The Translator

by John Crowley

  She was a good student: she had nothing else to do but her homework, and she did it, as she almost never had in high school. On a Friday after lunch she went up to her room to finish a poem of her own due for Falin’s class at two, or maybe to write a letter to Ben. She didn’t think that the poem she was writing was one of the real ones. It was carefully impersonal, artificial even, and she guessed that its cleverness—all it really had to go on—wouldn’t be apparent to someone who knew English only uncertainly; jokes must be the last thing you begin to get. After poems themselves even. Reverse your answer, Love: not no but on.

  The letter was the same. In the kingdom of Rayn they used to cut your tongue out for lying—they did, Ben, didn’t they?—but the sunsets were spectacular. Here it’s the reverse. Would he know she wasn’t really talking to him, wasn’t telling him anything because of something she couldn’t tell? She hoped he knew, and she watched her hope carefully, so it wouldn’t betray her to him.

  That day she wrote nothing after all. She sat for a time unmoving at her tiny desk and then lay down on her bed. She closed her eyes and thought of having a machine like a tape recorder, only small, not suitcase-sized like George’s, and so sensitive it could record her words as she thought them.

  When she woke up, two hours had passed and half of Falin’s class was over.

  She lay a moment in astonished shame, feeling pinned to the bed. Except at Our Lady (sitting up in the dayroom chair, head lolling), she wasn’t someone who slept in the day; it always made her feel dizzy and sad and heavy and hateful (as she did all the time at Our Lady). She felt horror too, the first class she’d missed. Oh well oh well. She went out into the silent halls (everybody else dutifully in class) and went to the bathroom to wash out her woolly mouth.

  Then what? She sure wasn’t going to walk into that class when it was almost over. She went back to her room and her desk and her letter to Ben. I see Elvis got his discharge. They didn’t wipe that smirk off his face though. If he can get out why can’t you? I’m glad there’s no war going on now Ben except for a Cold War. I really hate that term, Cold War, it almost makes me feel crazy to write it down: a war that’s cold, what could be worse, that freezes instead of burning, everyone frozen in place, without passion or motion, as though it could last forever. But anyway they don’t shoot at you, do they, the bad guys? And you don’t shoot back. So that’s all right.

  She opened her French text, and closed it again; she listened to the room and the building, lone footsteps in the corridor, tick of the heater. Weirdly, transgressively free. She put on her coat and went out walking.

  Running from the University gates to the center of town, where a comical courthouse lifted a pointy dome, College Street passed by bookstores and diners and an art theater that was showing The Cranes Are Flying, and a coffee shop or restaurant that was a local landmark, the Castle, its front made to look like stone and little crenellations carved above the door.

  Kit went into the bookstore, a crowded and cluttered one that had literary magazines and books of poetry and glossy paperbacks put out by university presses, and the New York Times a day late, and more commonplace things too. All her life Kit would find herself to be stingy and close about only one thing, and that was the buying of books, and she would never find out why, much as she questioned herself when she stood in a bookstore pondering the purchase of one, one she needed or wanted but couldn’t bring herself to put down money for, since maybe after all she wouldn’t read it: a kind of shyness or self-effacement. She looked them over now, her covetousness aroused but her hands remaining in her pockets. Among the books in Poetry was one called Terror and the Muse: Soviet Poetry Under Stalin.

  She pulled it out. There was one poem of Falin’s in it. Above it was a note by the translator, saying that it was part of a long poem called “Bez,” which meant “without,” or “-less” in compound words like bezlyubye, “lovelessness.” He said that in the long poem Falin created a choral meditation somewhat like a Russian Spoon River Anthology, or like Stephen Vincent Benét’s celebrated John Brown’s Body, a poem Kit had hated. She moved her finger down the lines, almost shy to look upon them; then she began to read, going back when she lost the thread, stitching it into her own thought as best she could.

  After long thought I have at last decided:

  I must write to denounce my neighbor.

  Evidence both seen and invisible has so accumulated

  That it cannot be ignored

  And I know what my duty is.

  I believe that nothing that has been reported can ever be erased,

  And everything unreported likewise will not go unrecorded,

  And everything that can be known is somewhere known,

  If we are vigilant, and if we have done our duty.

  I will tell how once returning home

  On an evening when snow was beginning to fall

  Seeing the light far off in his window

  He began unaccountably to weep

  And for a time could not go on.

  It lasted only moments and he has forgotten it but there is no denying it.

  I will denounce my neighbor for it is my duty

  As smiling boys do their duty to wild birds:

  Once, he cut a cabbage in half, and saw that the two halves

  Were a demon’s face and its reflection;

  And he saw that each face also had two halves, left and right,

  And he wondered if symmetry was the deepest truth about the world

  Or if he only wondered at it because of his own division,

  Himself a creature struck in two as by a swordcut

  One half the inexact mirror of the other.

  I will write if I can find paper and a pen

  Though there have been sudden shortages lately of these things

  Shortages that are certainly someone’s fault

  But around here we have done all right without these and other things.

  If I can find no paper or pen, I will write in the wet sand

  With one arm of a broken pliers;

  I will sew letters together with hawthorns and straw,

  I will write in spit on the pale undersides of leaves,

  I will write with the torn hieroglyphics of moonlight on water.

  It is my duty as a citizen not to keep these things hidden

  But to bring them to the attention of those who need to know.

  She sat down, on a box of books waiting to be unpacked, and read it again. She wondered what the duty of smiling boys to wild birds was; she wondered what words in the poem gave the sense of desolation and cold that she found in it. Something more than the “snow beginning to fall.” Bezlyubye: lovelessness.

  She slipped the book back into the space it had left.

  Did it seem to be a poem by him, was it what she would have expected? She couldn’t tell. She thought of him standing before their class and reading the poem by Pushkin; is that how he would read his own poems, this poem?

  She went out of the bookstore and turned left the few steps to the Castle; went to the counter and asked for coffee; sat with it before her, still seeing the page she had read. She wondered if there are some poems that are moving or touching simply because of the things to which they refer, the griefs and terrors that stand behind them. Would that be a bad kind of poem, would it be too easy to do that, to evoke those things that the reader will surely be thinking and feeling, though not because of anything you wrote, only because of the world in which you wrote? And would such a poem be different for readers who read it in another world, as she did, overhearing it maybe, something not intended for her ears at all?

  She turned halfway around on her revolving stool just to feel it move, and found herself looking at Falin. He was sitting very near, in a high-backed booth, and he was looking at her. It was hard to believe she hadn’t seen him when she came in. Maybe he had been summoned here by her thinking about his poem; or maybe she had been made to ponder his poem because he was himself so
close by.

  “Professor Falin,” she said. She was about to go on, so sorry about today, when he raised a finger and wagged it No.

  “Not professor,” he said. “No. I profess nothing. I have no, no…” He was stuck.

  “Degree. Ph.D.,” she guessed. He nodded and shrugged as though that might be it.

  “Well, um,” she said, and he watched her search for some other form of address.

  “Innokenti Isayevich,” he said, smiling as though he knew this was well beyond this American girl to say, and he pointed at the booth seat opposite him. She got off her stool and slid into the seat somewhat mousily (could feel her head duck and her shoulders contract, why should they, but they did) and pressed her hands into her jacket pockets.

  “Not in class today,” he said. “You were sick?”

  “Asleep,” she said, unable not to.

  “Ah well.”

  The counterman, before Kit could protest, placed her (cold) coffee before her. “I,” she said. “I just now, just a little while ago, read your poem. It was printed in a book, an anthology…”

  “No, no,” he said, smiling again. “No, not my poem.”

  “The one about denunciation.”

  “My poem,” he said, “was a poem in Russian. The poem in the book was a poem—perhaps a poem—in English. This I believe you read.”

  “Was it a bad translation?”

  “I can’t say,” he said. “There were no rhymes, and my poem rhymed, and had a certain meter. The one there had no strict meter that I can perceive. It was free verse. Two poems could not be the same that differ so much.”

  “But I could see the poem in it, a little. What it was about.”

  “Ah. My poem and this one are about the same things. Perhaps. But even so they do not say the same things about those things.”

  “It was just so sad.”

  “I point out one small example,” he said. “Where this translation said I will denounce my neighbor my poem said only I will write about my neighbor.”

  “Why would they translate it that way then?”

  “Because the translator was clever enough to know that in my country now, if we say someone has written about someone else, we mean the person has supplied to authorities information or just speculation, enough perhaps to have him investigated, even arrested. We say of someone, I don’t trust her—I think she writes. So the poem may be read in that way, and that is why the translator chose this word denounce. But to write, in Russian, is still also to—to just write. Write letters, poetry.”

  She had never tried to translate poetry in any way except literally, as though cracking a code in which it was hidden, a chest or safe more beautiful than what was kept in it.

  She said: “I don’t see why it couldn’t be translated more accurately.”

  “Perhaps it could.” He moved the papers and things before him square with one another, his cigarettes and box of matches, notebook, a small book bound in pale green linen. “But it would then be different poem in English. Still not mine.”

  She thought this was too chaste, or too abnegating. It was too sad to think of too. She knew there were poets everybody said were impossible to translate (Horace, Pushkin) and others that weren’t (Shakespeare), but she didn’t know why they said that, or what made the difference.

  “Now in your poem of May,” he said, and she felt a small sensation in her breast. “Could it, do you think, be translated so that every line would end as yours do, with a certain consonant?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “If I were a translator, I’d try.”

  He laughed in delight at this, and she thought she hadn’t seen him laugh before; still his eyes went on taking her in, her and everything.

  “Do you think,” she said, “you’ll ever write in English?”

  “It would be hard choice to make,” he said, as though he pondered it often.

  “But why would it be a choice?” she asked. “Couldn’t you write in both?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It may be that languages are like lovers. You can have more than one at a time. But perhaps it is possible to love only one at a time.”

  She knew as little of lovers as of languages. She thought of a piece she’d read in National Geographic about an old Indian, the last of his tribe able to speak its language: it had never been recorded, and there was no one else left who understood it. You couldn’t be more alone than that.

  He had begun to gather up his things and put them in his funny case. He said: “May I ask you. In your poem. Was it, the soldier, a person now alive?”

  “Well yes.”

  “It seemed when I read,” he said, “perhaps not. Perhaps this poem told of a boy who every May returns. But who can come no closer.”

  “Oh no,” she said. She saw that it could be taken so, she hadn’t seen it but now she could, and always would. “No.”

  “Well.” He stood, as though unfolding his long body. “Now. You must come to class next week.”

  “Oh yes, yes,” she said ardently. “I mean that was just so not like me. Falling asleep.”

  “Since you have no doctor’s excuse,” he said, “you can now not get perfect grade. So you must come always.”

  He smiled at her, shrugging on his great enveloping coat; his smile, this amazing open secret. She didn’t know whether to laugh because what he said was a joke, or look grave because it wasn’t. She had understood all that he had said, with no way of knowing what he meant. It was as though he himself existed here in this town in this state in translation, ambiguous, slightly wrong, too highly colored or wrongly nuanced. Within him was the original, which no one could read.

  He looked back, at the door, and she waved a small farewell.

  She pushed away her cup, feeling both privileged and besmirched: anyway as she had not felt ever before. On the table was the box of matches he had toyed with, left behind. She touched it, pressed her thumb against the little paper drawer. Then closed her hand over it and pocketed it.

  When she got back to her room, Fran was practicing, but stopped and put down her viola as soon as Kit entered.

  “I like it,” Kit said. “Go ahead.”

  “Eh,” Fran said, a dismissive New York sound that by the semester’s end Kit would have acquired from her.

  “No really.” Kit had avoided all her mother’s efforts to give her music lessons, and the sight and sound of someone actually playing an instrument, in the flesh, an otherwise ordinary person like herself, thrilled and fascinated her, a magical act, or at least a magic act.

  “Somebody called for you,” Fran said, falling back on her bed with her Kierkegaard. “A sort of redneck-sounding guy? Named Jackie Norden?”

  “Really?”

  “Really,” Fran said wearily.

  “Well,” said Kit. That sense of doors opening if you dared press on them, if you could find their knobs and jambs in the apparently seamless world around you. This one being the one she had long avoided or chosen not to see, the one she had skirted so artfully through school.

  Except that she hadn’t skirted it, not in the end. She had not skirted it at all.

  “Well,” she said again, alarmed and elated. “Well I’ll be.”

  7.

  The Christmas when Kit was a senior in high school, Ben came home on the last leave of his enlistment. He had been lucky to be posted in the States, he told her, he could have been one of the GIs they watched on TV, getting turkey dinners on desert islands or arctic airstrips, unwrapping presents from home.

  That winter Kit had begun baby-sitting, and learned to write blank verse. She had little interest in babies and no natural ability with them, except in the telling of stories; yet she preferred infants and toddlers, who could be put to sleep early with any luck, releasing her to explore the still house in a close approximation of solitude, close enough to make her giddily gleeful. A sip or two out of the dusty liqueur bottles. Once she came upon the family supply of condoms in a blond dresser, though at fi
rst she didn’t know what they were.

  Blank verse was just a matter of nerve. At the library she’d come upon the old Mermaid series of Elizabethan poets, beautiful books that just fit into her new Mark Cross bag; and she started reading Marlowe and Massinger and Webster and counting the beats on her fingers, da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum da-dum. As soon as she found the courage to do it too, it began immediately knitting lines up as though by itself, long swatches growing longer, like the scarves Marion knitted while watching TV, holding them up at the night’s end startled by their sudden length.

  This Park is green. I will not see him here.

  So fall, you leaves, and change your seasons, trees;

  Turn, moons, from full to dark to full again

  Until earth bows her head before the sun

  And winter comes, and snow; and so does he.

  “Who’s this ‘he’?” Ben asked.

  “Nobody,” she said.

  “Oh come on.”

  She meant it though. She thought her “he” was like that “she” who appeared in the poems of male poets so continually, who also appeared in their biographies sometimes, sometimes not. The Eternal Feminine, George had said, as though he knew this, as though everybody did. Female poets didn’t seem to have an Eternal Masculine; the “you” or the “he” in their poems seemed to be more often actual people, being chided or pleaded with or charmed. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Kit loved nobody, but she thought she had a right to this faceless he anyway, and set herself problems in verse to solve, all about him. One or two she had put, anonymously typed, in Burke Eggert’s locker or bookbag at school, knowing he’d never guess.

  Burke was a football player and senior-class officer a year ahead of her, lean and tall (a quarterback), with Ben’s dark short hair, but thick glasses too, designed probably to correct a still-detectable crossed eye: Kit cherished that weakness. She couldn’t think of any way to attract him, and didn’t try. In her diary and inwardly she assembled the parts of her crush like the elements of a hard poem, oddly assorted things to be connected in such a way that they made an anfractuous figure, a tetrahedron maybe, solid and gleaming and worthy of the feelings that had evoked it, that it evoked.