Suggested translation of passage by Philippe Djian
Some evenings she could have cried tears of rage. She felt
her life was a real disaster and this made her panic somewhat. And yet the
filming was going well: the rushes were good and more and more people were
congratulating her for her work, and saying they bet she could[1] get
an award for her acting out of it and be
back in the spotlight again.
This promising future, though, did not thrill her as much as
she had thought it would. Now that it was within her reach, the prospect left
her nonplussed; she no longer found it so attractive. She had almost lost that
furious appetite for success which ate away at ninety nine per cent of artists
on the planet- and a hundred per cent in the world of cinema.
Eric Duncalah was perfectly correct
in thinking that a sign from Evy would be able to make her happy, in so far as
that was possible. They missed each other in the mornings, since at Dawn she
was like a stone at the bottom of a well, crushed by leaden sleep or thoroughly
drunk with fatigue. When she heard the coffee machine in action, it was too
late. In the evenings she would do her best to clear her schedule and find time
to be with her son, but she had not yet managed to have a serious conversation
with him about all this, not to mention the fact that they had André under
their feet. What a pain in the neck he
was, that man.
Judith Beverini made use of their
yoga sessions to urge her to get rid of the old bastard- as if anyone in the
house needed a sports room, as if muscle was what the house was short of!
“I wouldn’t put up with it
if I were you ,” said Judith. “And it’s so weird, I reckon. It’d be different
if Rose was there. Really he’s just lurking around the house. At least that’s
what it looks like. How old is he. Brr... he must be 70. Isn’t he?
Judith’s husband had gone
off again to put on The Nutcracker in Nankin, in China, with the communists ,
so the two women could talk on for hours about how men were intrinsically
deceitful and gifted for rudeness and pretence. But all that could not stop
Laure from thinking that first her husband and then her children had abandoned
her one after the other, and this picture terrified her.
[1] There are other
possibilities here, but the sequence of tenses seems to rule out structures
with « may ».
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