by Mark Leidner
I went to the window, still tonguing it, wondering if any neighbors had seen or heard the racket. Down the block, a man in a bucket hat was fiddling with the threads on the head of his weedwhacker. He appeared to suddenly solve whatever problem he had been trying to solve, swung the weedwhacker down, pulled a cord, and resumed gracefully slashing the grass around his house’s bright red brick foundation. Through the open window I could smell the grass and the gasoline and for a moment felt expanded in my fear, and then, somehow, un-alone. A sparrow swooped into and out of view. Then another. Then a squirrel leapt off the raincatcher of one of the houses and landed on a power line, then it changed its mind and leapt back onto the roof. I watched the power line bounce until it was settled. I watched the squirrel on the shingled eave struggle with what to do next. Elway cautiously nuzzled my leg, and I pet his head absently.
LOST IN TRANSLATION
I HAD ALMOST FINISHED TRANSLATING THE NOVEL OF SOMEone unknown in my country (I’ve decided against identifying him to protect his reputation) when, one night after grading papers at a bar, I walked home to find my front porch window shattered and the deadbolt unlocked from within.
I walked inside as if entering a dream. Up to that point, if my life had been a novel, it would have been the sort of slow-paced, middling, pseudo-literary meditation on bourgeois ego so over-represented in American fiction. As the shards of glass cracked under my tennis shoes, however, I wondered if tonight was the night my life finally changed genres.
I set my keys and graded papers on a table by the door and walked down the shadowy hallway. Maybe I was drunk, or delirious from having just read so many of my students’ idiotic arguments, or both, but I remember feeling strongly a spine-tingling curiosity. At any moment, I naively hoped, some beautiful spy was going to jump out of the dark and press into my palms some secret artifact, or map to its location, and entrust me with the continuation of a mission upon which the fate of democracy or even humanity hinged.
“Why me?” I would stammer. “I’m just a part-time college teacher!”
“I know it’s not ideal, but it has to be you!”
“Are you… hurt?” I would ask, looking down at the blood leaking through their shirt.
“I’ve been shot in the stomach.”
“Oh God. You need a doctor. Let me take you to the—”
“There’s no time! I won’t make it. Look, I know we don’t know each other, but you have to promise me you won’t let my death have been in vain. You have to deliver this to…”
And on like that. Soon I’d be sending out an email cancelling all my classes, tossing a pistol into an open suitcase, and racing to Egypt on a cargo plane to prevent a determined cabal of neo-Nazis from acquiring a shard of the Cross, or a lock of Mary Magdalene’s hair, or a map to the Garden of Eden.
Fully deluded in this manner, I tiptoed to the end of the hall, gingerly entered my own bedroom-office, and saw that my mattress had been unceremoniously flipped over.
Something about the blatancy of this fact was sobering. It hadn’t crossed my mind that whoever had broken in was just a normal burglar, probably someone from my community who had less money than I, a drug addiction, or some other desperate circumstance reflecting the social and economic iniquity that characterized our capitalist system.
Imagining whoever they had been more realistically now, I took a step back, suddenly worried they might still be in the apartment. A quick check of the rest of the rooms revealed no one, so I went back to the bedroom-office.
My dresser drawers had been emptied onto the floor. There were the clothes I worked out in; the clothes I taught in; the good underwear, the underwear with holes; a crushed box of condoms; some expired fish oil supplements; some ankle socks that had always been too small; a puka shell necklace a girl I’d dated in college had given me when she told me she just wanted to be friends; an old postcard of a meadow full of wildflowers that I’d never sent to anyone; etc.
The sight of my actual belongings all dumped out like that smashed any lingering fantasies. I suddenly felt sorry for the burglar. How desperate and out-of-touch would you have to be to break into a random apartment and expect to find loot under a mattress? Who even has cash anymore? Whatever the burglar’s other struggles were, I decided, they were also hopelessly lost in a past that was gone forever.
My pity evaporated, however, when I saw that my desk was empty and realized my laptop was missing.
A broader inventory of the apartment revealed the only other missing item was my old microwave, which truly puzzled me. Aren’t microwaves like $20 brand new? Why would anyone risk breaking and entering for something worth so little? I never used it, and I probably couldn’t even have given it away. In fact, in this way, I even momentarily reconsidered the burglary as a potential blessing—but then I remembered the laptop, and the laptop’s loss was profound. Don’t ask me why, but I hadn’t backed anything up. Gone were hundreds of pages of notes and all of the translated drafts of the novel.
The police suggested I check the local pawn shops over the next few weeks to see if the laptop turned up, but every pawn shop dealer I spoke to explained emphatically that they would never buy anything if they suspected it was stolen. Not that I believed them, but I begged them to break that rule in the case of my laptop. I showed them a picture of the model and told them that if someone brought in anything that looked like that to please buy it, no questions asked, no matter how stolen it looked, I’d pay double. But they said they wouldn’t do that. It would only encourage criminals.
There were no laptops in any of the pawn shops I checked, though in one I did find a VHS set of Twin Peaks, so I also bought a VCR, and I watched the entire series over the next few days instead of doing any work.
The author had sent the original-language hard copy of his novel by mail, and that particular copy I still had, but I found it difficult to look at now. It sat there on my desk, butterfly clip-bound, coffee-stained, waiting to be re-entered, waiting to be re-translated—but I had lost all motivation.
While I genuinely believed that I’d be doing the world a favor by ushering this writer’s work into English, I was honestly more interested in the thanks the world would heap upon me in return. I’d dreamt every day of the better jobs and social connections and greater academic and literary credibility that completing the first major translation of this author in English would bring me. Thus, the prospect of starting all over from scratch was demoralizing. I was thirty-seven, and I’d have liked to have had children before forty, but who was going to marry some penniless part-timer professor with eighty grand in debt and only two chapbooks of his own unacclaimed drivel to show for it?
Even if it had been ignored critically, with a complete and beautifully rendered translation, I’d have been able to claim some sort of artistic martyrdom. Such a version of me might still have enough appeal to draw an acceptable mate with whom to have children on my preferred timeline. Without the translation, though, my only prospects were the day-drinkers from the dive bar down the street and the other, even sadder teachers slaving away at the same sad, underfunded community and state colleges I’d taught at for years. I’d of course fooled around casually with several, but that all-important personal connection that didn’t wither in the clear light of day had thus far proven elusive.
Dating fellow teachers was its own extra level of hell anyway. Everything became a competition: who had the worst students, the most grading, the most degrading pay, the least job security, the most meetings, the most total commuting, the single-longest commute, the most mercenary administrators, and, of course, the most debt. That all of this relentless whining was justified did not make it any less toxic to the happiness of anyone I knew. While at first the loss of the laptop meant the loss of my golden ticket out of a doomed milieu, in the subsequent clarity of my depression over its loss, I realized that no one new was going to have loved me more for translating the work of some other person no matter how wonderful the final product turned out.<
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My whole plan, the plan upon which I’d staked my early-to-middle adulthood, I learned, was not only naïve, but was bitterly, ironically naïve, given that I was a teacher, and it was my job to be the opposite of stupid. Re-translating everything from scratch then—dumping even more years of life staring into the laptop screen with even less chance of success than before—was simply not going to happen. Instead of throwing it away, and hoping perhaps that the laptop might somehow turn up and permit me to finish the job, I pushed the untranslated hard copy to the back of my desk and forgot it—or tried to. Even there, it seemed to mock me, however, so I stacked a bunch of textbooks I was supposed to be reviewing on top of it too. Later, because I could still see the edges of the manuscript pages poking out from beneath the textbooks, I put my printer in front of the stack and then draped a track jacket over the output tray of the printer, completely covering not only the manuscript but everything touching it, too.
The pile, of course, was an even more obtrusive reminder of all the lost time the manuscript represented. Plus, on a purely practical level, it utterly cluttered my already small desk. But because it still seemed sacrilegious just to throw his manuscript in the garbage, I used it as an excuse to do some spring cleaning. I put the butterfly clip-bound pages in a cardboard box with some other stuff I no longer needed, including a book on the history of ballet that had been in my bathroom for ten years, some old scarves and hats, the ill-fitting ankle socks, the expired fish oil supplements, etc.—and set it all out by the street.
I checked the box whenever I left or returned to the apartment, and each day, something new would be gone. The manuscript was the last to go. When I realized that probably no one would take it, I resigned myself to letting it be ruined by the rain, which seemed poetic, and therefore slightly better than throwing it in the garbage. But then one day, before any rain had come, the box was empty. I wondered what kind of person would take three hundred plus pages of text in another language off the street. Probably someone had seen free scrap paper and gotten it for their kid to draw on. Or perhaps some punks who had wanted to start a fire had seen it as free kindling. As I crushed the cardboard box into the recycling bin, I decided that I was happy not knowing, relinquishing the author’s book to the universe for whatever purpose the universe saw fit to give it.
I walked back into the apartment free of foreboding for the first time in what felt like forever, wondering what new vaguely literary paths to self-actualization might now be open to me. Maybe I would become one of those people who sold tote bags online with Henry James or Virginia Woolf quotes on them. Maybe I would write book reviews, or reviews of reviews, and submit them to some arts-centered online dumping ground. These ideas failed to capture my imagination, however, when I realized anyone with a computer and free time could do them. They lacked the romance, the exoticism, the whiff of self-sacrifice, the glimmer of public service, and the writerly nuance I believed I was capable of, that translation demanded. And yet translation was too depressing to return to. And so, because I had no desire to be admired for any of the things I feel like I could have done, and because I wanted to be admired for the one thing I no longer had any interest in doing, I did nothing.
For weeks I woke up grumpy, drained, and exhausted. I couldn’t go to bed unless I’d had a few drinks, and no books or movies or TV shows entertained me. I switched therapists, but where the last therapist had been too supportive, the new one was too smug and prone to lecture, for some reason, about the failure of psychoanalytic theory, so I switched again only to end up with someone who couldn’t even remember our appointment times, and switched again after that only to end up with someone who had potential, but who was too new at their practice to be very helpful to a buffoon as prone to self-pity as me. I even bought a new phone. The new phone was beautiful, but so big that I dropped it all the time and could hardly get my hand around it and it fit in none of my pockets. Before long the screen was cracked and I tried to go back to a smaller one, but they wouldn’t let me without paying $250. I got a new laptop. I quit coffee. I quit sugar. I took up smoking, and then I quit that. I got into yoga. I started meditating. I got an app that tracked the length and frequency of my meditations. Nothing changed.
I think when life is good, we see its diversity and are gratified by its abundance. Even its conflicts seem an important part of the hidden continuity between outwardly dissimilar things, almost like the glue that holds everything together. But when life sucks, we see only fragmentation, and fragmentation is lonesome. Every fragment becomes a reflection, and then an amplifier, of a formless sadness within.
What happened next was initiated, ironically, by some of my worst students. It was one of those hot, sweaty, evil teaching days when your hangover just won’t cool, and the void won’t let go of your soul, and you can feel a thrumming drumbeat between your ears, a distant echo of war and chaos and plunder that inflects everything you think and do, and then at school all your students do is whine and cheat and lie and throw tantrums and stare at you in stony silence and break your heart and ignore your assignments and even when they actually try, disappoint you. There you are in front of the classroom, grinding your teeth, hands shaking, hair thinning, temperature rising, eyeballs aching—and you come within inches of throwing your hands at the ceiling and shouting, “You know what, Amelia? Class cancelled! You know why, Jerome? Here’s why, Ansley. Because we’re lost! We’re doomed! All of us! Even me!” And you swing your finger around like a preacher. “But especially you! And the only evidence I need to make this thesis statement sing is right here. That I’m the one appointed to be your shepherd. A total loser, someone for whom no dream has ever come true, nor should it have, since all his dreams are hopelessly narcissistic. And that fact that you’re still listening to him is proof that you’re just like him.” But of course you don’t do that. You bite your tongue. You internalize. You go into that fugue state you go into, which you don’t wake up from until you’ve left campus, both regretting even thinking what you thought and yet ashamed of not having had the guts to say it. You feel guilty and stifled in a hundred ways you haven’t even the energy to unpack, and the only remedy is to do something recklessly stupid.
Even though it was after 5pm, I pulled my Honda into a corporate coffee shop, got a giant cookie and the biggest coffee they had, dumped a shitload of cream in it, sat down by the window, opened my new laptop, and started working on some original poetry. I never drink caffeine after 5pm—ever. I stay up all night. I work myself into dizzying spells of meaningless anxiety. My dreams, when I do sleep, become ghoulish. It makes me absolutely insane. But I had to do something to reassert for myself some semblance of purpose, and the combination of poetry and caffeine had called my name.
The coffee capably worked its sorcery, and for all of an hour the writing was practically glorious. Then I realized my bladder was about to explode—my ruminations had been so beautiful I hadn’t noticed—so I asked a lady next to me to watch my laptop and went to the bathroom.
When I came back, I casually perused the document I’d just spent the last hour typing furiously into. Instantly, I saw that it was wordy, vague, and overflowing with expository bellyaching, its uncensored bitterness filtered only through the thinnest veil of pseudo-intellectual “lyricism.” The only thing it seemed to be “about” was my own privilege—unintentionally so. When I’d left the table to go to the bathroom, I’d been convinced it might be the next great American poem—that once-in-a generation poetic artifact of ignominious origin that would go on to be read in classrooms until the fall of the empire, and maybe beyond, but when I returned, I saw that it was disgusting, and I slammed my laptop shut in disgust.
I drove home dehydrated and sweating, still jacked on caffeine, having squandered the initial concentration it had given me and dreading the anxiety that would be its price on the back end.
I cleaned the whole apartment when I got home. It was hot and I was trying not to run the AC, so I stripped to my boxers and bl
asted Chopin and swept and mopped and dusted the blinds and all the books on my shelves. Behind the table I keep my keys on, I even found some broken glass from the break-in I’d never swept up. After the living room, I cleaned the kitchen. After the kitchen came the bathroom. The bedroom-office came last.
My desk sits over a cast iron radiator. On cold winter mornings I can do work and be heated and soothed by its humming and wheezing. Cleaning behind it, however, yielded a surprise. Amid some cobwebby essays by students whose faces I’d long since forgotten but whose names still felt faintly familiar, was a second butterfly clip-bound hard copy of the novelist’s untranslated manuscript. It was actually the first—I suddenly recalled that when he’d sent it to me originally, I’d promptly lost it, so I’d requested a second copy, which he’d agreeably sent through post, and the second one was the one I’d been working from, and which I’d left in the box on the street.
I stopped cleaning to ponder whether this find was an indication that I should foray backward and translate the whole thing again from the beginning. I might be forty-five or fifty by the time it got published, but that’s young enough, right? To have finally established my brand? To have gotten my mini fifteen minutes? And cash it in for a job? Or adulation? If nothing else, I had nothing better to do. It was Friday night, and I was a hyper-caffeinated loner dusting and sweeping to Chopin.
On the other hand, I’d already rejected this path once. When I’d set the manuscript out in the box with the scarves and fish oil, that had been that. I’d not looked back. Wouldn’t restarting again, now, be retroactively wasting all the months that had elapsed between the first time I quit and today? If I stayed quitting, all that time would remain progress. Toward what I didn’t know, but it didn’t matter.