Kate Briggs, translator of Twenty Minutes of Silence and of Hélène Bessette’s first novel Lili is Crying, wrote in an essay for The Yale Review in September 2025: How, why, and under what material circumstances a writer, translator, or publisher feels compelled to respond to the call of a past work — all of this is often wholly incidental. While there can be deep interest as well as contingency and opportunity at play, there is rarely a clear logic to it.