The Translator

by John Crowley

  “Okay,” he said. “Tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  He put his huge hand out to her and this time she took it and squeezed as hard as she could, and then quickly turned away and went out the screen door, which a rising wind snatched from her hand and flung against the house, so that she had to turn back and push it shut; then she ran to where her bike was and mounted it. She didn’t look back. The night washed over her as she rode, the lightning flinging the fields and houses at her and then the dark instantly snatching them back, she still seeing them for a moment though, persistence of vision. She pedaled hard and fast, growing wildly afraid of the storm catching her. It almost did too, the first big raindrops pummeling her as she crossed campus. She was wet and panting with effort when she came into the little compound; the first great ripping shriek and fall of real thunder came just as she pulled open her door, and she yelled out loud with it in triumph and terror.

  3.

  So every day that summer she rose early and studied his language; she walked to the dining hall to speak it with her soldiers through lunch, went with them to the labs where, each within his own cubicle, they listened and repeated the surreal little poems they heard. Everywhere in Yalta you can smell the sea. Everywhere I look I see dry land. There is nowhere I can go. And after dinner she mounted her bike and rode out to the house at the end of the street where the fields began.

  He had gotten a typewriter from the Slavic Languages Department, an ancient un-American-looking thing whose name in enameled letters on its brow she worked out as he watched:

  “Oondervud,” she said.

  “Lenin had same,” he said. “Can be seen still in his office, now shrine. Undervud.”

  “Oh,” she said, and laughed. “Oh.”

  He had typed on this machine all his poems, those he had written since leaving the Soviet Union, and those he had carried out with him, here he said, tapping his breast with the blessing fingers of his right hand. Beside his he laid the English versions she brought, typed on Ben’s machine.

  She felt at first, and never entirely ceased feeling, like a slow pupil, a fumbling apprentice without even the skills to know how to begin, as though he had to teach her English as well as Russian; as though her only role was to nod, and puzzle, and shake her head and laugh in bafflement, while he worked calmly (calmly, mostly) through the agonies of metamorphosis. His meanings struggling to get out, like chicks from their hard shells. But he said it wasn’t like that: there wasn’t a poem trying to get out of one language and into another; the shell and the chick were one.

  “When I was a little kid,” she said, “I mean a really little kid, I used to wonder if poems in other languages rhymed in the languages they were written in, or only rhymed when you translated them into English.” She wiped the sweat from her upper lip with a forefinger; the papers between them were dotted with drops from their foreheads, hard labor for sure.

  “Yes,” he said, not listening.

  “I guess I thought English words were the real names of things, and other languages were just like masks; games those people played. For fun.”

  “You see here,” he said, holding a limp sheet.

  “I mean how could things have two real names?”

  “Let us look,” he said. He put his finger on the words she had typed.

  In some worlds my torturer is but a man as I am

  And his bosses are men, as well

  And their bosses men like me

  And the leader a man, a man I myself could be.

  Weep, weep, children; mothers, run and hide;

  Go, day; sink, sun, don’t look upon us.

  “Is not instruction, you see,” he said. “You instruct stars to turn, day to go; my lines say only that they will.”

  She shrugged one shoulder slightly.

  “Rhythm, though, is right.” He looked down at it doubtfully. “Yes, right.”

  In some worlds my torturer is a being not like me

  And his father is a fallen angel

  whose father is a heedless god

  whose father is the abyss to whom the leader bows.

  See not, children; mothers, blind their eyes;

  Gather, clouds; fall, night, and cover us.

  In some worlds he is the tongue in my own mouth

  In some worlds he is the child of my body

  He dies of shame in some and lies unburied

  In some he never dies, outlives the sun.

  “Can the lines not be four beats, as mine are? Ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum ba-dum.”

  His Russian rhythms were always stronger than her English ones; when she tried to duplicate them they sounded like drum-thumps.

  And every world and every sun’s so near

  To every other one! So near

  The subtlest blade could not be passed between them

  And dreamers cannot know from which to which they wake.

  And I: I lift my eyes from your letter in my hands

  “‘Look up from’ is better,” Kit said. “Use ‘look up from.’”

  “‘Look up from,’” he said. He changed it with a yellow pencil.

  And I: I look up from your letter in my hands

  Because I have heard a sound in every world:

  In some it is a chink of spurs upon the stair

  In some a raven’s shriek that tears the night.

  “Should be, yes, comma after ‘in some’? ‘In some, a little clink of spurs…’?”

  “‘Chink.’” He looked doubtful again. He’d wanted “tinkle” at first, and she’d had to talk him out of it. “I don’t understand that line,” she said. “That and the next. By the way.”

  “Ah. You see. Everyone knows. Those spurs come from last stanzas of Evgeny Onegin, novel in verse of Pushkin. Spór nezapnïy zvón. After Onegin has read his beloved’s letter of rejection. As he stands in her drawing room he hears her husband, the sound of the spurs on his boots, approaching. It is the last of Onegin we see.”

  He opened his hands: simple.

  “And the raven?”

  “Yes. This was common name, usual name, for police vans. Ravens. Because both are black. Ravens arrive for arrest. Not now, long ago. Now, simply an ordinary car.” He pointed at the stanza. “So, different outcomes of a secret letter, in different worlds. In some only disappointment, trouble, an embarrassment; perhaps nothing at all. But in other worlds…other consequences.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, people don’t know that. I mean Americans.” He looked at her, so hurt and baffled that for a moment she almost laughed. “There’s an English word for a police wagon, the old kind; it was called a paddy wagon. But that’s comical. Like silent movie comedies.”

  “No. Not comical.”

  “There’s another name, a woman’s name, what is it.” He waited while she searched within for the term. “Black Maria!” she cried. “That’s it. How about that? Black Maria’s cry destroys the night.”

  Now it was his turn to shrug, unable to know what effect this might have. “Not a bird,” he said.

  “No.”

  “You see.”

  “Well,” she said. “You could have a footnote.”

  “No! No no. You will not march all over my poems with muddy footnotes.” He pondered, lit a cigarette. “And these cars are black?”

  “I guess.”

  “Strange,” he said. “A bird and woman, both black.”

  It had grown dark, indoors at least; the lamp he had turned on over the table where they worked no longer illuminated the whole of his little place. But in the windows the midsummer night was still alight. He stood, and then, seeming still to be absorbed in thought, he lay down full-length on the linoleum.

  “Cooler,” he said.

  She watched him for a while, and maybe because he smiled at her she came too, and stretched out beside him. It all looked different.

  “In some worlds a black bird,” he said. “In some a black woman.”

  “Are there really different world
s?” she asked. “Do you think that? Is that why you wrote that?” It seemed to diminish it as a poem if he did, and yet to make him himself huger.

  He seemed to ponder. “No,” he said then. “No. There is but one world, only there are many worlds within it, for it exists in more than one way at once; and these different ways cannot be translated into one another.”

  “Like poems.”

  “Like poems. You cannot translate. You can only make other poems.”

  The smoke of his cigarette was like a small being, a jinn folding its arms and salaaming, turning and dissipating, appearing again. “Then what’s the original?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps there is not one. Perhaps there are many translations but no original.”

  “Or the original’s lost,” she said.

  “Perhaps even more like poems,” he said. “Events in the world can perhaps be like rhyming words in poems: they can only, what would you say, pay off in one world, one translation, not in others. In one world people are cheering and weeping with joy, for best conclusion has been reached, secret is revealed, heroes have come home safe. In another world, say this world, same events are events of no significance; a pact has been made that will be broken just as many others have been. A man and a woman have misunderstood when they were to meet at train station and train is already gone, but there will be another.”

  “Couldn’t sometimes they rhyme in both worlds?”

  “Oh yes. Sometimes, not often, a rhyme can be found both in this world and in another. We call this coincidence.”

  She felt the cool linoleum through her thin shirt, and she saw the undersides of the card table and the chairs, and yet she felt aloft too, rising. “How would you learn, though. That there are other worlds.”

  “By same means as you perceive what poems say, the nothing that they speak of: by metaphor. By seeing that two things, all unconnected, are connected.”

  “Like snow.”

  “Like…”

  “Snow. The last word in that Housman poem.”

  “Yes,” he said, and smiled again, glad for her it seemed. “Yes. Just so. A-plus for you.”

  She laughed, and without thinking or seemingly without thinking she turned her body so that she could place her head on his stomach. They lay looking at the ceiling or at the window where the light remained, and thought; and the worlds turned and multiplied as they thought, each within all the others, all linked yet different.

  Wake, children, wake; mothers, lift your faces;

  Turn away, stars; rise, sun, and dry our tears.

  Each pale night she would ride back beside the empty road, listening to the insects, her bare legs brushed by the roadside grasses, only infrequently a car coming up behind her and passing with a rush of air and odor. Then in her room at her own desk and lamp she studied her Russian lessons until her eyes began to close and the words to turn back into the nonsense from which they had arisen; still she couldn’t sleep long, and awoke with the solstice sun thinking of what she and he had done with his lines, reshaping them, making them English, coming up sometimes with plain or commonplace English equivalents for what seemed at first mysteriously and wholly other, as though in the dark she picked up a common object and felt it come slowly or suddenly clear to her what it was. A poem called “1941” told of the Red Army troops sold to Death like grain, grain that was na kornyu: “in rooted condition,” Falin said, gesturing, acting out the inexpressible as in a game of charades. “Growing tall, not, not sprouts, you see, you see…” But she hadn’t, not till she sat in her room and it was delivered to her: standing was all it meant, troops in their ranks sold like standing grain, and it had the same fearful connotation too, for standing grain is ready for harvest. He had pulled her into his Russian and she had to make her way back alone.

  She’d get up then, and type and retype the line, trying to fit her new line into the meter of his, and also keep the meaning of each successive line contained in the same boxcar out of which it had come, and almost always failing. He’d forbidden her to use rhyme unless her English rhyme words fell exactly where his Russian ones did, which almost never happened, though sometimes it did, or almost did. Corona and vorona, he wrote, crown and crow. Coincidence.

  She thought, long after, that she had not then ever explored a lover’s body, learned its folds and articulations, muscle under skin, bone under muscle, but that this was really most like that: this slow probing and working in his language, taking it in or taking hold of it; his words, his life, in her heart, in her mouth too. Daylong she listened to her teachers and the air force boys and the mechanical voices in the language lab use the same language and she would feel the secret knowledge of what she did with him, with it, in the nights: she alone.

  The library in the middle of the campus was as cool as a cave and nearly empty in July. It was in places like this—solemn and welcoming, high and dim and paneled in dark wood and going on in many directions—that Kit’s dreams often took place. The dreams didn’t have this smell, though, the sleeping breath of uncounted paper pages, old glue, what else. Because you can inhale in dreams but not smell, just as you can bleed but not be hurt.

  She had asked Falin to meet her here and not come to the little language school compound for her, and he smiled and agreed without a word, and she felt a hot shame, that she was protecting him and herself too from being caught at something, something they weren’t doing, the protecting being all there was to catch. Still it was better to be here, to walk over here beneath the huge old campus oaks, to drift through the stacks and open Russian books almost as foreign to her as ever, or just linger in the great reading room where no one was, walking as in a forest glade along the tall rows of books no one ever removed.

  Her hand, passing idly over their backs, came to a bright red one, bright once, called Folk-Tales and Fables of Old Russia. She took it out, guessed at the date (old but not very old), and looked at the title page. It has been printed in 1942, and all the profits were to go to a fund for children made homeless by the German invasion.

  Besprizornye.

  She looked at the list of editors and translators, American and Russian, and the cheerful flat red-and-black illustrations like Easter eggs. She wondered if she had actually once read it or looked at it. She turned the pages, and there was a card at one place, a computer punch card like the ones she had been given for her classes, that day in the field house where she had first seen Falin. What was that doing here? Had someone looked at this book, so recently? The card said nothing, told nothing. She put the book down on a long table beneath a lamp, open at the place where the card had been put or left, and sat to read.

  Once, God and the Devil contended for Rus, and the Devil won.

  Going happily to collect his prize, the Devil found the way barred. God had decided that after all the Devil could not have the souls of the people. All else he could take from them, but not their souls.

  The Devil complained that it wasn’t fair, and God admitted that (thank God) things aren’t always fair.

  So the Devil set himself up in state, and demanded that the people of Rus come before him, and each deliver up to him the thing he loved best. In his rage at having been cheated he was most exacting, and Death sat at his side and kept the books.

  The Devil took from the miser his money, from the Tsar his triple crown, from the Patriarch his staff, from the mother the love of her child. One by one they came before him and went away weeping and sorrowing.

  At length one young lad came before him who appeared to have little to yield up. The Devil demanded of him what he loved best, whatever it was. The boy pleaded to be spared; he offered to give the Devil anything else, even the sum of all that he had. Take his clothes and his hat; take his felt boots, and he will walk barefoot in winter; take the sight of his eyes.

  No, the Devil wanted none of that; he would be put off with no substitutes. He wanted what the boy loved best. And what was it?

  At last the boy told the Devil what it was. />
  A song? the Devil asked.

  It’s my own, the boy said weeping. My very own song I have made.

  Well, the Devil said, let’s have it.

  Begging and weeping were no use, and so at last the boy lifted his voice and sang. For a time everyone ceased bewailing to listen. The Devil listened, his clawed hand cupped behind his ear. Even Death held still to hear.

  Mine, said the Devil when the song was done. Mine forever and ever. Next!

  The boy hung his head in grief and went away.

  But not so long afterward, among the poor people of Rus from whom so much had been taken, that song began again to be heard. The boy had fooled the Devil, and had still kept what it was he had given away: for that’s the way it is with a song, as everyone but the Devil knows. The boy sang the song in the deserted roadways and in the villages from which every beloved cow had been taken. And by and by, in the woods where no flower grew and in the empty churches and even in the desolate courts of the Tsar, the little song could be heard, a song about nothing that filled the eyes with tears and the throat with joy to hear.

  So the people of Rus had a song at least to comfort them in those days. But still life was very hard, since the Devil had taken every other thing that anyone loved away. And in the end, of course, one way and another, he got a good number of their souls as well.

  She looked up. Falin stood nearby, his hands in the pockets of his pleated slacks. She hadn’t heard him come in. Without any warning, her eyes filled with tears, and the light glittered and swam.

  “You must hate them so much,” she said. “For…for what they took, for all that they took.”

  “No,” he said, “no no,” as though he knew why she had said this, knew just what she meant. “Some I despised. But when you hate, you touch. I wanted not to touch. You know in my poem ‘Bez’ are ones who hate. Ones who can never take their fingers from those throats. Now come.”