Ravaging

Violette Leduc’s early novel Ravages was famously censored by its Gallimard editors for the initial 1955 publication; the excised sections included romance and graphic sex between women, sexual assault, and illegal abortion. In 2023, a group of scholars produced a restored version of the French-language text (again with Gallimard) that aims to reconstruct the novel as Leduc would have wanted it. My project is a translation of an excerpt from Ravages (2023), accompanied by a critical introduction that explains—selectively—the history of the novel’s editing and popular reception, and my approach to translating it.