Marie NDiaye - Ladivine

“You didn’t see it in front of the courthouse?”

“No, I didn’t see anything,” Richard Rivière stammered.

Ladivine Sylla gently opened the door, and the big brown dog padded in on its thin, trembling legs.

She stroked the coarse fur between its small, upright ears, and the dog turned to look at her with its knowing eyes, its chaste eyes.

She felt a dizzying rush of happiness.

She was sure it had come here to tell them everything it knew, that it had endured many torments and exhaustions for no other purpose.

It was bringing Malinka’s throbbing heart back to them, and maybe too, she thought in the ardour of her joy, the promise of a new light cast over each and every day.

Marie NDiaye was born in Pithiviers, France, in 1967 and studied linguistics at the Sorbonne. She started writing when she was twelve or thirteen years old and was only eighteen when her first work was published. She won the Prix Femina for Rosie Carpe in 2001, the Prix Goncourt in 2009 for Three Strong Women , and in 2015 she was awarded the Nelly Sachs Prize for outstanding literary contributions to the promotion of understanding between peoples, and the Gold Medal for the Arts from the Kennedy Center International Committee on the Arts. In 2007, after the election of Nicolas Sarkozy, NDiaye left France with her family to live in Berlin.

Jordan Stump is a professor of French at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He has translated many authors from the French including Marie Redonnet, Eric Chevillard, and Honoré de Balzac. His translation of Jardin des Plantes by Claude Simon won the 2001 French-American Foundation translation prize, and he was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2006.