Louis Wolfson (writer)

Louis Wolfson (born 1931 in New York)^[1] is an American author who writes in French. Treated for schizophrenia since childhood, he cannot bear hearing or reading his native language. He invented a process which consists of immediately translating every English sentence into a foreign phrase having the same sound and sense. He lived in New York, then in Montreal after his mother's death. Since November 1994 he has lived in Porto Rico where he became a millionaire on 9 April 2003 after winning the jackpot in a lottery game.

Biography

Diagnosed with schizophrenia at an early age, Louis Wolfson was placed in psychiatric institutes during his adolescence, where he underwent severe treatments, notably electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). This period left him with a particular rancour and mistrust of the human race, as well as a radical detestation of his native language which he refused to use. He learned foreign languages (notably French, German, Hebrew and Russian), and became used to spontaneously translating—through an extremely sophisticated technique— whatever was said to him in English into a Sabir of all these languages.

In 1963 he sent a manuscript to the French publishers Gallimard in which he set out, in French, the principles of his linguistic system, and how he used it in daily life. Le Schizo et les langues (Schizophrenia and languages) was published in 1970 in the collection "Connaissance de l'Inconscient" that had just been launched by writer and psychoanalyst Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. It met from the outset an intense critical interest, partly thanks to an introduction by Gilles Deleuze. Seven years later Wolfson's mother died from complications of an ovarian tumour. The author, at last liberated from her guardianship, left New York and moved to Montreal in 1984. There he wrote an account of the last months of their divided lives, marked by his mother's agony and his obsessive practice on betting on horses. The text - Ma mère, musicienne, est morte... uses the staggering language of Le Schizo et les langues and its humour, but is also charged with the drama of the illness. Published in 1984 by Éditions Navarin, this text has become hard to find/unavailable. Louis Wolfson drew up a new version during 2011 in Porto Rico, where he has lived since 1994. It was published by éditions Attila in 2014.

Bibliography

• Wolfson, Louis (1970). Le Schizo et les langues. Connaissance de l'inconscient (in French). (Introduction by Gilles Deleuze). Paris: Gallimard. ISBN 2-07-027436-5.  (new edition in 1987)
• Wolfson, Louis (October 1977). "L'épileptique sensoriel schizophrène et les langues étrangères, ou Point final à une planète infernale". Change (in French): 119–130.  (changes and additions to Le Schizo et les langues)
• Wolfson, Louis. "Full Stop for an Infernal Planet or The Schizophrenic Sensorial Epileptic and Foreign Languages". Semiotext(e).  (changes and additions to Le Schizo et les langues, translated into English)
• Wolfson, Louis (1984). Ma mère, musicienne, est morte de maladie maligne mardi à minuit au milieu du mois de mai mille977 au mouroir Memorial à Manhattan. Bibliothèque des Analytica (in French). Paris: Navarin. ISSN 0756-273X.
• Wolfson, Louis (2012). Ma mère, musicienne, est morte de maladie maligne mardi à minuit au milieu du mois de mai mille977 au mouroir Memorial à Manhattan. Bibliothèque des Analytica (in French). (new, augmented edition). Le Rayol, France: Éditions Attila. ISBN 978-2-917084-47-2.

External links

• "Louis Wolfson et la finance" Éditions Attila. (in French)
• Wolfson dit merde à la mort", Le Fric-Frac Club. (in French)
• Louis Wolfson, « L'étudiant de langues schizophrénique », in La Revue des ressources. (in French)
• L'Absentéisme verbal de Louis Wolfson schizo, École lacanienne de psychanalyse. (in French)

References

• Auster, Paul. "One-Man Language". The New York Review of Books. Retrieved 2017-07-01.

Notes