The Mule

by David Quantick

  CHAPTER TWO

  I work from home, which has its plus side and its minuses. On the plus side, you’re your own time-keeper. You can work for an hour, take a break, and then go out for lunch – although I generally stay at home and have something from the fridge. You can surf the net and you can even watch TV if you want to, although again I find that’s not something I like to do. People say to me, ‘Jacky, if I had your job, I’d just be watching TV all day.’ Yes, and you’d starve to death because you’d get no work done, I always reply in my head. The minus side is you tend not to see people. Although I know from when I have worked in offices that they’re claustrophobic places, where you’re forced to interact with people you might not otherwise even want to look at, let alone chat to in a friendly manner.

  Another thing I’ve noticed about offices is that the people are all the same. I don’t mean that they’re clones of one another, just that there are always the same four or five recognisable ‘types’. There’s the ambitious type who’s cold to you if you can’t help them ascend the career ladder. There’s the gossipy type (who can be a man or a woman) who seems friendly but really just wants to leech juicy titbits from you. There’s the innocent kid, and there’s the old-timer serving out their tenure until they can cash in their pension. It’s like being in a soap opera where the faces change but the personalities are the same. I mentioned this to my mother once, after I’d worked in a couple of different offices and all she said was, ‘So which one are you, Jacky?’ My mother isn’t always very sympathetic.

  So today I welcomed my home-working status, because, hangover aside, I was feeling unsettled after the meeting of the night before, and if I’d been in an office with other people, they might have noticed my distracted state and joshed with me about it. Or they might have read something into it and said, ‘What’s her name, then?’ and kept up some running banter that would have got annoying pretty quickly. So being alone was much better. It also enabled me to sit at the computer and do some searching, which of course you could be penalised for in an office. Here, though, in my own home, I was able to go online to do some research of my own. I have a pretty good memory for words, perhaps because I encounter so many, so I was able to remember the three weird ones that had come up in our conversation last night. I closed the window so the banging was a little quieter and started typing in the words.

  The word sunt was so common as to be almost meaningless. There were over 250 million entries on Google for it, everything from proper names and trademarks to made-up obscenities and random web host names. Most of the uses of sunt were, as I said to the girl, in its normal Latin sense, which is of course the third person plural of the verb ‘to be’. In layman’s terms, it means ‘are’. I tried Eureka and Babelfish, which at least stripped out the proper names, but still ended up with pretty much the same thing.

  I should tell you a little about my job, I guess. When I say ‘translator’ to people, all kinds of images come into their heads. Sometimes they picture me at the United Nations with headphones over my ears, rapidly conveying the words of an important Iranian diplomat into English, just one verbal slip away from plunging the world into a nuclear conflagration. Sometimes they imagine me at a legal aid office, helping new immigrants with application forms. And every so often, someone will know a little bit about the real world of translation, and they’ll assume that by ‘translator’, they mean someone who spends their time rendering technical documents and practical handbooks into English, things like manuals for driving Russian tractors or schematics for wiring up satellite dishes. The bread and butter of translating, you might say if you were feeling poetic about it.

  Nobody ever gets it right. I mean I have done some of those manuals, but they require a technical knowledge of the specific fields of relevance of those manuals. Say I was asked to translate one of those hypothetical tractor manuals – well, I know that the Russian word for tractor is traktor but that’s about it. The rest of the technical vocabulary would be as new to me as it is to you. And that’s just tractors. I’m someone who, probably just like you, doesn’t know anything about tractors. Yet people often assume that I’m Mr Manuals. Which should really annoy me. I don’t look at a man in glasses and tie with a bald spot and think, Aha! Accountant! or see a blonde in a tight leather skirt and think that she’s a call girl. But people hear me say that I’m a translator and suddenly I’m an expert on Eastern European agricultural vehicles.

  Iiiiiiiiii-i-i was slightly better, in that it only cropped up on Google about seventeen times but mostly in the names of websites or webmasters, basically as a way of naming something quickly and meaninglessly. And that was without the hyphenated spacing. With the hyphens, it just took me to sites composed apparently of nothing but the letter i. This might be interesting to an algebraist, but it didn’t help me. Of course, Iiiiiiiiii-i-i could be the phonetic transcription of a cry of pain or a war whoop or something similar, but that would only make its meaning decipherable in context. And context was what I did not have.

  What I actually do, as a translator, is this: I translate novels and poems. I’m not one of the big boys, as I call them: I’m no Jay Rubin or Gilbert Adair or even Norman Thomas di Giovanni. Publishers don’t send me the classics. I’ve never translated Goethe or Schiller or Dostoevsky (which, concerning the last, is probably a good thing, especially if he writes about tractors much). But that doesn’t bother me. In fact, it’s actually a good thing. The big boys can keep the giants of literature – you can buy a thousand translations of any of those writers at any charity shop or second-hand store in the world and their fields are, with all due respect to these talented people, somewhat overploughed. A translator gets to Dickens or Balzac and the cupboard is pretty much empty. There’s not much you can do when everybody’s had a crack at ‘To be or not to be’ or ‘Où sont les neiges d’antan?’

  But the writers I translate – my ‘stable’ as I like to think of them – are entirely mine. You want to read an English rendering of Soldiers of War by Max Hemnitz? That was me. Fancy casting an eye over Ecstasy’s Dagger: The Complete Poems of Padre Alessandro? I did that. That much-thumbed copy of She Walked Among Men by A.J.L. Ferber? Check out the credit on the title page, just below the author bio. Me again.

  True, I don’t make a lot of money. I do stuff like office temping and helping out on the phones at my publishers to make ends meet, but I’m a frugal sort. My apartment is as clean as a rich man’s castle but that’s the only thing it has in common with a gilded palace. But I do have a computer, and a cooker and a washing machine and a TV, and I don’t really need anything else.

  Next I keyed in la furcheuxne. This at least led to a reduction in the number of possibilities, as the search engine told me that there were ‘no results found for la furcheuxne’. The same held for furcheuxne without the la, and possible variant spellings like furcheusne, furcheune and furchene. It was a nonsense word. A made-up collection of French-sounding letters whose meaning, if any, was ‘red herring’. A total waste of time. But I’m a diligent person and I expanded the search to include vercheusne, fercheuxne and other possibilities. That was also a complete waste of time. Finally, almost stabbing at the keys, I Googled ‘la furcheuxne sunt iiiii-i-i’. Suddenly the screen filled with results and the mystery was solved. I’m kidding. Once again, there was nothing. I had wasted almost an hour on a search I knew would be useless right from the get-go. Now I became overwhelmed with a sense of futility and disgust. Futility on fairly obvious grounds, but disgust for reasons that were both personal and professional.

  * * *

  A couple of years ago, I went into the offices of R.J. Walker-Hebborn Publishing, the company for whom I do freelance translating. It’s not a big firm by any stretch of the imagination, but the owners had cannily snapped up some writers who were biggish names in their own countries but unknown in the English-speaking world and, by swiftly bringing out decent translations of their books, made a tidy profit. Nowadays that kind of thing is a lot harde
r, I’d imagine. A kid puts a short story on a blog in Budapest and within hours the whole world’s heard about it. But this company still had a reputation for being sympathetic to ‘foreign’ writers, and so their European and Asian counterparts continued to use them.

  Anyway, this one day I was coming in to use the phones, on legitimate translator’s business. I needed to speak to an author, which is not as common as you might think. Authors can be very hands-on in the writing process, consulting with editors and publishers, but once the book is out, they usually like to move on to the next project. (I imagine this is why the famous J.D. Salinger had such a reputation for uncommunicativeness: he just wanted to get on to the next project.) And with translators, authors find they have even less to say.

  Which was the case that day. I was translating from French, funnily enough, one of the books I mentioned before, She Walked Among Men by A.J.L. Ferber. I don’t know if you’re one of Ferber’s fans, but she has quite a following, I’m told, although personally I find her work quite dense and challenging. Which is probably why, if I’m honest, I wasn’t looking forward to telephoning her. Madame Ferber, as she liked to be called, was the kind of person who didn’t suffer fools gladly. And as she was also the kind of person who thinks most of the human race are fools, there was always a strong chance when talking to A.J.L. Ferber that you would receive the sharp edge of her tongue. (I have since been told that she left behind a string of ex-husbands and angry girlfriends. I can see why, believe me.)

  I dialled Madame Ferber’s number and listened as the telephone shrilled its unfamiliar, exotic continental ring. Then, just as I was sure she must be out, someone picked up and Madame Ferber’s distinctive voice said, ‘Oui?’ in a tone that suggested that somebody had better be in mortal danger at the other end because otherwise they were wasting a famous author’s valuable time.

  ‘Hello, Madame Ferber,’ I said, ‘this is Jacky, your English translator.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, making the word sound like a piece of lead.

  I once read about a lighthouse keeper who was standing at the bottom of the stairs in his lighthouse when it was struck by lightning and caught fire. A piece of molten lead from the lamp flew out and leapt straight into the poor man’s mouth, killing him outright. They put that lump of lead on the lighthouse keeper’s gravestone, and whenever I think of it, I think of Madame Ferber saying, ‘Oh.’

  ‘I thought the translation was complete,’ she said.

  ‘It is,’ I replied, ‘but I’m just clarifying a few minor ambiguities in the text.’

  ‘I see,’ said Madame Ferber, perhaps a little coldly.

  I don’t understand this about authors; they spend all their lives telling people that their books are layered with meaning, and nothing is ever black and white, but the moment you suggest to them that maybe some of their book is confusing, they get all huffy.

  ‘It’s just a small thing,’ I said soothingly. ‘On page 583—’

  ‘Young man,’ said Madame Ferber, ‘I cannot be expected to memorise the pagination of my own books.’

  I ignored that, because I was sure at least one wall of her apartment was probably insulated with copies of her own books. ‘Let me read you the line in question,’ I said, and hurried on in case she had an objection to someone reading her prose out loud to her. ‘“In that moment of plangency, Odile reflected on Corale for the first time, yet it was only in the calmness of her later years that she realised that Corale had somehow reflected on her.”’

  There was a silence at the other end of the line. Even though it was just a silence, it sounded annoyed to me.

  ‘That’s the line,’ I said.

  ‘I am aware that that was “the line”,’ said Madame Ferber. ‘I did not think that you had somehow acquired the ability spontaneously to generate prose.’

  ‘I was wondering about the use of the word “reflected”,’ I said. ‘Do you mean that Odile was thinking about Corale for the first time, or do you mean that Odile was having some kind of effect on her, like reflected light?’

  There was another silence on the end of the line. This time, it sounded puzzled. For the first time, I could hear hesitancy in the silence. It was as if – and I knew that my imagination was running away with me, to say the least – it was as if Madame Ferber didn’t know the answer to my question.

  ‘Or is it,’ I said, as the silence lengthened, ‘meant to be ambiguous?’

  There was a crash at the other end as the phone was slammed down. I made a mental note to put this query in an email to Madame Ferber, put her file back in the ‘Authors’ cabinet, and was just about to leave when the door opened and R.J. Walker-Hebborn came in. With him was a short man with terrible hair and a pair of eyebrows that seemed somehow impossible.

  ‘This is Euros Frant,’ said R.J. Walker-Hebborn. ‘He’s a very exciting author.’

  I was surprised to hear this, not because Mr Frant didn’t look exciting – authors are like their books, I say, in that they can’t be judged by their covers – but because Walker-Hebborn didn’t deal in exciting authors, or if he did, at any rate he wasn’t sending them my way. To my certain knowledge, neither Padre Alessandro nor Max Hemnitz had ever penned an exciting word in their life. (And nor, I was prepared to bet my life’s savings, had A.J.L. Ferber. In fact, sometimes, on long nights stranded in one of her sentences, I pictured Madame Ferber writing an exciting word and hurriedly scratching it out lest the infection spread to the other words.)

  Euros Frant nodded with such violence that he nearly dropped the large package he was holding. As it was, several sheets of paper fluttered out from it, and both Walker-Hebborn and I lurched to grab them from the air.

  ‘Well,’ Mr Walker-Hebborn said, ‘I’ll leave you two to get better acquainted.’ And he wafted out of the room.

  I motioned Frant to a chair with a sinking feeling in my stomach. The papers floating from his parcel could only be part of a manuscript – and if that parcel was composed entirely of manuscript, it was going to be a hefty piece of work. Combine that fact with Walker-Hebborn’s keenness for me to meet Euros Frant and his rapid exit from the room and that could mean only one thing. Euros Frant had written a very big book and it was going to be my job to translate it.

  ‘Shall we go for coffee?’ I said to Frant, wishing I hadn’t as he started nodding and the sheets of paper began to shake out again.

  * * *

  In the coffee shop, Frant turned out to be an agitated kind of man. His eyebrows worked as he talked, and he talked like he moved, in short jerky bursts, and he looked around every time he spoke, as though one wrong word would bring hidden assassins running from the shadows. He had ordered an enormous cup of coffee – to be fair, he’d had no choice, as the coffee house only sold coffee in enormous cups – and he sat behind it like a tail-gunner, occasionally reaching out to it and finding it either too hot to drink or too heavy to lift.

  ‘This book,’ he said in an accent that was both thick and staccato at the same time, ‘is my life’s work.’

  I must admit that isn’t a sentence a translator wants to hear. It sounds fine on the radio in an interview or at a fancy awards ceremony, but when you’re the poor fool tasked with rendering someone’s ‘life’s work’ into readable English, it has to be bad news. The life’s-work brigade are very fussy about anybody tampering with their precious prose and tend to take every alteration or improvement personally. Should we say that your first memory involving a red toy fire engine was ‘heavy with emotive force’ or ‘pregnant’? It’s a minefield. Opt for ‘heavy’ and you risk being accused of making something beautiful into a workaday cliché. Use the word ‘pregnant’ and you’re somehow pre-empting the next six chapters dealing with the birth, and subsequent jealousy, of your younger sibling. I’m not kidding. I have had a writer say that my vocabulary suggestions ‘disembowelled’ his narrative.

  Frant didn’t look as if he might be a future narrative disembowelment accuser, but he had a light in his eye that I
had learned to distrust. Say what you like about ‘boring’ technical manuals, but the men and women who come up with those rarely accuse you of stealing their souls when you ask if a word means ‘spanner’ or ‘wrench’.

  I was about to ask Frant what his life’s work was about when he slammed it down on the table between us and pulled out a few pages.

  ‘Here,’ he said, ‘tell me what you think.’ And he sat back in his chair, cradling his coffee cup in both hands like a huge dormouse.

  I looked at the pages. They were typed, manually, and they were in Italian. I mean, sort of. They were in Italian the way that Ivanhoe and that kind of stuff is in English, all thee and verily and forsooth and so on. It wasn’t medieval Italian in any real way (which I was relieved about, because I’m no scholastic translator) but it wasn’t ‘real’ Italian either. It was all, as I say, knights in armour stuff.

  I scanned a few paragraphs. ‘There are a lot of words in here that are new to me,’ I said. ‘And some unfamiliar place names.’ I flicked back to the title page, and my heart sank. La Chronac De’ Mondinos Imaginarios.

  ‘I don’t quite understand,’ I said. Frant smiled in a way that even I could tell was meant to be indulgent and knowing. It just made his face look crazier. ‘This isn’t—’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ he said, his eyebrows dipping condescendingly. ‘I know. It’s not conventional medieval Italian, at all. It’s a dialect of my own invention – a parallel dialect, if you know what I mean.’

  I did know what he meant but I was damned if I was going to say it.

  ‘This book – whose name I’m sure you’ve discerned – is called The Chronicle of Imaginary Worldlets.’