Figure It Out

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  “My loss is untranslatable,” said Daisy, through Gavin. “And my finger hurts.”

  Then everything changed. Gavin discovered his voice. Daisy lost hers. Gavin became an original, and Daisy translated him.

  Meanwhile, Wayne taught himself the rudiments of Daisy’s language, a newfangled combination of several dispersed tongues.

  Before class, Wayne and Daisy went out for beers to discuss Gavin’s originals. Gavin wanted to come along, but Gavin, now that he was an original, had become untrustworthy, unsavory. As Wayne enveloped himself in Daisy’s hippie skirts, the notion of the uncapturable trace came alive for him as never before.

  Daisy and Gavin resumed their affair and videotaped themselves having sex. Wayne watched the videos. A torrential mess. Attractive. For sale. Dispersed remains. Daisy got her voice back and Gavin lost his. Gavin returned to translation, and Daisy to originality. Militant divisions. Everything reverted to normal.

  Daisy wrote a poem about the imminent war. Gavin refused to translate it. He said it violated her contract. War changes the contract, Daisy argued. Gavin took off his shorts.

  Daisy had biblical patches. Gavin’s duty was to seek out the patches and remedy them, disguise their purple.

  In their sex videos, Gavin and Daisy nude-wrestled, their bodies slick with the infantile.

  Daisy and Gavin were still in their twenties. Their work had hardly begun. It was a pity that one of them would soon die.

  Daisy sounded like Francis Ponge, Nazim Hikmet, and Marina Tsvetaeva, but Gavin distorted her in translation, turning her into a bargain-basement Paul Verlaine. He infelicitously translated Daisy’s famous poem about a pebble. Wayne caught the errors but didn’t dare tell Daisy that translation had soiled her pebble original.

  Against advice, Wayne showed his students the video of Gavin and Daisy nude-wrestling. Assignment: write a paragraph adjudicating the fight. The students en masse said they hated allegory. They refused to write the paragraphs. The twentieth century ended. The war began. Wayne wrote a paragraph. He brought his allegory to the bar and discussed it with Gavin, before class, while they drank beers. Gavin’s alcoholism got worse, almost rising to Daisy’s level.

  Daisy decided to take a shower before she wrote another poem about a pebble. She shampooed with Herbal Essence. Gavin joined her in the shower, put conditioner in her hair. Wayne opened the bathroom door. “Can I come in?” he asked. Gavin said yes. Daisy said, “Please don’t use your video camera.” Gavin refused to translate. Wayne had forgotten his rudimentary knowledge of Daisy’s vernacular. “Gavin,” said Wayne, “do you mind if I video?” “That’s fine,” said Gavin. “I’m sick,” said Daisy, “of Wayne’s feeble literalism.”

  And here are Daisy and Gavin, at the Oscars!

  Daisy was nominated for best foreign original, and Gavin was nominated for best translation of a foreign original.

  The winners are—Glenn Close opened the envelope—Daisy and Gavin! The theme music of the Daisy and Gavin movie began to play, and Daisy and Gavin walked onstage together to accept their Oscar, a conjoined-twin statuette, two selves united at the rib cage. Afterward, downtown, Daisy and Gavin found a practitioner to bisect (illegal operation) the monstrous Oscar.

  Gavin got a lot of translation work for high prices because he was exceptionally handsome. Daisy’s pebble poems were praised because she was beautiful. Gavin got sexier, after the Oscar. Daisy got dumpy. Now Daisy was jealous of Gavin, his face on magazine covers. The translator and his sideburns. The translator and his room at the Y. A curious nation’s shifting population watched Daisy and Gavin vie.

  Then Wayne and Gavin started having an affair, and Wayne checked into the Y, to be closer to Gavin. After sex, Wayne and Gavin went to the coffee shop across from the Y, to discuss Daisy’s originals. Gavin’s body improved, the longer the affair lasted.

  Daisy continued to write further installments of her pebble poem. Gavin, at the coffee shop across from the Y, discussed the new translations with Wayne. Tonight Wayne was teaching the seven hundredth poem about the pebble, and Gavin couldn’t explain a few of the nuances. “If I don’t understand the pebble, Gavin, I can’t teach this poem,” Wayne said, exasperated, as he ate his hamburger and drank his malted milk.

  “We go about the tasks of daily life,” said Gavin, “in our own ways.”

  “Your translation is more confusing than the original,” said Wayne.

  Shocked, Gavin gripped the edge of the table. He froze and fell backward in time to a moment before he’d begun to translate.

  Daisy’s new project was a revision of Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet. Daisy called her version The Book of Perpetual Quiet. Gavin had already begun to translate it, though Daisy had not finished writing it. Gavin worried that Daisy was not composing quickly enough. Wayne worried that Gavin was not translating quickly enough. Over beers, Gavin told Wayne that Daisy’s Book of Perpetual Quiet was her most difficult work and the most exasperating to translate. Wayne replied that the task of the translator was to stop complaining. To escape the day’s cruxes, the teacher reached his hand into the translator’s pants.

  “Every act of speech is site-specific,” Gavin told Daisy. Wayne was filming their conversation with his video camera so he could replay the event to his class. Wayne worried that Daisy’s and Gavin’s nudity would offend students.

  The students were not offended. They applauded Daisy’s and Gavin’s bodies.

  “In Daisy’s pebble poems,” said Wayne, to his seminar, “she is totally ‘out there.’” Gavin, visiting the seminar, interrupted. “I disagree. In my translations of the pebble poem, I show that Daisy is completely grounded. That’s the point of the pebble: to demonstrate Daisy’s connection to diurnal things.” Daisy was sitting at the other end of the conference table. She wore a pink wig today. She still had a wound on her right index finger, from the Waldorf ice-bucket flame. Despite discomfort, Daisy took notes. Her new fluency in English surprised everyone. She was outgrowing the need for a translator. This fact upset her. She’d acquired clout in the literary community because she relied on a translator. Originals were respected only if they passed through translation’s veils. “I miss my power,” Daisy whispered to herself, in the seminar. As she contemplated her vanishing clout, she began to cry. Georgie, a student who had a crush on Gavin and was doing a video documentary about him, began to film Daisy crying. Any exploitative footage was fodder. “I’m pissed,” whispered Daisy, as Georgie filmed. “I’m pissed that the teacher doesn’t get my pebble nuances.”

  The task of the teacher is to translate.

  The task of the translator is to wake up Daisy.

  Daisy’s pebble nuance poem is the translation of the burn.

  The translator is the task of Daisy.

  Gavin is the Daisy of Wayne.

  The Waldorf is the translation of the Y.

  The Y is the Waldorf of the translator.

  The burn is the nuance of the pebble.

  The task is the dispersal of the translator.

  Gavin is the Oscar of the pebble nuance poem.

  The seminar is the task of the burn.

  The breakdown is the Oscar of the task.

  The sexual fantasy is the task of the Y.

  The breakdown of the translator is the task.

  The seminar is the sexual fantasy of the translator.

  Multiple choice quiz:

  1. War is

  (a) the task of the translator

  (b) outside the story

  (c) the story

  (d) untranslatable

  (e) all of the above

  2. The task is

  (a) the translator

  (b) Daisy and Gavin’s sexual incompatibility

  (c) Daisy’s sexual voraciousness

  (d) Gavin’s sexual hang-ups

  (e) how we got here and how we get out of here

  3. Shame is the tint of

  (a) the translator

  (b) the task

  (c
) Daisy

  (d) the pebble nuance poem

  (e) untranslatability

  Spleen

  a new poem by Daisy, translated by Gavin

  Daisy, grand flotation device,

  loves the pale inhabitants of the nearby cemetery

  that pours mortality on the smoky suburbs.

  Daisy on the roadside looks for litter

  agitated without rest by the meager galette

  that Gavin fed me when I tried to strangle his gullet

  with my sad voice, all frill and phantom.

  My pebble burden is perpetual mouth, lamentation

  faucet that never turns off,

  rheumatic dependency, foul ball, perfumed yard-sale.

  Heritage is fatal, said Gavin, in the Waldorf,

  under a hydroponic umbrella. The handsome valet

  offered to undo my pique by sinisterly causing

  my translatability to go falsetto.

  In the dungeon, Wayne taught Gavin’s translation of Daisy’s “Spleen.” Daisy attended the seminar. Her burn filled the room. The war began. Would we win was not the question. The question was how to translate the pronoun we.

  “I don’t want merely to fall back on rhetoric,” Daisy said to the seminar on the second evening of the war. Daisy’s voice is newly transparent in the evening, thought Gavin, afraid of being erased by evening. Wayne was trying to teach the students about Gavin’s fear of erasure and about Daisy’s new wartime transparency. “Tasks can’t go on as usual,” said Daisy to the room, but the room didn’t trust her, because she was having another florid breakdown, carefully documented in the pebble nuance poem. Gavin was taking notes for a future translation of Daisy’s in-class breakdown on the second evening of the war. Wayne was trying to teach Gavin’s future notes, even before they were written down or translated, and this precipitousness, this earliness, was posing problems, complications to be discussed between teacher and translator, later, at the Y, in Gavin’s room, after Daisy had returned to the Waldorf.

  Scarlatti wrote 600 sonatas, Daisy wrote in a poem that Gavin was trying to translate and that Wayne was trying to teach even before it had been translated; Scarlatti wrote more than 600 sonatas, and at his death, wrote Daisy, in a poem that expanded on the work of the pebble nuance poem, Scarlatti’s manuscripts were dispersed, and his reputation fell into obscurity. Gavin translated the lines poorly, but Wayne could see through the inadequate wording and in any case no longer taught translations, only originals. In the seminar, Gavin applied a bandage to Daisy’s burned finger. In wartime it was prudent to teach only originals, but no one in the seminar, including the teacher, fully understood Daisy’s amalgam of tongues, or the sources of her wounds, or if her losses had origins.

  Ars Poetica

  a new poem by Daisy, translated by Gavin

  Music comes first.

  I prefer impairment.

  The vaguer and airier, the better.

  Less pizzicato, more posing.

  It’s also necessary to wander from the point

  and to choose your words contemptuously

  so you don’t end up behaving like a grisette

  in a derision joint near the indecisive Rhine.

  O beautiful derrière of Gavin, translating me!

  O beautiful trembling day, nearly noon,

  above autumn’s accidents, the Kremlin

  framing Daisy’s love for Gavin’s oyster-clear eyes!

  Voilà, nuance, come, again and again,

  into my pebble poem, colored red or yellow

  according to my fiancé’s whim—

  I hop from dream to dream like a flute having a coronary

  and I try to assassinate—

  good Daisy that I am—every impure thought,

  every “point,” every cruel azure argument—

  you can take your elegance, Gavin,

  and shove it up your ass! feral

  Being, assuaged by rhyme,

  veiled by the Almost, the Nearly—

  I’ll sue you, rather than step

  forged into the lime-bright falseness of this age,

  musical as the Aga Khan though no one cares,

  enveloped by agency

  and within the alleys of your decisiveness

  arguing a footpath between brother and other.

  Good luck, Gavin,

  I’m parsing you as best I can.

  The bed you sleep in isn’t literature’s.

  Next year, Gavin and Daisy were nominated for Oscars again—Daisy, for best foreign original, and Gavin, for best translation of a foreign original. Daisy lost. Gavin won. Gavin had carefully crafted an acceptance speech, which he read aloud to the gathered crowd. After reading it, onstage, he shot himself in the heart. Daisy, in the audience, ran up to him and threw her living body over his dead one. The next week, Wayne taught Gavin’s acceptance speech in his translation seminar. Here is the speech in its entirety:

  “Translation, like triumph, is a subject I can approach only cautiously. If I had a language other than my own, perhaps I could broach this subject, and this imperial occasion, with more fortitude and clarity; in the absence of a substitute language, I must regard this subject as one too daunting to trifle with, too large to avoid. Lucky indeed am I to be in the position of speaking to you today about this matter, a matter I shall call the opposite of weightless, a matter unapproachable despite my surprising victory; for today’s occasion, untranslatable, proposes a subject before which any thinking and feeling woman or man, any woman or man with a sense of historical consequence, must tremble; a subject before which we must take unusual pains, lest we damage ourselves or our listeners by mishandling a single nuance of the burden I would not call word-hauntedness if there were a better noun in my forlorn and bewildered language to describe the task.”

  (2003)

  III

  PUNCTUATION

  1.

  These cold spring days, I’ve been ruminating about punctuation. Evasion of facts? Flight into formalism? Culpable immaturity? Should I stop paying attention to interruptions? Start focusing instead on history?

  Hannah Arendt gives me pause. A solid, ethical writer, she uses dashes to set off parenthetical expressions. Listen: “And the acceptance of privileged categories—German Jews as against Polish Jews, war veterans and decorated Jews as against ordinary Jews, families whose ancestors were German-born as against recently naturalized citizens, etc.—had been the beginning of the moral collapse of respectable Jewish society.” A dash offers a place for holding your breath, while the weight of parenthetical information, subordinate yet urgent, lands on top of your body.

  2.

  I have a problem knowing when to pause. I catapult into irresponsible acts. As a schoolchild, never raising my hand before speaking, I battered the classroom air with questions. For that tendency, I acquired a nickname: Question Bomb.

  Walter Benjamin, a fellow Question Bomb, tried to answer some of the questions he posed. I’m not sure he answered them to the satisfaction of his stringent landsman Theodor Adorno, who berated Walter for insufficiently dialectical thinking. Here is one of the culpable questions Benjamin posed: “Was ist Aura?” He inscribed this riddle on a strange piece of stationery (labeled Manuscript No. 221 in his archive); the page is crowned with an advertising image of a San Pellegrino water bottle. Perhaps Benjamin is addressing his open-ended question—Was ist Aura?—to the bottle itself. What is your aura, San Pellegrino, patron saint of the unwell?

  3.

  My happiest moments as writer and reader occur in the space around the period. Retroactive fixity suddenly enshrouds the sentence, as we look back on it; we can understand what it tried to mean, what it failed to say. We can forgive its incoherences.

  Short sentences put me in a good mood. So does self-laceration, when artful. Two short sentences from E. M. Cioran suffice to remind me that brevity is a calling: “Cristina Ebner lived from 1277 to 1355. The Middle Ages were pregnant with God.” Christina drea
mt that she gave birth to Jesus Christ. Recently I used the word epidural to describe the moment when nervous cerebration was forced to stop.

  4.

  Marguerite Duras was full of mannerism but also wished to detach herself from posing. Her sentences tear themselves apart before they can achieve assembly. In an interview, she confesses a desire “to tear what has gone before to pieces.” She describes one of her books, Destroy, She Said, as devoid of sentences: “I don’t think there are any sentences left in it.” We destroy sentences to banish style’s encumbrances. As a reader, I seek sentences that reveal—in their method, not merely in their meaning—a core of self-destructiveness.

  5.

  Annie Ernaux, like Duras, prefers the piecemeal. And though Ernaux begins her autofiction Shame with an arresting sentence that seems to announce a traumatic cause, she devotes her short book to tangling catalyst and consequence, so that events no longer leave reliable footprints. Her opening sentence: “My father tried to kill my mother one Sunday in June, in the early afternoon.” A short sentence, the kind I like. We’re never too far from the period. We can see it coming. Each of us is loaded, like a gun, with bullets like this sentence, bullets we’ll never fire. I went through a phase, as writer, when I could give information only laconically. I made the mistake of considering my unemotional remoteness a style, and therefore seductive. I’ve often fallen into the trap of considering my self-administered epidurals (figuratively speaking) to be powerful flirtation tools. I’ll wipe out all feeling from my voice, in the hope of luring you to fall in love with me.

  6.

  Being spellbindable is my fate. This mesmerized state is one that Denis Diderot considered ideal for viewers of paintings. In fact, it was a painting’s responsibility to spellbind its viewer, according to Michael Fried, who paraphrases Diderot’s credo as follows: “a painting, it was claimed, had first to attract (attirer, appeller) and then to arrest (arrêter) and finally to enthrall (attacher) the beholder, that is, a painting had to call someone, bring him to a halt in front of itself, and hold him there as if spellbound and unable to move.” After the word beholder, Fried uses a comma, but I’d prefer a semicolon.