My idea for (N.d.T.), the novel that accumulates footnotes and which you are in the process of translating, David, is intimately linked to my Sunday readings of Tintin at the Parc des Princes seated next to my father: the bottom—my comic book from back then or the contents of the footnotes now—is more important to me than what’s on top—the green lawn of the stadium or the blank part of the page above the thin black line, and perhaps even life. Furthermore, when as a child I would plunge passionately into the adventures of Tintin, of Captain Haddock and his consorts, I would read the words and dialogues in the bubbles much more than I would look at the images, their designs, their colors: to my eyes, the words counted more than the colorful flat tints of the boxes, which themselves interested me more than the movements of the players and the ball over the green rectangular lawn. Lowering my eyes toward the footnote, I chase the events of the world from my mind and find others, filtered through writing, for example the Parc des Princes and my fanatical reading of the adventures of Tintin. Like the door of the apartment of E.T. A. Hoffmann leading to the opera balcony box, my eardrum links me to the exterior world, informing me of athletic feats, but each time with a bit of delay that makes me miss everything and pushes me even further toward my comic and its marvels, which always remained available to me at any moment. For my personal enjoyment.
Though I conceived the idea for this book in New York during a night of insomnia while crushing a mosquito between a white page and the large volume of Joyce’s Ulysses—the violet speck evoking, on the back cover of the book and even more on the blank page, a footnote—its true origin is the Parc des Princes, in those rows of seats of my childhood where the spectators piled in like the aligned words of a footnote, under the empty space, green there, blank here, with the soccer ball as the asterisk. How did I not realize this analogy sooner?
* * *
Let’s move on to other rows: the shelves of my armoire, duly visited and even dismantled by my American translator and temporary tenant, the indelicate David Grey, David the Grédin*. The Easter Egg containing its miniature replica containing the little silver key was of course placed there by my provident hand, to lure you, the curious inveterate.
* I wonder if he will understand this play on words. In the end, even if it’s a bit unusual, I have the right to introduce to my novel (N.d.T.) its current translator, who henceforth I mistrust like the plague.†
† I’ve perfectly understood, fucker. It’s a very poor pun. (Translator’s Note‡)
‡ I translate this chapter of Translator’s Revenge with relish. For once, I change nothing, nor do I add or take away. Curiously, the memories of Abel Prote concerning the soccer matches that he witnessed—or rather did not witness—as a child with his father are very much in keeping with the recollections that I invented for him in Chapter 3 (the father worshiping a cult in America, the Anglophile mother, etc.). It’s even a bit unsettling … (Duck Soup)
* * *
As for the model of the Super Constellation, I assembled it when I was seven or eight years old. My father bought the box in New York in the mid-50s, and gave it to me as present when he got back from one of his frequent transatlantic trips. I had never constructed a small model that was so complicated. It was with a mix of terror and admiration—the Americans have a word for that, as you know: awe (in French pronounced: ôô, like two chocolate Easter eggs, each wrapped in a ribbon tied on top, or two stunned phantom eyes with raised eyebrows penetrating the darkness of a cellar or an underground tunnel)—it was with a staggering joy that I first came upon the magnificent painted image of the box, an almost photographical precision, the image of the long-haul plane with the ovular nose flying toward the sky at a twenty-degree angle after taking off from the airport; a few gray runways and the tiny control tower were in the bottom right corner of the image. The plane had already passed through a swarm of white quilted clouds. The pilot and the copilot were visible in the cockpit, in uniform and hats with blue visors: ô and ô.
I was enthralled by this gift, but disappointment and incredulity swiftly replaced my joy when I opened the cardboard box and saw the many transparent cellophane bags that contained the white, gray, or black plastic bars, like stiff lichen or shrubs fastened to a trellis, to which were clamped the countless minuscule pieces of the model. What relationship was there between the image of that splendid airplane propelled between sky and earth, as if cast in a perfect block of steel, as luminous, molded, aerodynamic as a seabird, a flying fish, or an egg, and that horrible proliferation of those little bits of plastic, lifeless and insignificant?
One can certainly admire each piece of a puzzle on its own, for it is an indefinable piece of the final image; the process of reconstituting that image is comprehensible, immediately believable, to our eyes and to our mind, confirmed by the discovery of those myriad little colorful pieces, organically linked to the big picture. But how to muster up even the slightest appreciation for those scattered fragments, for those pieces of plastic fixed to their straight branches like the dried, drab, prickly fruit of a monstrous stratified and fossilized organism? It was ugly and off-putting. The clear squeaky bags of shiny cellophane immediately made me think of samples removed from the scene of a murder committed across the Atlantic—after all, I didn’t know how American criminology worked—or else like an archaeologist had gone to the Congo, Egypt, or Arabia and brought back these vestiges of a vanished civilization, but I saw no relation between that frightening mess of dull plastic pieces and the curved, powerful shapes of the steel bird.
In a word, I was disgusted, and for a few days my father had to help me assemble it, with a sometimes exasperated patience, first one wing, then the other, then the cabin, then the tailplane, then the runway, until the blessed day when all those modules spread over the table were finally glued and assembled to constitute the marvelous oblong object whose feline image had continued to seduce me. Finally, the painted model, with its countless decals meticulously placed in the right spots, joined its base molded out of bluish plastic, the ovular nose proudly pointed toward the sky at a twenty-degree angle.
One more thing: just before completing the model’s assembly and finally gluing the tailplane to the cabin, my father went looking for a gold coin in his desk drawer and slid it into the crack designed to hold the tailplane. He then told me with a smile: “A piggy bank that will only work this one time.” The firm pressure of his fatherly fingers gluing the tailplane to the cabin sealed the tomb of the gold coin. Then, picking up the finished model, my father amused himself making the nose of the Super Constellation rise and fall, which produced, as it does today, a little irregular clinking, a loud chime of the coin, the only passenger of the beautiful airliner rolling and bouncing in the fuselage, from the nose to the tail, then from the tail to the nose.
I am not an idiot: I see the relationship between the countless pieces of that model—of any model—and the title of the volume placed on another shelf in my armoire, Fragments épars. That said, I know nothing about that book, I don’t even know how it landed there, that hijacked airplane, or rather that square flying saucer. It’s a translation of an American novel, and rather incoherent, like the pieces of my Super Constellation when I first opened the famous box, a book written by a certain Boris Matthews, and rather badly translated, it seems to me. Who put it there? And for what reason? I don’t know. The Fragments of Matthews echo each other, they hint at a hidden coherence, but at no time as I was reading (I’ve just finished the book) does anything resembling a big picture appear, like the splendid painting of my Super Constellation on the front of the box. I also feel as though I will never manage to grasp the general architecture of this novel, as I formerly constructed the model of my plane, with my father’s help of course. But why nurture such a desire? Why want, at any cost, to impose order on the chaos of the scattered fragments, to the clutter of detached pieces, to the jumble of life? In literature, is the metaphor of assembling a model outdated?
There is still the e
nigma of this novel’s appearance on my shelf.
And then there is another, even more implausible enigma, so absurd that I almost forgot to mention it: the main character of Fragments épars has my name: he’s called Abel Prote. I can’t make heads nor tails of this. I turn on my computer, go to Google, type the title: nothing. I type the American title, Scattered Figments: nothing. I type the name of the author, Boris Matthews: nothing. It must be a pseudonym. Finally, I type the name of the French publisher, Éditions du Marais: nothing. It’s flabbergasting. Where did this book come from?
Another shelf, another memory: the crown of faded violets adorned with the love letter. Again, I’ve never really understood why that crown was in our apartment’s armoire: did the American actress these flowers were destined for refuse them? Or did my father forget—the crown, not the actress—before entering the secret passage to go to the Odéon and his mistress? Unless, at the last minute, “the lover of words” decided not to give it to her? What is beyond a doubt, however, is that he wanted to make her happy and at that time had perhaps already seduced her.
“To my beloved Dolores, with all the love of the lover of words. For your hundredth. Maurice.” Written in violet ink June 21, 1937, by Maurice-Edgar Prote, my father.
Thinking about it, there’s another possibility: in the absence of my mother, who loved to go to Deauville with her friends as soon as springtime came around, Maurice and Dolores came back to join the festivities in my parents’ mansion; the publisher met back up with his friends at the party, and the actress left her flower crown here.
Despite the article in Paris-Soir, no one will ever know which explanation is true. Nonetheless this violet crown requires a footnote. My father clearly held on to it: for all those years, he kept it in secret. As for my mother, the unfortunate cuckquean, she certainly never knew of the existence of this token of love nor, I believe, of the secret passage where I have just lured David Grey after having prepared for him a few audio and visual surprises along the tunnel as well as in the large cellar where the tunnel ends. After the shameful episode of the “Z” computer virus injected into my computer in Normandy that ravaged my hard drive, I now know the disturbing fascination David Grey has with the character Zorro: the magnificent black costume in the upholstered room will be irresistible to him (yes, yes, my little David, you must scrupulously translate this entire paragraph, without hiding your face behind your mask, without crossing out or sabering my sentences, without rewriting them, above all not massacring or censoring them: you have become a character in your own right in (N.d.T.), and now that you’ve compulsively disguised yourself, you must translate yourself yourself, as I write you.**
I understand your anger and your humiliation, my dear David, isn’t it inherent to your profession as a translator to be led around by the nose, not by a woman—who sometimes leads a man by another end—but by the author that he’s translating?†† Thus, the hidden underground where, despite your absence, I begin leading you through today, the day before your arrival in my apartment, this underground is the equivalent of my text, (N.d.T.), where you are bound to follow the path that I have outlined for you in advance on the book’s pages).
The crown of violets. I still don’t understand why my father, Maurice-Edgar, kept it for so many years, unbeknownst to my mother, his wife, who apparently never knew of its existence, nor did she suspect the existence of Dolores. That crown tied to its love letter by a thin twisted metallic wire, like a life preserver thrown to sea at the end of a spliced rope, or else … like … but of course … ! like a voluminous colorful asterisk thrown on the white page and attached to a text, to a loving note at the bottom of a page of the immaculate public life of my father, the impeccable “lover of words,” the brilliant smuggler of transatlantic literature celebrated throughout the small word of Parisian publishing.
Am I delirious imagining a distant printed star in this modest faded crown, tied to the rectangular cardboard, itself pierced by a metallic ring like another asterisk and covered in violet ink: a note from the editor (Ed.), at the bottom of the page, not dryly informative, laconic, or objective as we are used to reading from time to time, but a secret that is infinitely subjective, declarative, passionate, hiding nothing of a mad and secret love.
I must be sure of it: I’ll go fetch the crown from the armoire.
The braided stems of the faded violets and their twisted tail pulling the kite of loving words, as in the summer the small plane above the beach teeming with vacationers tows its advertising banner, “To my beloved Dolores, with all the love of the lover of words. For your hundredth. Maurice,” this memento that is anything but public is now sitting on my desk, next to my computer. My fingers play with it mechanically.
Nearly seventy years separate me from June 21, 1937, when my father, the then-very young Dolores, these flowers (and my mother, also still young) sparkled, when the vibrant ink dripped from my father’s pen, not violet but white and abundant as it is supposed to be, and I was not yet born—still thirteen years to go, no, twelve and a half. My agitated fingers get lost in the heart of the crown, at the center of the asterisk. Suddenly, among the brittle jumble of layered stems, they stumble over a small hard mass, a nodule that I extract with difficulty from the tiny thicket, as if the asterisk itself contained a nodule, a pip in the crown, a stone in the kidney. It’s a thin sheet of yellow paper that’s almost transparent, called onionskin, folded and refolded in two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, until it’s the size of a postage stamp. Heart racing, I unfold this sheet carefully and quickly I notice that it is covered in the same chicken scratch handwriting as the label, a handwriting that I inherited. The paper and the ink were certainly of excellent quality, and their reclusion in the central nest of the crown, itself hidden, sheltered from the light in the armoire or a secret chest—all of that has made it so that the paper does not tear or crumble, that this note, sealed for so long, is now even more legible than the label. A clandestine note in the middle of the asterisk, a secret passage in my secret passage.
Immediately, I’m skeptical: was this message meant for me? It seems too implausible. How could my father have foreseen that so many decades after that famous summer solstice night, his son, who at the time was not yet born, would finally discover that onionskin doubly hidden in the center of a hidden crown? But even the name of this paper—“onionskin”—suggests layers to peel back, concentric walls to overcome, Easter eggs to open, successive masks to put on. Hell, it’s not ubiquity, it’s atavism … I who thought that nested Easter eggs were my idea, the white chest containing this letter in the black cellar my invention! I who thought I was maneuvering Grey, remote-controlling him through space and time, now it seems that I too am walking in the footsteps of another, following a path deliberating mapped out in advance by my father. I have to read this paternal text that perhaps no one, not even the young American actress, Dolores Haze, has ever read. Here it is:
Hello, Abel (But how … ?), I’m sure it’s a surprise to you that I address you by your first name, for of course in 1937 you were not yet born, not yet conceived, not even imagined. I see from here—or rather from over there, from very far away—your incredulous stupefaction: how could my father who was not yet my father know my first name? (Exactly…) I can even say, without fear of being mistaken, that you are a writer, that you are fifty-seven years old, and that you are fooling around with your secretary (Well I never! In addition to ubiquity, did Maurice-Edgar possess the gift of clairvoyance?) in this beautiful year of 2007. The spring was a bit cold, no, in Normandy the plants came late, and the winter blizzards were terrible in New York, a city you travel to often, as I used to, by which I mean I do now (?!).
Well, might as well confess up front and put an end to this quid pro quo that I did indeed prepare with great care, you will agree: I am not your father, Maurice-Edgar, whose passionate relationship with the little Dolores Haze, that young Yankee actress whose tumultuous love affairs were once the talk of the
Parisian gossip columns, even if the journalists of the time never suspected, because of the proverbial and efficient discretion of your father, that she was sleeping with him. No, I am not your father, but I learned to imitate his handwriting and I can imagine your shock upon discovering, at the heart of the crown of life, in the center of the target, this folded and refolded note, this onion-skin that you surely believed to be perfectly preserved despite the passing of decades, but which in reality came from a regular ream of paper bought two months ago from a store in my neighborhood in Belleville. You will soon observe for yourself that, contrary to the inflamed declaration of the “lover of words,” this particular note is not very sweet.
Revenge of the Translator Page 8