Postcards and Proofs 1979–1981 313
spite of all my eff orts, many of these eff ects disappeared in the
translation.^15Hans-Joachim Metzger, the German translator of The Post Card,
would fi nd the work equally demanding. ‘On reading your ques-
tions,’ Derrida wrote to him, ‘I see yet again that you have read the
text better than I have. That’s why a translator is absolutely unbear-
able, and the better he is, the scarier he is: the super-ego in person.’^16
At the end of winter 1980, when he sent The Post Card to his friends,
Derrida seemed to be making more or less systematic use of the
formula ‘yours’ (à toi), which created a few additional misunder-
standings. Every reader – especially when female – could feel that
the book was meant for him or her in person. Élisabeth de Fontenay
described exactly the unease the work aroused:
I feel, when faced with The Post Card, as if I were an old
English spinster, a sort of Brontë sister, living through a love
aff air, which has nothing to do with a love aff air by proxy, as
you can well imagine. It would instead resemble divine saint-
hood. And the naïvety of my fi rst impression of this book now
overwhelms me, for a long time. And I will hold to this fi rst-
degree reading of a book that is perverse enough to make room
for me in this way.^17But for some readers, especially Derrida’s closest friends, the
allusions to reality at the centre of the ‘Envois’ seemed barely toler-
able. Pierre remembers how he recoiled from the work. ‘When The
Post Card was published, I sensed how much private life, how many
disguised confi dences, even how much exhibitionism there was in
the book. I had no desire to be confronted with it, at any case in
this form, and this no doubt played its part in the fact that I read
relatively few of my father’s books.’^18
The articles that came out were mostly positive. They all focused
on the fi rst part of the volume, somewhat reductively. In his Journal
de lectures, the writer Max Genève waxed enthusiastic about the
‘the fi nest epistolary novel since Crébillon fi ls’.^19 In Les Nouvelles
littéraires, Jane Herve also hailed ‘the Derrida factor’ (or ‘Postman
Jacques’ – le facteur Derrida), albeit in a rather heavily ironic style,
while Philippe Boyer, an old associate of the review Change, devoted
a full-page spread to The Post Card in Libération, under the title ‘A
philosopher’s love letter’:
In literature as in agriculture, the main principle is that everyone
should stay at home to look after the cows properly. Novels
should be written by novelists, cookery books by gastronomes,