The Mule

by David Quantick

  People think translation is easy. They think all you do is take a word in one language and trade it for a different word in another language. Like you’re sitting there and you take oiseau and exchange it for bird. Actually, that’s a bad example, but when you deal with authors and poets like I do, there’s a whole world of nuance involved. It’s very hard to translate expressions, for instance. You may have heard the old translator’s joke about the language computer that translated the English phrase out of sight, out of mind into Russian and then back into English, and it came back as invisible maniac. That’s an extreme example, and an inaccurate one too, as modern translation software would acknowledge out of sight, out of mind as a pretty common colloquialism and render it more accurately. Also when I ran the phrase through the Babelfish site, it was translated into Russian as из визирования, из рассмотрения and back into English not as invisible maniac at all, but from the sighting, from the examination. Which, I have to admit, makes even less sense, but that’s not the point. Translation is not as simple as it looks.

  And that’s just if you’re dealing with languages that everyone is familiar with. When it comes to mystery languages, you need a key. No doubt you’re familiar with the Rosetta Stone, the big carved piece of rock that enabled Jean-François Champollion to translate Egyptian hieroglyphs by comparing them to the texts underneath. Will all due respect to Jean-François Champollion, the stone has to be the number one luckiest discovery of all time. Armed with a copy of the Rosetta Stone, the average baby could probably translate Ancient Egyptian texts. It must have been Christmas come early for anyone with a standard nineteenth-century knowledge of classical tongues. I might be sounding a little envious here but, to be honest, as I stood in my apartment holding that piece of paper in my hand, I could have done with a Rosetta Stone of my own. But instead I had those two drawings, with their captions, and that might just be enough of a visual and verbal cross-reference to get me going. It was all I could do to put the paper down on the table and go into the kitchen and make myself a cup of coffee. It was an important moment, and one that could arguably lead to a breakthrough, but I for one was not going to be hasty in this instance. I went back to bed, and lay there until sleep finally came.

  * * *

  I made my morning coffee and ate a bagel – toasted, to ease digestion – and then I sat down at my desk. Normally at this time of day I would have begun by checking my emails, and I must admit, I was torn – should I answer duty’s call or just throw caution to the winds? In the end, I reasoned that if one of the emails I received that morning was something I couldn’t ignore – an urgent work request, perhaps, or a message from my mother, asking me to come and deal with one of her increasingly bizarre problems – I’d become distracted and have to put off the task of looking at the text in my scanner.

  So I clicked ‘log out’ on my email account and sat down with the two pages. There they were, smudged at the top and densely packed with text elsewhere, the mass of words broken up by the two drawings. I would have guessed that there were just over 300 words on each page. It was clearly the same nonsense as before, a mishmash of hybrid words from Latin, French, German and God knows what else. One thing was for sure: it might be in a made-up language or it might be complete random drivel, but it was no historical document or mysterious missive from the past. As to what kind of idiot had the time, the resources or the desire to sit down and churn out page after page of this drivel I really couldn’t say; it seemed to me totally pointless, like most obsessions. I was guessing it was an obsession because to be frank I couldn’t see someone sitting down and casually turning out this stuff after a hard day at the office. I was reminded, suddenly and kind of bizarrely, of a poem. I don’t read poetry, as a rule, because I dislike the ambiguity, but sometimes in my job I have to translate the stuff, and it’s hard graft which is probably why it sticks in the brain. Anyway, there was this one poem by Padre Alessandro Marchese, whose Ecstasy’s Dagger I had recently had the mixed good fortune to translate, which suddenly just walked into my mind with its big boots on. You may know the verse from the more well-known Edwardian translation:

  Made with care in commerce’s fury –

  None deny endeavour

  Let me set this before God’s jury –

  Made for love be made for ever.

  Pardon me if I blow my own trumpet for a moment but I found, with all due modesty, that my own translation seemed to express the padre’s sentiments just as well:

  Made for money or for need

  Fine for the begetter

  But I prefer the amateur deed:

  Made for love is better

  Although, if I am completely honest, it now strikes me that neither of them is particularly good, and I’m wondering if the fault lies with the original poem. And, thinking about it further, it’s not even a sentiment I agree with in the present case, as the pages in front of me continued to just plain annoy me. I mean, what is the point of writing an entire book in some made-up language? Even Tolkien, who was a bit too fond if you ask me of his Elvish and his Gnomespeak and whatnot, drew the line at writing a whole damn book in the stuff. No, my point of view for what it’s worth is simple: there are enough languages in the world without some fool coming along and adding a few more to the mix. And that includes Esperanto and all the other languages invented to bring about world unity and the like. I’m sure it’s all very noble and high-minded of people to think of these things, but if people wanted to go round saying, ‘Mi voli kelka fromagxo’ or whatever, surely there’d be no stopping them. Instead, everyone would rather bomb the hell out of each other while issuing commands in their own familiar languages.

  I agree that I’ve strayed from the point slightly here, but you can see how strongly I feel about this topic. It’s one that’s close to my heart, after all, and I can say with confidence that on this, at least, I know what I’m talking about. So you can imagine that, even though these pages were the lead I’d been hoping for, I still wasn’t exactly jumping for joy at the thought of having to plough through them. Be careful what you wish for, I guess. But I put aside all negative thoughts concerning the topic of made-up drivel and decided instead to concentrate on the two diagrams, in which I had invested most of my hopes.

  You see, because this pair were captioned, they were as near to a Rosetta Stone as I was likely to get. Not that I was looking at a mass of different texts that could be co-related and rendered into English. All I had was a couple of pictures and what I was hoping would be descriptions of the pictures. It wasn’t much, but if one of the pictures was of, say, a man walking his dog, then the caption would probably be the words ‘Here is a man walking his dog’ in the fictional tongue. Of course, it’s entirely possible that the caption might be something not directly connected, like ‘Everyone enjoys the outdoor life’, or even completely irrelevant – ‘Buy Sudso soap!’ – but I was hopeful, and besides, it was all I had.

  The first picture wasn’t a man walking his dog. Nor was the second one. I didn’t really expect them to be. But they were clear depictions of real, or at least fairly real, things. One was a small girl looking at two grotesquely fat people, and the other was a chessboard. They were not very good drawings but I had no difficulty recognising the subjects. In fact, these were images I was already familiar with. I even knew that the drawings I was looking at were inferior copies, or perhaps pastiches, of better-known drawings. Because the two grotesquely fat people were called Tweedledum and Tweedledee, the small girl was called Alice, and the chessboard was a reference to the framing device of a book I was familiar with from my own childhood, Alice Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carroll.

  I sat back in my chair, mixed emotions running through me like several rivers. My dream of finding my own personal Rosetta Stone had come true. In a sense, this was the most extraordinary piece of luck. Despite the lack of textual information I had at my disposal – two partly blurred pages in a scanner – I now knew that, with the smalles
t amount of cross-referencing, I would be able to translate the bizarre language of the mysterious book into English, although there would be some linguistic irrelevancies in the form of some of the author’s invented ‘portmanteau’ words. On the other hand, the text itself, now about to be revealed, was not what I had hoped it would be. I have to admit I had know idea what was going on, especially regarding the macabre photographs. I hadn’t really thought about that, but I suppose I was hoping it would be something that would explain everything. Instead it seemed pretty doubtful to me that a copy of Alice’s Adventures Through the Looking-Glass would contain any useful information whatsoever. Engaging and timeless though the adventures of Alice and the Tweedle brothers – here renamed in the caption in a way that set my teeth on edge, Alassa and Tradelidon é Tradelido – might be, they would surely bring me no closer to finding out what was going on.

  There were more questions than answers. Some didn’t puzzle me. As a children’s classic, and a favourite of fans of puzzles, Alice Through the Looking-Glass (as it’s generally known) has been translated into hundreds of languages, including Latin and Ancient Greek for the benefit of academically inclined idiots with too much time on their hands. It didn’t surprise me that somebody would render it into an imaginary tongue. That sort of thing, pointless though it is, goes on all the time. It would probably be a vanity pressing, privately paid for (which would also explain the poor quality of the illustrations, almost certainly drawn by the person who had put the book together).

  As to the book being something the girl – Carrie – would pick up, seemingly at random, I wasn’t surprised about that. Very few of us would resist the temptation to look at a book we are familiar with, only to abandon it when we discover it’s written in a language we don’t understand. I can only imagine her reaction when she opened the book. I can see her now, in my mind, flicking through the pages, maybe a little amused at this peculiar labour of love, perhaps picking out a scene here, a name there, that she recognises. Then, getting a bit bored with a book she can’t really read, about to put it down when she notices something you wouldn’t expect to find in an edition of Alice – a series of photographs. Turning to those photographs and seeing not Victorian daguerreotypes of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson and Alice Liddell, but contemporary images. A dead girl with her face.

  Thinking about this, I felt more strongly than ever that I had to help her. But my one hope – that the book would turn out to be the key to everything – had led me into a cul-de-sac. All these pages could do for me was help me translate Alice Through the Looking-Glass into English, which, given that it was already available in English and had been for over a hundred years, wasn’t especially helpful. There was nothing I could do and nowhere I could go. I was a failure. Once again, Jacky shot for the hoop and missed. Only it wasn’t Jacky, was it? It was the Mule. A dumb animal fit only for carrying other people’s baggage up hills and through deserts.

  I was feeling sorry for myself, I knew, but why not? Every so often a person is entitled to feel sorry for themselves, and God knows I had enough to feel sorry about. All this day needed was a phone call from, say, my mother, asking me to come over and spend the afternoon with her at the hospital and my day would be just perfect. That sounds bitter, but sometimes I wish she knew some people other than me who would always be at the end of the phone for her. When my father was around, they were always entertaining. I know, I was upstairs in bed at 6pm listening to the sound of laughter and music from below. And then my father went and my mother just kind of gave up. Her health sank like a stone – one minute tennis club, the next wheelchair – and all her friends floated away, leaving me as the one who was Always There for her.

  As I thought this, I realised how bitter and ungrateful I sounded to myself, and reminded myself of the love and affection that existed between us. So, when the phone did ring, a few seconds later, I found myself picking it up and sounding pleased to hear her voice when I said, ‘Hello, Mother, how are you?’

  ‘I am well, thank you,’ said A.J.L. Ferber, ‘but I very much doubt that I am your mother.’ I stammered an apology, but she had already moved on.

  ‘I have been thinking about your query concerning the line on page 583,’ she said.

  I had no idea what she was talking about. Then I dimly realised she was referring to a translation in progress. I reached out in the direction of a heap of manuscript papers – Madame Ferber never sends attachments or PDFs, just couriers her materials over from Paris – and pulled out the dog-eared pages of She Walked Among Men. This was some task, as the script was the size of a young television. Riffling through the thick wad with one hand, trying to find page 583, I tried to tell Madame Ferber what I was doing, but she was in the middle of an uninterruptible stream of thought.

  ‘At first I was quite angry at your suggestion,’ she said as I dropped half the manuscript and struggled to pile it all back together with my one free hand. ‘After all, the opacity or otherwise of an author’s work is surely in the lap of the author, not their translator. But the more I considered the point, the more I began to see that perhaps you may have accidentally stumbled on a point not without relevance.’

  So you’re telling me I was right, you old boot, I thought to myself, although to be honest I had no idea if she was an old boot or not. There had been no public sightings of A.J.L. Ferber since the 1980s and for all I knew she could be a stunning woman of a certain age. I doubted it, though; anybody who talked the way she did, which was more like a mahogany cabinet than an actual person, probably wore fox furs round their neck and a black hat with a dead bird on the brim.

  ‘In short,’ said A.J.L. Ferber, ‘I have decided that the answer to your query is yes.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Oh! That’s … that’s good to know, Madame Ferber.’

  There was a pause. I realised I was the one making it.

  ‘Could you – it’s been a while, you’ll have to excuse me – could you refresh my memory as to what my query was?’

  Another pause. This time longer, and clearly coming from the continental mainland.

  ‘Really, I’d have hoped that you might keep better notes …’ she sighed. ‘The query to which I refer is the one concerning page 583 …’

  ‘Yes, you did say.’

  ‘Specifically the use of the word “reflected” in the sentence, “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.” You recall now?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said. ‘It’s quite a memorable sentence.’

  ‘You had suggested that there was some perhaps unnecessary or even unintended ambiguity about the use of the word “reflected”.’

  I did, and you slammed the phone down on me, you probable old boot. ‘I remember that, yes …’

  ‘At first I thought your question came from ignorance, or possibly a deeper misunderstanding of my work, but I gave you another chance, and I considered the sentence and I think I was wrong. The word “reflected” is too ambiguous. It might even be that I simply failed to notice that I had used the word “reflected” in the first part of the sentence and then used it again to mean something else entirely. Please replace “reflected on” in the second part of the sentence with “influenced”.’

  I scrabbled for a pen and made the correction. ‘Thank you for clarifying—’ I began, but she butted in once more.

  ‘No, it is I who should thank you, young man.’

  And before I could fully register my astonishment, A.J.L. Ferber rang off.

  * * *

  I sat for some minutes in stunned silence. As a translator I’ve noticed that there are quite a few different kinds of silence. ‘Stunned silence’ is pretty big among the writers I translate. There’s ‘awkward silence’, too, which you get a lot with the more modern writers. But my favourite kind of silence has to be ‘companionable silence’, as in ‘they sat together in companionable silence, reading the
ir books.’ I don’t know why I like ‘companionable silence’ the best, because if I’m honest it seems to be something you never come across in real life. You see a husband and a wife in a coffee shop and they’re never sitting in companionable silence: they’re either bluntly ignoring each other because they no longer have anything in common, or they’re bickering about who has the ticket for the car parking or who’s going to cook dinner tonight.

  For some reason, these thoughts were in my mind as I took a taxi to visit my mother in hospital. After I’d mistakenly thought A.J.L. Ferber was my mother on the telephone, I took that as a sign, or at least a prompt, that I should go and see her. Also I had reached a brick wall with the whole book thing, so maybe some pleasant conversation with a family member would return me to the real world. I knew that my mother hadn’t actually invited me to visit her, and I hadn’t even called in advance to check that it would be OK to go and see her, but she was probably well enough to receive visitors. It had been more than a week since she’d had her fall and while the telephone call from her neighbour, Mrs Dreyfuss, saying that my mother didn’t want visitors, had been clear enough, I still felt I should stop by and see her. (Besides, Mrs Dreyfuss was eighty-four and had a habit of getting things wrong; she’d once told me that my mother wanted me to bring her sandwiches and milk at work and when I’d got there, my mother told me that she was not allowed anything with yeast in it or any dairy. So I drank the milk and ate the sandwiches in the park before I went home.)