A Swiss Prize-Winner Gets a French Voice: Terzaghi's Meditation on Photography Arrives in Translation
Matteo Terzaghi's fragmented prose collection on images and their lost objects, honored with a Prix suisse de littérature in 2014, is now available in French, translated by Christian Viredaz.
Matteo Terzaghi, a writer from Ticino, won the Prix suisse de littérature in 2014 for the original Italian version of his book. It has now been translated into French by Christian Viredaz under the title Bureau des projections lumineuses, according to Le Temps.
The book is made up of short, fragmented prose pieces that circle around a single idea: that the camera's diaphragm acts like a pair of scissors, cutting the image away from its object so that the two go on to live separate lives. Le Temps describes the texts as by turns analytical and dreamlike, melancholic and playful, exploring that gap between a photograph and the thing it once depicted.
For readers who keep a home library, the book arrives as a reissue-by-translation of a title already recognized in its original language more than a decade ago — a reminder that literary prizes in French-speaking Switzerland sometimes take years to cross into French itself.
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