Translator's Note Unhomed

When asked to contribute to a speculative fiction folio, I noticed only afterward I’d picked two tales that revolve around houses. Freud would say I protest too much. (I am merely grateful his list of impossible things—to govern, to teach, and to cure—does not include translation.)

- Edward Gauvin

The house in every incarnation from crumbling castle to suburban abode, whether with skeletons in the closet or hearts beneath the floorboards, is a mainstay of the fantastic, locus of ghosts and seat of the self. The French fantastique as a genre is bound up with the word étrange of whose supernatural suggestion our “strange” retains but an attenuated echo (“estrangement” preserves some of the alienating force, though not its vector). And so étrange in this context is generally rendered as “uncanny,” both of which are standard for the German unheimlich—literally, “unhomely.” These words, each with their own origins and baggage, triangulate a concept that derives its lasting power from its very impalpability, but it is to translation that we owe their collusive proximity.