Who reads translations anymore? Mr. Brodsky misdirected his Russian anger. Instead of attacking Garnett, he should have bashed people who don’t read Russian authors, or German, or Arabic, or Chinese, but choose Westernized imitations instead.
Before she began her missionary work, only the rare English speaker who knew Russian could read those writers. She introduced so many of us, those who can read English but not the original language, to Heaven’s passions. So Joseph and Vladimir can rant, and they do, ever so elegantly and eloquently, but Constance’s zeal has been a blessing.
I can’t tell you how good my translations are since I can’t look at them dispassionately. I am intimately involved. Mine are translations of translations, which by definition means that they are less faithful to the original. Like Constance, I try my best. However, unlike her, I don’t skip over words I don’t know, nor do I cut long passages short. I didn’t and don’t have the intention of translating an entire canon—my ambitions are neither expansive nor comprehensive. I translate for the pleasure it engenders, and I certainly don’t possess Victorian energies. I am an Arab, after all.
Garnett wasn’t the most prolific translator by any means. The Renaissance Venetian Lodovico Dolce translated more than 350 books (Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Castiglione, to name a few), and I’m not sure he was the most prolific either. Earnestness is a common trait among translators.
If you ask me, though, Garnett’s biggest problem was that she was of her time and place. Her work is a reflection of that; it appealed to the English of her generation, which is as it should be—completely understandable. Unfortunately for everyone, her time and place were maddeningly dull. Old chap and cheap port, that sort of thing.
Using Edwardian prose for Dostoyevsky is like adding milk to good tea. Tfeh! The English like that sort of thing.
She also wasn’t a genius. Now, you know, Marguerite Yourcenar did much worse things when she translated Cavafy’s poems into French. She didn’t simply skip over words she didn’t understand, she invented words. She didn’t speak the language, and used Greek speakers to help her. She changed the poems completely, made them French, made them hers. Brodsky would have said that you weren’t reading Cavafy, you were reading Yourcenar, and he would have been absolutely right. Except that Yourcenar’s translations are interesting on their own. She did a disservice to Cavafy, but I can forgive her. Her poems became something different and new, like champagne.
My translations aren’t champagne, and they’re not milky tea either.
I’m thinking arak.
But wait. Walter Benjamin has something to say about all this. In “The Task of the Translator” he wrote: “No translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original. For in its afterlife—which could not be called that if it were not a transformation and renewal of something living—the original undergoes a change.”
In his own confounding style, Benjamin is saying that if you translate a work of art by sticking close to the original, you can show the surface content of the original and explain the information contained within, but you miss the ineffable essence of the work. In other words, you’re dealing with inessentials.
Take that, Mr. Brodsky and Mr. Nabokov. A right hook and a sucker punch from good old Mr. Benjamin. Had Constance translated Russian works more faithfully, she would have missed the essential.
All right, all right, Constance may have missed both the essential and the inessential, but we should applaud her effort.
Yourcenar also translated Virginia Woolf’s The Waves. I can’t bring myself to read her translation, though. In Woolf’s case, unlike Cavafy’s, Yourcenar could read the language. Proust couldn’t read anything but French, and before he wrote his masterpiece he translated the apostle of the aesthetic John Ruskin, an incomparable stylist. Read Ruskin, then read Proust, and compare the influence—compare the incomparable stylists.
Walter Benjamin translated Proust into German. In one of his letters, Benjamin wrote that he refused to read more Proust than was absolutely necessary to finish the translation because he was terrified that the translatee’s exquisitely delicate style would forever seep into the translator’s.
I hope that the lepidopterist Nabokov would have approved of my work, but I’m not certain. I’ll never know.
Let me come out and state this, in case you haven’t deduced it yet: I have never published. Once I finish a project, once the rituals of the end are completed, I inter the papers in a box and the box in the bathroom. Putting the project away has become part of the ritual. When I finish my final edit, I lay the manuscript aside for a few days, then read the whole thing one last time. If it is acceptable, I place it in its box, which I tape shut, hoping the seal is airtight, and attach the original books to the outside for easy reference. I store the box in the maid’s room, or now in the maid’s bathroom since the former is filled. After that I’m done with it and hardly think of my translation again. I move on to the next project.
I create and crate!
Jacques Austerlitz awaits burial. It is that time of year.
I understood from the beginning that what I do isn’t publishable. There’s never been a market for it, and I doubt there ever will be. Literature in the Arab world, in and of itself, isn’t sought after. Literature in translation? Translation of a translation? Why bother?
Actually, I should say that when I started I may have deluded myself into believing that my translations might find a home. That didn’t last long. After all, the dozen or so who wish to read Anna Karenina are usually educated enough to do so in English or French. The two or three who might wish to read it in Arabic would choose a translation from the original Russian, not one done through my chosen system. Translating, not publishing, is what I bet my life on.
Now, you may ask why I am so committed to my translations if I don’t care much about them once they’re crated. Well, I’m committed to the process and not the final product. I know this sounds esoteric, and I dislike sounding so, but it’s the act that inspires me, the work itself. Once the book is done, the wonder dissolves and the mystery is solved. It holds little interest after.
That’s not all, though. In The Book of Disquiet, Pessoa writes: “The only attitude worthy of a superior man is to persist in an activity he recognizes is useless, to observe a discipline he knows is sterile, and to apply certain norms of philosophical and metaphysical thought that he considers utterly inconsequential.”
Although I can’t say that I understand all the implications of such a stance, I have recognized that my translation activity is useless. Yet I persist. The world goes on whether I do what I do. Whether we find Walter Benjamin’s lost suitcase, civilization will march forward and backward, people will trot the globe, wars will rage, lunches will be served. Whether anyone reads Pessoa. None of this art business is of any consequence. It is mere folly.
Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas.
I didn’t believe that when I first started. I wanted my work to matter. Early on, I hoped that someday in the future an enthusiastic Mendelssohn would initiate an Aaliya revival. That hope fed this vanity of human wishes, my blameworthy vanity. Luckily, the dream didn’t last long—it sounds so silly and naive now.
If I tell the truth—and I should, shouldn’t I?—I translate books with my invented system because it makes time flow more gently. That’s the primary reason, I think. As Camus said in The Fall: “Ah, mon cher, for anyone who is alone, without God and without a master, the weight of days is dreadful.”
I made translation my master. I made translation my master and my days were no longer alarmingly dreadful. My projects distract me. I work and the days pass.
But then I wonder if that’s the emphatic truth. I have to consider that I do what I do because it makes me happy sometimes. I don’t suffer from anhedonia, after all; I am able to experience pleasure. I read a poem about happiness by Edward Hirsch that ends with these lines:
My head is like skylight.
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My heart is like dawn.
I think that at times, not all times, when I’m translating, my head is like skylight. Through no effort of my own, I’m visited by bliss. It isn’t often, yet I can be happy when I commune with translation, my master. Sometimes I think that’s enough, a few moments of ecstasy in a life of Beckett dullness. Peaks cannot exist without valleys. My translating is a Wagner opera. The narrative sets up, the tension builds, the music ebbs and flows, the strings, the horns, more tension, and suddenly a moment of pure pleasure. Gabriel blows his golden trumpet, ambrosial fragrance fills the air sublime, and gods descend from Olympus to dance—most heavenly this peak of ecstasy.
During these moments, I am no longer my usual self, yet I am wholeheartedly myself, body and spirit. During these moments, I am healed of all wounds.
I’ll be sitting at my desk and suddenly I don’t wish my life to be any different. I am where I need to be. My heart distends with delight. I feel sacred.
Dante describes these moments best in the final lines of his masterpiece:
But already my desire and my will
Were being turned like a wheel, all at one speed,
By the Love which moves the sun and the other stars.
Sometimes I think that’s enough, that I’m grateful.
Most often I think I’m delusional. Vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas.
By the way, when the war was winding down in 1988, I think, a publisher called and asked if I would be willing to “try my hand” at translating a book. Not one of the translators he normally used was left in our violent city. He’d heard from his distributor that my English was rather good, so why not try? For a brief moment, a frisson tickled my heart. I could be someone. I could matter. While talking on the phone, I began to rebuild this house of cards called ego.
A huff and a puff.
The book he wished me to consider was Lana: The Lady, the Legend, the Truth.
Before my door, before the threshold, lies a silver salver under an oval platter of fine porcelain, covered in crinkly aluminum foil. Without having to look, I can tell; I can smell the okra and lamb stew, still warm. My stomach serenades it, but my bladder is more insistent. I scrape the soles of my shoes on the doormat before I enter my apartment. I place the tray on the kitchen counter and rush to the bathroom. I suffer strange tingling in my fingertips whenever I relieve myself these days. I consider, not for the first time, that I should rearrange the crates in the maid’s bathroom so I can use that toilet in emergencies. I doubt I will. I am in large measure a creature of habit, years of habits.
The platter could probably sate four starving Ethiopians into a crapulous state. Fadia is nothing if not over-the-top generous. It has been a while since she’s blessed me with one of her gifts. She doesn’t cook as often these days since she lives alone, her husband dead, her children married.
Fadia’s children may be the most well-mannered people in the Middle East (which isn’t saying much), but they’re also the most ridiculously boring humans on earth. Fadia implanted good breeding in their cells, insisted on correct etiquette throughout their childhood. She showered them with so many sermons that Joumana once called her the professor of homiletics. The children grew up embarrassed, if not horrified, by their mother. She was so desperate for each of them to have a better life that she raised them not to have a place for her in it. She shows up at all their events and gatherings, incredibly proud of them, and they ashamed of her. Fadia’s offspring would cross her off their list if she didn’t frighten them. None of her almost middle-aged children has ever dared criticize her or point out a faux pas, because they’re probably afraid she’ll shoot them, literally.
Every now and then—more then, for sure—I wonder what my life would have been like if I’d had children. But then I think of Fadia’s, and I think of the children downstairs, and I feel grateful. When I think of the once-loud daughter upstairs, I rejoice, pop open a bottle of champagne to celebrate my progenyless existence.
I hear no noises in the apartment above. Joumana and the witches must have gone to the hair salon. I don’t have to climb the two flights of stairs to thank Fadia this evening.
I take the bottle of red wine out of the pantry cabinet, pour a glass, and recork the bottle with the vacuum stopper, a wonderful invention for single people. I set out my dinner at the red-and-yellow kitchen table as the streetlight goes on outside my window. From the vase in the middle of the table, I remove the dead flowers, twisted flags of dried irises, and throw them into the garbage. Irises in late December? Who’d have thought such a thing was possible forty years ago?
I draw the curtains in the house, pull the window shades down to the sill.
The first bite of the stew makes my eyes water. Delicately, delectably divine.
This is art.
I bet you believe in the redemptive power of art.
I’m sure you do. I did. Such a romantic notion. Art will rescue the world, lift humanity above the horrible quagmire it’s stuck in. Art will save you.
I used to think that art would make me a better human being. I believed in the foolish idea that listening to Kiri Te Kanawa or Victoria de Los Ángeles purified my soul. “Vissi d’arte” and all that.
I lived for art, I lived for love,
I never did harm to a living soul!
Well, no, non vissi d’amore. I wasn’t that lucky. I also can’t say that I haven’t harmed a living soul. I sold books, after all.
I did live for art, though. It wasn’t a conscious decision, I don’t think. I didn’t sit down one day and plan on a life devoted to aesthetic beauty. I’m not berating myself for that. I slipped into art to escape life. I sneaked off into literature.
The forbidden aspects of this life may have seduced me. I don’t think anyone approved of my reading when I was a child. My mother certainly didn’t, and my stepfather made sure to criticize when he noticed: “Reading is bad for your eyes. You’ll soon need glasses, which will make you even less attractive.” My family would have been incontrovertibly hostile to art had they known that such a thing existed—if you showed them a grand piano, they probably wouldn’t have known what manner of beast it was. Of course I received various permutations of the “Who will want to marry you if you read so much?” lecture, but I also had to endure the chilly “Don’t try to be so different from normal people.”
Different from normal people? When I first heard that, I was sorely offended. I thought every person should live for art, not just me, and furthermore, why would I want to be normal? Why would I want to be stupid like everyone else?
May I admit that being different from normal people was what I desperately sought? I wanted to be special. I was already different: tall, not attractive and all. Mine is a face that would have trouble launching a canoe. I knew that no one would love me, so I strove to be respected, to be looked up to. I wanted people to think I was better than they were. I wanted to be Miss Jean Brodie’s crème de la crème.
I thought art would make me a better human being, but I also thought it would make me better than you.
Better? Yo, la peor de todas.
Oh, the sad vanity of flesh and blood called mankind,
Can’t you see, you’re not the slightest bit important?
Poetry brought me great pleasure, music immense solace, but I had to train myself to appreciate, train and train. It didn’t come naturally to me. When I first heard Wagner, Messiaen, or Ligeti, the noise was unbearable, but like a child with her first sip of wine, I recognized something that I could love with practice, and practice I most certainly did.
It’s not as if you’re born with the ability to love António Lobo Antunes.
I know. You think you love art because you have a sensitive soul.
Isn’t a sensitive soul simply a means of transforming a deficiency into proud disdain?
You think art has meaning. You think you’re not like me.
You think that art can save the world. I used to.
Why di
dn’t I train myself to be a better cook?
What was it all for? What good did it do me?
What good is a personal skylight if I’m the only one who sees its light?
How special!
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
I can relate to Marguerite Duras even though I’m not French, nor have I been consumed by love for an East Asian man. I can live inside Alice Munro’s skin. But I can’t relate to my own mother. My body is full of sentences and moments, my heart resplendent with lovely turns of phrases, but neither is able to be touched by another.
I have my writers’ neuroses but not their talents.
In The French Lieutenant’s Woman, John Fowles describes his character as possessing Byronic ennui. Let me paraphrase:
I am filled with Byronic loneliness but have neither of the poet’s outlets: genius and adultery.
All I am is lonely.
Before I go to bed, I must put away Sebald, both The Emigrants and Austerlitz. I can’t read him now, not in this state. He’s much too honest. I will read something else.
I must prepare for my next project. January first arrives soon.
In the wire rack next to the sink, the dishes dry, slowly dripping water upon the gray stone countertop. A winter wind starts a low moan outside my kitchen window. Rain comes.
I must sleep. Forget the Aaliya revival. I need the Aaliya asleep.
Of course, my mother’s visit delivers a night of anguish. I am unable to sleep. Tumbling thoughts of why, how, and what occupy my mind. I raise myself out of bed rather quickly, hoping to banish the worries from the mists of my head. The cool early temperature is a feathery hand tickling my spine. I put on my robe. My nightgown, darkened with moisture, sticks to my torso like the skin of an onion. I glance back, notice that I’ve left two damp bulbs on the sheet.
An Unnecessary Woman Page 10