When I translated Julia Kristeva’s Dostoïevski face à la mort, ou le sexe hanté du langage, I faced puzzling choices about the subtitle because there is no single meaning for that phrase. Is language haunted by sex, or is sex haunted by language?

Maybe rewriting these provocative expressions in the active voice will make the choice between them clearer. Let’s see: “Dostoyevsky in the Face of Death, or Sex Haunts Language.” Or perhaps “Dostoyevsky in the Face of Death, or Language Haunts Sex.” Alas, a conversion to active voice doesn’t make the choice any less baffling. And while I’m struggling to determine which of those two expressions corresponds better to what Julia Kristeva meant when she wrote “le sexe hanté du langage,” another thought occurs to me: can we not understand “hanté” as just an ordinary adjective modifying the noun “sexe”? So another possible translation might read “Dostoyevsky in the Face of Death, or the Haunted Sex of Language.”

The conscientious translator now has three choices. Either language haunts sex, sex haunts language, or language is characterized by haunted sex. (The fourth choice, “the haunted language of sex,” while quite evocative, even suggestive, is out of the question. Nothing in the original allows for such a translation.) If language is characterized by haunted sex, then it is only a small step to the notion that language is haunted by sex, leaving “sex haunted by language” out in the cold.

And so this is the choice I made as the translator of Julia Kristeva’s scintillating study of Fyodor Dostoyevsky for the English version of her title: Dostoyevsky in the Face of Death, or Language Haunted by Sex.

But what do these words mean for Julia Kristeva? In a book of dense, focused analysis, everywhere marked by her passionate insight into her subject, there is a paragraph of free association marked by ellipses in the manner of Céline, the novelist. Kristeva’s language is poetic, and it’s a striking admission of the effect Dostoyevsky has on her. Here it is:

I read these lines tracing a faith, its bounds and rebounds, ways, his voice, I hear it, it vibrates, catches fire, goes out… ellipses, and let it explode… This is not Céline’s catastrophic opera, Godless apocalypse and “let nothing exist”… Dostoyevsky’s deluge is an invocation of the invisible that he is not looking for… he has found it… he has discovered that sex (which is not pornography) is in the language…It’s the sex of language… it haunts it… the drive seeking to say it… the desire to the death to say it…it haunts… it harangues… it is said and it is contradicted, it charges, it discharges and it threatens… the doors and the arguments, the links and life…it huffs, it rolls, and it grabs…it grabs me… it aggravates me… it’s too much… it’s that all the same… injury or magic… I’m with it.

“It’s the sex of language… it haunts it.” Really? Could the author please be more specific? Which “it” is it? I wrote to Julia Kristeva and asked for her interpretation, telling her I thought she meant “sex haunts language.” Yes, yes, that’s it, that’s exactly right, “Le sexe hante le langage,” she replied, adding that I had understood right, as usual. With such a friendly voice bolstering my instincts, I stayed with my choice, though in the less precise passive voice, “language haunted by sex.” And there is no second-guessing once the book lands on the desks of readers.

But what does a language haunted by sex mean for Dostoyevsky? There are many kinds of answers. Sexual desire is what makes all the Karamazovs, including the father, speak the way they do; their language is pervasively haunted by sex. Elsewhere, those infamous Dostoyevskian pedophiles give voice to their reprehensible acts and thereby enhance them; their language too is haunted by sex. The book may speak only of hands, lips, legs, and laughter, but the narrative, Kristeva asserts, “makes penetration wildly manifest.” In another story, two women come together unwittingly, and Kristeva writes that “sadism in the feminine becomes frenetic” when they say “we kissed each other till our lips were swollen.” It’s the speaking of it that is haunted by sex.

As readers, you will enjoy finding other examples.

Armine Kotin Mortimer is professor emerita of French literature at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is the translator of Dostoyevsky in the Face of Death:or Language Haunted by Sex.