't understand a single word you're saying. Syntactic creation or style-this is the becoming of language. The creation of words or neologisms is worth nothing apart from the effects of syntax in which they are developed. So literature already presents two aspects: through the creation of syntax, it not only brings about a decomposition or destruction of the maternal language but also the invention of a new language within language. "The only way to defend language is to attack it." "Every writer is obliged to create his or her own language." Language seems to be seized by a delirium, which forces it out of its usual furrows. [Gilles Deleuze, Literature and Life, Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Verso, 1998), 5.]

In “He Stuttered,” Deleuze gives a few examples of writers who fiddle with syntax in order to deterritorialize language – to make it stutter. These writers insert repetitions, digressions, and ‘zones of vibration’ into their texts, respectively. Immediately, these insertions seem comparable to characteristics of clinical stuttering. Repetition of syllables, for example, makes a word disjointed and decomposed. Digression (understood as starting to say one word but switching to another) points to an open-endedness of meaning and a stopping-and-starting.

Repetition and digression overlap with the two stutterings that language itself is subject to: choices and combinables, respectively. Repetition is a response to not choosing the ‘right’ word, once and for all. Digression embodies the non-progressive flow of language as a system in disequilibrium, where meaning and sense are subject to continuous variation. Here’s what this looks like, according to Deleuze in “He Stuttered.” [Kelly Hardcastle Jones, Deleuze’s “Stuttering”: Decomposition, Deterritorialization, and Pushing Language To Its Limit, p. 48]