“Sometimes, also, unpredictable methane explosions and murderers make entire dialogues explode, crack, or shatter misplaced voices, reduce to nothingness loves and friendships, destroy in a flash the slow formulation of an accent, of a breath, of rectifiable language tics. Suddenly, that voice rings false, the character rings hollow; careful, he’s going to implode. So everything has to start anew, there is no hope of mending anything. The translator must demolish the entire edifice of that voice, suddenly broken, condemned to a definitive muteness. In recreating it through other means, he will probably notice that other voices in the crowd, if not all of them, also need to be recreated: one methane explosion often brings about others, almost immediately, in a chain reaction, or with a delay.”
In order to offset the disappearance of all those adjectives, adverbs, stage directions, comparisons and metaphors, entire passages, and to emphasize what enhances the text—for example the number of my lines at the bottom of each page—I add the following images to my American author’s book, for through my stubborn and anonymous‡ work these lines, my images, and my presence expand like
“The afternoon shadow on the sundial
Showing that labor can demand its requital;
By the fire, who can deny it, the standard meter;
An unrolled trouser leg, after the river;
The mended boot whose heel is remade;
While he clears the table, a flunky’s pile of plates;
The half-drawn sword stick brandished in a duel;
When an elderly pianist shrinks, the piano stool;
The new tear-off calendar replacing the old one;
The soufflé when it’s taken out of the oven;
The sail at the first upturn in weather, descended;
The table before a large dinner party, extended;
The flame of the match head;
The roots of chives in the garden bed;
When its resistance breaks, the elastic umbrella fastener;
When the bed replaces the cradle, the comforter.”
(Rousselian Note)
‡ I almost wrote autonomous!
Chapter 3
THE TRANSLATOR ADDS SOME BACK IN
*
* The character Doris, the “servant with a big heart” and personal secretary to Abel Prote, seems insufficiently developed to me. Therefore, I will take the liberty of fleshing her out (without, of course, asking the permission of the author, who, decidedly lacking in common sense, remains a bit curt and uptight). After all, the ancillary functions merit our interest, don’t they … For example, in New York, when she proposes her professional services to David Grey, who accepts them gladly, I envisioned that she would soon offer him much more. What the young Grey doesn’t know is that Doris is already in a relationship with Abel Prote, the Parisian writer whose novel, curiously titled (N.d.T.), Grey is translating into English.
Hence Doris’s back-and-forths between Paris and New York, between Prote and Grey, bearing witness as much to her “big heart” as to the liberty of her morals. She is a well-read courtesan. In my version of the novel, Doris acts as a double agent, more of a corrupt muse than a faithful employee. (Temptress’s Dark Side)
*
*All of the following passage:
My father was a long-distance captain, petroleum engineer, geologist, film actor, lover of French poetry and literature, test driver and sewage worker, dowser, mason, upholsterer, surveyor, gigolo in his spare time, pen pusher and amateur painter, sculptor and rod-fisherman, champion swimmer (it was at the public pool that he seduced the water nymph who would become my mother), air traffic controller, distinguished skier and seasoned mountaineer (it was to the immaculate and then-deserted slopes that he would soon bring her on vacation), lead trawler, collector of postage stamps and smoker of cigars (it’s presumably because of these pastimes that over the years he later tolerated the drudge of married life).
As they say in the notes at the bottom of administrative forms, “Cross out where not applicable” or “Check the appropriate box.” But when it comes to a father, does there exist such a thing as nonapplicable or an appropriate box? So I leave as is this improbable enumeration and supply neither birth date nor social security number. Nevertheless, here are a few specifications that will never appear on any administrative form:
Comfortably settled in front of the black-and-white television screen, a glass of cognac close at hand, a pungent Cuban in the other, my father never missed a rugby match or a night of wrestling (I would watch TV with him sometimes, after my mother went upstairs to go to bed, and I still remember the match between the White Angel and the infamous Béthune Executioner, in a balaclava and wearing all black: athletes dressed for the small screen even then). His usual disappointments because of the ORTF didn’t stop him from looking forward to the next sports broadcast. Often away for work, he would travel to India, Brazil, the United States, or, more modestly, to Marseille, for stretches varying from a few weeks to several months. He spoke English fluently and, in the 50s, was a fervent defender of all that came from America: checkered shirts with a button-up collar, Johnnie Walker “Red Label” whiskey with the swashbuckler in a redingote and shiny top hat on the label, LPs of jazz and that famous burgeoning music, rock ‘n’ roll, Reader’s Digest, plastic models of the B-25 bomber, of battleships and aircraft carriers, of dinosaurs and pterodactyls, cars with streamlined wing tips in shiny chromes (he owned a Versailles, then an Ariane, before buying an Ovni: the nauseating DS), he defended the dollar and progress, morality, technique, and work, but most importantly he displayed from morning to night an unwavering optimism. He flew in the Super Constellation and had a fondness for the multilingual flight attendants. Curiously, he did not like the cinema.
My mother, an Anglophile, made me read from a young age Somerset Maugham (I found it strange that she pronounced his name “Môme”) and Washington Irving, Charles Dickens, and Graham Greene. Sometimes on summer afternoons, lying side by side in the sun on two chaises longues (we called them “transats”), in the vast garden of the house we rented for vacation, she and I would read the pages of those novels in turn and out loud. Face protected by a large straw hat, dressed in a loose violet dress with a multicolored pattern or in a silk sari brought back from India, she would listen, a kind smile on her lips, to my hesitant and diligent voice. Then she would take over and each time I would admire her melodious accent, which enchanted me all the more because I had no other to compare it to: we rarely went to the movies and the babbling television was exclusively in French. Reading was how I learned English.
all of this passage is my own.
Scanning the horizon, I can already make out the dusty cloud of Freudians rushing over at a gallop.
Nevertheless I add with no remorse these personal confidences that evoke, through Abel Prote, his childhood and his precocious bilingualism. (Transatlantic Nubility)
*
* A recurring nightmare I used to have as a child also feels worthy of being added to my author’s text. In this nightmare, it’s neither day nor night and I’m freefalling through an undefined black space, in the grips of a violent vertigo and a complete loss of any sense of direction, between the walls of what I imagine to be a bottomless pit, a bit like the unlucky hero of “A Descent into the Maelström,” the story by Edgar Allan Poe. Then a fading into darkness, a terrifying blackout. An ellipse, a hole in the narration. Then I climb back up inexplicably, with no tether to any ground or gravity, I am weightless, levitating, or else a shell spurting from a cannon pointed to the sky. Soon I reach the summit of my trajectory, where I am immobilized for a moment in the grips of a retching that leaves me breathless, before starting on another freefall, more and more rapid, more and more panicked. Another fading into black, another loss of consciousness. This entire sequence repeats again and again, with no respite, an inexorable swinging motion. From high to low, then from low to high, given over entirely to this metronomic mechanism, whose purpose I do not know. In a certai
n way, I suffer like the condemned man of that other story by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Pit and the Pendulum,” but unlike him I have no means to change my destiny or save my life.
For several months of my childhood, I went to sleep every night with the obsessive fear of reliving what I believe today to be the very terror of torture: to know you are given over to an unfamiliar and evil will. But my nocturnal terror was not of a human executioner, merely—which is perhaps worse—of a relentless mechanism, unfamiliar, incomprehensible, absent. An inhuman machinery would launch me toward the black sky, then bring me back down to an unknown depth, again and again.
This repetitive nightmare reminds me of the Goya painting The Straw Manikin. I’ll describe it briefly. Four smiling, certainly cruel young women each hold a corner of a large square blanket over which hovers a puppet in men’s clothing, larger than a child, smaller than a man. Hard to say whether this dislocated mannequin is flying toward the cloudy sky or falling back into the blanket; he seems to float weightlessly, hands and legs sadly turned toward the earth, head curiously tilted toward his shoulder, like a hung man with a broken neck. Beneath his white face made up with blush descends a long black braid curved in the form of a flaccid penis, isolated, backlit, strikingly positioned in front of the most luminous part of the sky. The four young women’s arms are spread wide, as if to welcome the arrival of the stuffed puppet, and they seem delighted with their game, which recommences endlessly. They amuse themselves with the back and forth of the milquetoast who goes up and falls back down at their mercy, obeying the muscles of their arms. In the back and to the left, a massive square tower with a roof of red tiles is hidden in a haze of greenery. This large painting, it seems, is a cartoon tapestry, but it evokes above all a theater stage, and the décor—intangible sun, abundant foliage, half-hidden tower, stormy clouds—resembles a gigantic painted canvas stretched in front of actors, singers, or dancers. (Terrifying Night)
*
* “Doris again, Doris forever … In your name, I hear or, gold, dors, an order to sleep, Ulysses’s trip to the land of the Lotus Eaters, and also his departure and its groundwork—ho! hiss!—the wind that suddenly blows the sails before the boat has left the port to head for the open sea, adventure, the unknown; or else, the inverse, in one direction and then the other, the return to the mother land, reunion with the mother tongue after a long absence, or else the whalers of Pequod shut tightly in their fragile skiff, preparing their harpoons to stop the white monster, drive their banderillas into its milky skin covered with dreadful crustaceans, sprinkled with asterisks, like a negative of the sky. Doris, I turn to you as a ship reaches a port after a long absence, ailing Ulysses or pitiful Pytheas, reaching the end of a desolate wandering over the sea in the middle of land, from a hazardous arrival to a hasty departure. I had given up hope of ever seeing my motherland again, so afraid was I of losing everything in the liquid plains. But in a remarkable role reversal, you are the one who goes back and forth between Paris and New York, assistant to the devious Abel Prote, you the golden light to my translucent eye, my lucky traveling star, my transporter weaving invisible threads between the ancient and the new worlds, spinning her tapestry of love in the sky where I hope one day to see my person outlined in the interlacing of all those nocturnal flights, among the shimmering stars, above the Atlantic swell.”
I deem David Grey’s romantic temperament compatible with this declaration that I add shamelessly to his diary, which, once again, seems to me lacking in spirit, in lyricism. My timid author is quite the nuisance! (Tender Navigator)
*
* David Grey is translating Prote’s novel (N.d.T.), a rather dry title lacking in panache. This N.d.T. stinks of DDT … I will not give my opinion on this novel within a novel. The reader can make his or her own judgment. But I will take advantage of my subordinate position, of my liberty, and of David’s melancholic stroll on the deserted Long Island shore after Doris’s departure (“Air France Flight 875 to Paris-Charles de Gaulle, immediate boarding at gate 34,” announces the robotic female voice) to add this new seaside scene to the text:
“Beneath a white sky specked with a motionless helicopter, the waves slowly move away from the thin black horizon line, they approach, accelerate, reach the shore, and unfurl there, immediately replaced by other waves that come to crash on the pebble beach endlessly, filling that large strip as my lines succeed each other at the bottom of the page.”
A bit farther on, I insert:
“The sand is littered with debris in varying states of decomposition: pieces of colored glass, bits of plastic that are impossible to identify, shells of crabs in the shape of horseshoes, large spiral shells that are rarely intact, whitish drooping jellyfish, as if dead, heaps of brown or beige shredded kelp, flat pebbles, tempting to throw like spinning tops toward the surface of the ocean so that they bounce and ricochet more and more rapidly before sinking abruptly. David Grey goes down toward the part of the beach covered by the low tide. He stops suddenly and kneels down in front of the little hills made up of fine and supple strands of sand intertwined like tiny rigging. In the shallows, the razor clams await the rising tide. David remembers an ingenious strategy for catching them: all you have to do is leave a pinch of salt on the hole beneath the hill and the mollusk, lured by that crystalline asterisk and that suddenly salty water, will wrongly conclude that the tide has already risen, that it should come out of its hiding place to poke its nose above the sand, and then you simply snatch it up. But Grey has no salt on him: the razor clams can wait in peace for the real rise of the tide. In the same way, couldn’t a cheating weight lifter, with a large magnet hidden above him in the rafters … ? (Trickster’s Net)
*
* Once Doris is on her plane, David Grey leaves New York to go to Chicago by night train. He reserved a sleeper seat, at the very bottom of a cramped compartment, almost level with the ground. There is little space between his sleeper seat, which is more of a narrow bench, and the one above it, occupied by a corpulent man with a wheezing breath. Exhausted after all those days of work and love spent with Doris, in the grips of the sweet melancholy of idleness and amorous solitude, he immediately falls asleep despite the snores above. He sleeps for an unknown amount of time, then is awakened with a start by the silence which has brusquely replaced the regular hypnotic din of the freight car wheels. His neighbor above has even stopped snoring. David sits up on his narrow sleeper seat, reaches for the metallic bar of the closed window and lifts it halfway up. The train has stopped in the middle of nowhere, there isn’t a single house visible in the white early morning glow. The pale sky remains hidden by the canvas rectangle.
In a sleepy stupor, the traveler notices the straight and uniform furrows, parallel to the tracks, of an immense field surrounded by the vertical supports of the window. It snowed. The bottom of the furrows are a blinding white, while the crests of earth, black and irregular, separate the immaculate lines, sometimes skinny, sometimes bigger, thus constituting a repetitive contrast, a fluttering like venetian blinds, a rapid hand playing with the horizontal slats. In the distance, a blue-and-white mail truck drives along the straight line of the road. David thinks then of his own translation work, of the curious layout of (N.d.T.), Prote’s novel, of all those lines of text assembled at the bottom of each page, like the elevated pedestal of an absent statue. Raising his eyes toward the half-raised blinds, he notices, almost at the center, slightly to the right, a small immobile spider.
Lost in the crazed contemplation of this landscape striped with snow, David soon remembers his recent dream, from which he was wrested by the abrupt silence of the train: he is walking with Doris on an immense deserted beach that looks like the beach on Long Island. The two of them suddenly hear, amid the clamor of the surf, a distant and irregular rumble that gradually grows louder. They turn their heads toward the foaming waves that the horizon endlessly regurgitates. Then to the sky, where the clouds keep rolling as if in a fogged-up mirror. Soon, Doris points at a black spot, like
a midge or a small asterisk, which grows bigger before their eyes in the white sky, but without changing place, as if the flying object were heading straight for them.
“A plane!” cries David.
“No,” Doris corrects him, “a helicopter.”
The regular hammering intensifies. It sounds like a train, an express train charging straight toward the terrified spectator curled up in his movie theater chair. It is in fact a helicopter. A large bumblebee, a flat beetle, metallic and chubby, the rhythmic humming becomes so deafening and menacing that David and Doris press their hands to their ears, then, panicked, throw themselves into the sand with a beautiful synchronization. Then the aggressive flying machine unleashes a swarm of letters over them, like a load of leaflets or confetti that falls relatively slowly, spinning toward the beach. David sits up. Doris has disappeared. The bird of misfortune with her. David looks at the deserted beach covered in violet envelopes, all seemingly identical. Each one bears a crimson marking in the shape of a Z. He leans down and picks up the envelope at his feet. The name of the sender is on the back, or rather their initials: A.P. Associated Press? Surely not. Agent de Police? Impossible. Aéroports de Paris? No, even in David’s dream there is no doubt about the sender: these messages are directives from Prote, sending a deluge of instructions to his translator, advice and orders for the American version of (N.d.T.).
Revenge of the Translator Page 3