The aerial attack born from David Grey’s overexcited imagination suffers nevertheless from a major handicap: despite his passion for flying machines, the American translator doesn’t have the slightest idea how to fly a plane. (Flight of the Bumblebee)
*
* So David chose another angle of attack, another weapon: the computer virus, signaled in a relatively clear message signed “Z” on Prote’s computer screen. An ersatz for the dreamed aerial attack, an economical consolation prize: rather than concentrating his efforts on the immensity of the sky and taking flying lesson, to carry out his heinous crime like other notorious evildoers, David makes do with that rigid plastic box swarming with 0s and 1s, clumped together in morphing constellations, in mathematical throngs organized with all the geometric precision of the nocturnal summer sky. Like an interplanetary probe with precise movements and programmed noxiousness, the frisky virus of a numerical galaxy with clusters of neighboring bytes, rigorously tearing through entire sections, extinguishing gigantic swaths of binary material, in a single vengeful flap of the wing annihilating planets, rings, asteroids and satellites, entire solar systems, white dwarfs and supernovas, plunging stellar memory into an unknown chaos, a new night.
“The damage is done. The virus works its way through the machine, like a rat. Z.” At first Prote took these few words for a stupid joke, the mere provocation of an intruder after breaking and entering the Normandy cottage where Prote has his office. The crowbar abandoned near the white door testifies to the presence of a criminal. The cottage had a visitor … But given the lack of any vandalism or any immediately identifiable theft, Prote quickly forgets the incident, puts the door back in place, sits at his desk, lights a Lucky Strike, and, already absorbed in the new chapter of his novel-in-progress, starts tapping away on his keyboard. Soon, however, the French writer is in the grips of doubt, skepticism, then consternation, finally anger: his words, his lines, dialogues, paragraphs, chapters, are inexorably eroded, sometimes a few characters, sometimes several syllables, or entire phrases, disappear without explanation, in an entirely random and incomprehensible manner, sucked up by the chasm of the screen like the stars of the universe in a powerful black hole, each destruction accompanied by a little melodious and exasperating pfuiit.
What to do? What defense to mount? Who to suspect? Who benefits from this crime? Do I have a mortal enemy, wonders Prote, who, rather than directly attacking my person or my published books, chose to lash out at my work in progress? Could I possibly suspect my little Doris, so devoted? Ah, I can’t stand these mocking pfuiits! It’s like the muted detonation of a pistol equipped with a silencer, whose every bullet destroys a few thousand characters of my novel. No, Doris is too loyal, too loving and helpful. It could be anyone, but not my dear Doris. Perhaps she has already received my letter in America. Perhaps she is writing back to me at this very moment … It’s more likely my concierge, the postman, my grouchy neighbor, the bad-tempered butcher, one of my former mistresses or wives, my cleaning lady bribed by a prankster, or it could even be my American translator with the drab name, Grey, that’s it, David Grey. But no, I can’t really imagine them slowly shooting my computer’s memory full of holes, inflicting an electronic Alzheimer’s. My Hungarian translator perhaps, Stefan Esterházy? Impossible: we hardly know each other. It could be that seductive Italian, Pietro Listo, who Doris found rather charming and cajoling, but whom I deemed effeminate and hardly straightforward, perhaps an opportunist prepared to do anything to translate my next book? No, that’s not realistic. But then who? First things first, let’s shut down this nasty ruse.
So, from Prote’s inferior point of view, the book is a can of worms, a haystack in which he has lost the precious needle of his text. It is now riddled with a virus of unknown origin. For the moment, Prote remains in the dark with his anger and speculations. (Tamperer’s Night)
*
* My author digresses, I follow his lead. We might consider Scattered Figments, my American author’s second novel, to be the first draft of Translator’s Revenge, a kind of groping version of the book that I am translating, modifying, correcting, amputating, augmenting, subverting, hijacking, doctoring. The French version, Fragments épars, I’ve said it before, is more like a shooting game than the complex art of the invisible presence, of magical possession, at once sovereign and delicate (like the act of love), which is translation.
Trotting about at my rhythm, I come to my point: the Prote of Scattered Figments was nothing, I dare say, but a clumsy prototype of the brilliant French writer that appears here. Moreover, this ruined novel should have been retranslated before even being printed by the pitiful Éditions du Marais: 238 copies sold in ten years (including those sent to the media) …The rest of the books were pulped, so much so that the book is a rarity today.
Where was I? Yes: despite its faults, Scattered Figments contains many keys to understanding Translator’s Revenge …Thus the obsession with the revealing detail, the glimpse of fleeting and marginal apparitions, evoked here by the first Prote (in my translation):
“Nearly all that is presented to me in the spotlight, centered in a frame, proudly positioned in the middle of a space or in the middle of the page, posing confidently beneath the light of the projectors, bores me. I don’t believe it for an instant, I am suspicious of it. It is very often impossible for me to accord the least confidence to such pretention, impossible to appreciate or even agree with these images that are offered up without suggesting the mysteries of their creation. No vacillating would be able to disturb those images, nor those texts so sure of themselves, of their prerogatives, of their blowhard progress fully exposed. I don’t care for luminosity except in radiant women, in the resplendent brilliance of their complexion, their gaze, their pearly white skin. But for the rest, no. I can immediately discern the insipid posturing, the overripe prose, the conceited ostentation, the assertiveness—at once authoritarian and ridiculous—of what quickly reveals itself as a weak cliché, a stereotype, a contemptible desire for glory.
“On the contrary, I like apparitions that are ephemeral, unexpected, risky. For example, the Nabokovian nymphs on roller skates, weaving at high speed from shadow to light and from light to shadow, defying gaze and desire, moving through the shaded landscape as though on a chessboard where a piece crazier than a madman, more menacing than a rider, zigzags from one square to another, pushed on only by the desire to escape a scrutinizing view or long-lasting examination thanks to a sharp and fast game of hide and seek, rendering prolonged observation impossible: the black square of the trunk of a tree, the white square of a puddle of light, then nothing, then there they are again altogether in the shadows, a violet form drawing the eye before disappearing again. I like these will-o’-the-wisps, these constantly changing images, imprecise, intangible, intermittently occupying the periphery of the field of vision, creating a fluttering of the senses, of conscience and desire, black white, then nothing, black white, a turmoil that does not grow but remains elusive, jagged, like the jerky flashing of these scrambling images, wet, striped with meteorites, that provoked the fascinated stupefaction of the first moviegoers.
“Happily renouncing any kind of global expanse, I like the fragment, the remedy to continuity, the ruin of the monument, the part that replaces the whole, that suggests without pretention, level with the ground, among the couch grass, the creeping insects, the debris, the scum and the reptiles, right next to the sole of the foot that serves as the lower margin and the forgotten root of my flights of fancy.”
Thus, when the first Prote, the one in Scattered Figments, recalls a woman, it’s the pink and translucent flesh of a perfectly curled ear that comes back to his memory; recalling another person, the shimmering reflections of a precious stone splashed with light bathed in a milky bosom; or else the muffled tonality of a murmur, the seed of a voice soaring in a perfect void, the fold of an elbow, a dimple hollowing a cheek, the texture of skin, a fine fuzz in the hollow of a lower back, the clamor of love.
In New York, where he goes sometimes, it’s the subway turnstile, a gigantic sign flashing on Times Square, a rancid odor that grabs hold of him in the street, a brief jostling at the entrance to a movie theater, the strap of a burgundy bra glimpsed on the round shoulder of an elegant woman who, like him, is going to see Buñuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid, the big snail that crawls on the already-cold thigh of the little girl lying in the forest, the boots that the fetishist makes the maid wear at night.
Or else, still in Manhattan, the humming mosquito that keeps him from sleeping all night, caracoling nonchalantly through the overheated bedroom, with a perverse and exasperating grace avoiding the loud smacks dealt to the already-slick cheek and the bolsters thrown against the immaculate walls, a mosquito that in the early morning ends up flattened against a pile of blank sheets of paper, under the substantial weight of Joyce’s Ulysses, a paper tome that he uses for the first time as a fly swatter. Asterisks and perils, he thinks foolishly, both drowsy and on edge from insomnia. Then, that blank page stained only by the violet flyspeck of the flattened insect, as if the tiny cadaver constituted a mysterious footnote, the beginning of a work of fiction, that darkly stained page gnaws at him and keeps him from falling asleep: even dead, the mosquito continues to disturb him. Seized by a sudden idea, Prote envisages writing a novel entirely composed of footnotes. His fondness for the fragment encourages the idea. He gets up from his bed and sits in front of his computer. A star stamped nearly in the middle of the screen, then a few blank lines, then a series of dashes. After a page break, another star and he begins:
“I reside here below this thin black bar,” he writes before lighting a Lucky Strike. “This is my place, my den.” That’s luck for you … But haven’t I already read these words? (Twirling Nymphets)
Chapter 5
THE SECRET PASSAGE
*
* Three weeks before Easter, Abel Prote and David Grey decide to exchange their apartments for two weeks. It’s an entente cordiale, at least in appearance. After the storm, a lull rife with suspicion and ulterior motives. In Manhattan, Prote will live temporarily in the two-room apartment in SoHo where Grey normally lives: a light-filled living room with white walls, a large bedroom stripped of anything superfluous, where Grey does his translation work looking out onto a calm interior courtyard. As for David, he will reside during that time in Abel Prote’s Parisian apartment, a vast and somber residence situated on the ground floor of a former eighteenth-century mansion, in the middle of the Latin Quarter. Before leaving for New York, Prote gives him a tour of the place in order to supply Grey with all the indispensable practical instructions for his Parisian stay. Despite the blue spring sky, the lamps need to be turned on in the middle of the day. In the office and the living room-dining room, high windows with small panes look out onto a courtyard with uneven cobblestones where two large hundred-year-old chestnut trees hang over the multicolored flowers of the few flowerbeds carefully maintained by the building concierge.
In the middle of the bathrooms is a deep bathtub of enameled steel, standing on four clawed feet, each one clasping a shiny brass ball; the bulbous faucets provide a parsimonious stream that leaves traces of concentric rust at the bottom of the basin. Throughout the apartment, the paint, discolored and flaking in places, has clearly not been redone in many years. There are drab tapestries—depicting Diana’s bath, a hunting scene, the passing of a comet above a bucolic landscape where rural peasants seated on the threshold of their cottages raise their astonished eyes toward the black sky streaked with a thin pale stripe—all these images darkened with time suck even more light out of the rooms and accentuate the feeling of a permanent dusk. A great heavy armoire of dark wood, half embedded in the wall of the corridor, almost blocks the passageway entirely; its two doors don’t close properly. The apartment has belonged to the Prote family since the Second Empire. An only child, Abel inherited it after the death of his father, the publisher Maurice-Edgar Prote, killed in a plane accident at the end of the 50s, on his way back from New York, where he had gone to see publisher or writer friends and had met a few newcomers to the American literary scene. September 6, 1959, issue 4608 of the newspaper Le Figaro announced the catastrophe on the first page, next to a column consecrated to “the latest incident in the Far East”:
Not Long After Takeoff …
A SUPER CONSTELLATION FALLS AND SINKS INTO THE RIVER SHANNON
Of the fifty-six passengers and crew members, twenty-eight died, including the famous Parisian publisher M.-E. Prote.
Abel Prote intends to study the New York setting of (N.d.T.) himself and thus to contribute to what will, by mutual agreement, not be a simple English translation of his novel, but a new version, another book, written by three or four hands, shared between author and translator in a ratio that has yet to be determined. And let’s not forget the lovely little hands of the beautiful Doris, who perhaps will slide herself among this hairy bunch of male fingers to participate in their work, but also sometimes to divert their studious energy toward less austere activities.
In fact, Doris will arrive from New York at the end of the night and meet David at Prote’s apartment. Oddly enough, she will be crossing paths with Prote in the middle of the sky.
Alone in the lugubrious Parisian apartment since the owner’s departure around five in the evening (“Au revoir, bon voyage!” “Merci, bon séjour à vous”), David Grey wanders around for a moment from room to room, enters the living room, follows the obstacle course of old-fashioned furniture, sits in a deep madder red armchair with frayed armrests, and distractedly rereads a few passages of (N.d.T.). He spends two hours like this before undertaking an in-depth visit of the apartment. My author is on his plane, he thinks with sudden determination. Let’s go.
He leaves the dark and humid living room and decides to begin with the writer’s office, at the end of the hallway. It’s a large room, somber and silent, with a creaky parquet floor covered with old rugs. The two high windows are covered with heavy burgundy wall hangings. Several shelves filled with books, some faded, climb to the ceiling. David turns on the light.
A large painting, wider than it is long, soberly surrounded and illuminated by a brass wall light, is hung opposite the windows. David approaches, stops in front of it. A black vertical bar divides the canvas into two equal parts. On the left half, David notices a series of black horizontal lines on a white background, some long, some short, that run between two white margins. The right half of the painting repeats the same pattern: they appear to be pages of an open book painted on the two halves of the painting, especially because the vertical median line strongly resembles that shadow line where the left page and the right page of a book normally meet the central binding. But unlike a typical book, in which every odd page differs in its appearance and contents from the facing even page, it’s as if the painter wanted to duplicate the appearance and contents of the left page on the right. The painting depicts the same page twice, excessively enlarged. David draws even closer and notices with surprise that, seen from up close, all the words are illegible: the painter has depicted only phantoms of words. Not the words themselves, but in a way their mass, their symbol, the image of these words, if one can say that words have an image. Comparing the two halves of the painting, the translator notices that the copy on the right is not completely consistent: the small drips, the width of the margins, the length of the black lines, the spaces between the lines, and even the thickness of the blacks differ from their counterparts on the left. In fact, which half of this painting is the original, and which is the copy? And what is the name of this artist, who obviously cannot sign his canvas on the bottom right as he usually does without disturbing the fragile symmetry? And why did Prote choose to hang this painting in his office?
Leaving these questions unanswered, David pivots toward the large dark wooden desk and the comfortable stuffed armchair with its back to the windows. A gray computer sits next to a small printer and a few volumes with broken spines, piled there
with care. Suddenly intrigued, David examines the books one after another.
At the top of the pile, he finds a worn copy of Nabokov’s Despair. A note written by Prote is on the flyleaf: “The narrator drives a blue Icarus.” That’s all. Disappointed, David puts the slim novel back on the desk.
Beneath it, he discovers a recent edition of Extraordinary Tales by Edgar Allan Poe. David leafs through the volume and quickly sees that the entire story entitled “The Pit and the Pendulum” is copiously annotated in the margins, in that thin chicken scratch handwriting that he recognizes immediately. David deciphers a few of Prote’s notes: “The threat comes from below, then from above, then once again from below.” A bit farther on: “The jail of the Inquisition is hermetically sealed, with neither entrance nor exit, with no visible secret passage, but equipped with sophisticated mechanisms.”
Intrigued, David then picks up a worn copy of Joyce’s Ulysses. On the cover, he notices a small violet speck, a bloody fragment of crushed insect nearly encrusted in the laminated cardstock, like a tiny star.
Next, a biography of the science fiction writer E.T. A. Hoffmann, from which falls a yellowed press clipping whose jumbled typeface evokes the French newspapers of the interwar period. It’s an article from an issue of Paris-Soir dated June 22, 1937:
Revenge of the Translator Page 5