by Mark Leidner
Around 2am, I was still too caffeinated to sleep, so I made popcorn and opened a bottle of wine. I sat on the couch with the popcorn in a bowl on the cushion to my right and the glass of wine balanced on the cushion to my left with the untranslated manuscript in my lap. Between sips of wine and handfuls of popcorn, I turned the crinkly, untranslated pages hesitantly—not intending to translate anything—just to read a few of my favorite passages. And, okay, maybe translate a little, but only if I was really feeling it. I suppose that removing the pressure to create great art helped me relax a little.
Upon skimming the first few pages, however, I grew alarmed. I tried to allay my fears by reading on, but the fear intensified. The same text I’d once considered a wry and unpretentious confrontation of the aesthetic crises of our time now seemed woefully insufficient. The tone of the story was sour, its narrator unironically moralistic and snide, oozing unchecked ego, as if the world itself would have been lost without his pronouncements. The other characters felt either like pale reflections of people who’d wronged the writer in life, or utter stereotypes whose purposes in any scene were only to incite and then listen to the narrator/protagonist’s relentless grandstanding.
Worst of all, the narrator continually digressed into long unfunny commentary on the nature of literature as he saw it. I knew I’d been in love with this kind of shit at some point in my youth, but I couldn’t now for the life of me remember how or why. And of all the things upon which I could have pinned my hopes of shedding my unsatisfactory circumstances, I’d chosen the shepherding of this into English? I couldn’t believe how bad his novel suddenly seemed, and how retroactively stupid that had made the first seven years of my thirties.
I tabled the pages and sentenced myself to bed, tossing and turning, bitter, nauseous, sticky, drunk, and yet not drunk enough to simply pass out.
I’d reevaluate the manuscript later, when circumstances had conspired to make me feel okay enough about things in general to assess more reliably how bad or good the manuscript actually was. Only then would I know exactly how much to regret my life—completely, or just a lot.
WHEN SEVERAL SOBER RE-READINGS THE next week failed to restore my faith in the work, I actually felt a bit relieved. I dropped the manuscript in the trash and thought at least I’m back to zero with this nonsense. At least I can finally move on, whatever that means. Thirty-seven wasn’t that old. Some people never even make it to thirty-seven. From that perspective, everything I have is gravy. I could move to Vegas, right now, just start doing drugs and see what happens. I could go on a Caribbean cruise and never come back. Even if I knew I was unlikely to act on them, such fantasies seemed to liberate my future from my past, and for them I was grateful. Then, a few days later, I received an email from the novelist.
Early on, he’d tried to make our author-translator relationship more collaborative, but I hadn’t been interested in that. I’d found my precious caterpillar and wanted to take it into my cocoon and turn it into my butterfly. I wanted to wow him—and the world—and privileging the privacy of my process seemed like the best way to achieve that. Looking back, he was a saint to have trusted me at all. When his email arrived saying he hadn’t heard from me in a very long time and asking me how the translating was going, I felt doubly bad because I’d just disencumbered myself of his work for the second time, and he’d had no idea that it had happened even once.
I don’t know if I detected a hint of mockery in his otherwise polite email, or if I was still irritated at him for writing what was, in my updated opinion, dreck in any language, but I was unproductively forthcoming in my response. I told him I was sorry, I’d not only lost all the work I’d done, I’d lost interest in his work as well, and I wouldn’t be able to continue in good conscience in my capacity as his translator. Then I lied and said this decision was recent, and the only reason I hadn’t emailed him yet was all my teaching duties. It was a real gem of an email, I thought, perfectly balancing pettiness with self-pity, and I regretted it as soon as I hit send.
He replied almost immediately. He was disappointed, he said, but he understood if I wished to discontinue the project. And he signed it ‘Best,’ and that was it.
What a classy guy, I thought. I was completely surprised, and I castigated myself for having been a jerk. This was a real human being, and if not a great writer, maybe an okay one, if only on the grounds that he was kind. That’s the key, I thought. Kindness. That’s what’s missing. Being humane. Maybe if you’re a kind, humane person, you can write something bad, but that’s still a net win for the world. Maybe this guy was exactly the kind of hero I needed to learn from. And for a moment I thought about what it would mean to change into someone more like him.
An email a moment later, however, reversed my opinion. He said he was sorry to send a second email, but he had to get something off his chest. He said there was no reason for me to be rude about his writing, and I could’ve easily kept my newfound disillusionment to myself. Then there was a beefy little paragraph calling me out for stringing him along for so many years and then not informing him of my decision immediately, even if it was recent, teaching schedule or not. He then went into several aspects of his own teaching and administrative duties that were substantially greater than my own, but which, he argued, had not prevented him from respectfully and promptly emailing everyone he needed to email for going on twenty years. Then he said he’d felt betrayed because he’d completely entrusted his work to me and had been so respectful of my privacy and process.
I sent back an even more ill-conceived, one-sentence email that to this day still mystifies me:
Well, I hope that someday someone else writes something I can in good conscience usher into English… that redeems the act of translation for the both of us.
It’s not that it’s even that mean, it’s just childish and confusing. Sometimes I re-read that whole email chain to try to figure out what was I feeling that made me say that. Why would his faith in translation have been shaken? How would me translating anything new by anyone else redeem it for him? Was I trolling him? If so, why? What was there to gain? Sure, he’d disappointed me, but only after I’d outgrown his work, and how was that his fault? He never begged me to translate him, I sought him out. He never even knew I existed until I pitched him on it. And I didn’t feel bitterness toward other things I’d outgrown. I didn’t hate bands I liked as a kid even though I never listened to them anymore. And if I’d been a more collaborative translator, maybe we’d have copies of all my drafts in our inboxes. Even if his novel was bad, at least I could have finished the project.
When he didn’t reply to the last email at all, in my opinion, he won. I thought of a metaphor for how I’d ended that chain. I was like a batter who’d swung and whiffed at two easy pitches, realized he was going to strike out on the next pitch no matter what, and so, at the climax of the third swing, had released the bat like a weapon, launching it from his hands, on purpose, toward the pitcher, only to have the pitcher, being a superior athlete, effortlessly duck, and then the whole stadium watch the bat sail silently over second and into shallow center. There, no one picked it up, but the TV cameras zoomed in on it, and its pathetic solitude against the manicured green grass evoked for all watching the miserable character of the batter.
I spent the next few days trying to write a poem that used that metaphor in some other, more universally relevant context. I was so enamored of the bat analogy that just thinking it to myself felt somehow like wasting it. As the draft of the poem got longer and longer, I knew the piece was losing all emotional and thematic clarity—but I pressed on, ignoring my eyestrain, ignoring other duties, pouring even more hours into it like I was still in my twenties, like poetry was the only thing that mattered, and like as long as I was making it, my time on Earth wasn’t finite. I was stretching it out. I was creating new hours and new years inside the elastic simulacra of language, not using up a fixed allotment. When I finally realized the poem would never work, however, because, in its inception, it had only
been a paean to my own self-pity, and therefore would have been agony for anyone to read no matter how apt its metaphors, I surrendered and deleted it and knew nothing about anything once again.
YEARS LATER, I ATTENDED A literary conference in Ann Arbor. Except for the bare minimum necessary for personal and professional communication, I hadn’t written or translated a word or line of anything in years. Everything about my life had been dominated by the pursuit of this career, and all it’d done was drive me deeper into mazes of self-absorption. I remained a teacher for income, and I’d met someone at a bar that I’d sort of fallen for. We’d even bought a house together. We didn’t have children and weren’t married, but at some point that stopped mattering too. I suppose I found that by relinquishing all ambition—writing, translating, offspring, or climbing any semblance of a ladder of dreams—I’d rediscovered the ability to spend time with others and have it mean something more than how much it hindered or advanced my own long-term plans. I was old, but for the first time in my life, I was content with who I was. I was sad, don’t get me wrong, but I was also happy.
I was only at the conference at all because my department head, having rejected me for a full-time position for the umpteenth time, had paid for the trip out of guilt and had given me a ridiculously high per diem of $100. So, as long as I spent less than $100 a day, I was literally making money by eating free food. And walking through the room with all the booths and the young people so passionate about writing and invested in their blossoming careers gave me the feeling of a former major leaguer, who’d washed out after one half-season, eating a hotdog in the stands, enjoying the smell of the grass and cigar smoke and the roar of the crowd, but also, not caring who won or lost the game, and even being glad that he wasn’t playing. I saw in the young people’s faces the same ardent idealisms and vanities that had once driven me, and yet I didn’t want to grab them by the shirt and shout that they were doomed. I felt happy for them, and then I felt proud of myself for feeling that zen—until I saw the novelist.
He was flanked by two large, vertical banners whose dark red color reminded me of those flags beneath the standards of a Roman legion. Each banner featured a picture of his huge bearded face in black and white and the translated title of his then just-released novel. Obviously, it was not my translation. I looked around that crowd, wondering who the new me was, but everyone in the crowd looked exactly the same. Then I thought his translator probably wasn’t even there. Whoever they were, they were probably hunched over a laptop in New York or Los Angeles or Beijing or Berlin, putting the finishing touches on their next blockbuster translation. No good writer would even be here, I thought, glancing around resentfully, unless they had something to hawk.
I bought a copy of the book and then got in the long, twisty line of folks waiting to have him sign their copy. Despite his imperial posters, the novelist looked surprisingly down-to-earth. He just smiled at each fan through his Merlinesque beard, exchanged two lines of smalltalk, opened the cover, crossed out his name, and signed. I stepped forward when the line moved. Soon I was in the middle. Then I was near the front. Then I was three people back. Then two. Then one.
When you’re young, maybe you read your own writing and think it’s bad, but maybe somebody else says it’s good, so you think it might be. Or you think you’re great until someone you think is good tells you you’re bad, or mediocre, or have a long way to go, and you believe them. And maybe you give up. You move on. Or maybe you don’t. Maybe you try to get better. Maybe you ignore everyone and crank out epic after epic overflowing with your own unappreciated genius. The point is, you don’t know. No one knows how good they are, and no one knows how good anything is, especially in the beginning, and there’s something equalizing and honest in the universality of that uncertainty. But for me, that uncertainty was unbearable. I wanted to win, not be uncertain, so I wanted an insurance policy, and that’s what made me a hack, and that’s what made translation—an act I barely understood—a kind of sanctuary. I could be someone else, someone whose work the world was already sure was good. But serving myself first and the work only second, if at all, had made that sanctuary a trap.
This was just the personal reckoning I went through standing in that line. I know my experience isn’t everyone’s, and probably not even many’s. I’d also like to emphasize that these fears of inferiority were only the earliest seeds of my interest in translation, and that my sustained interest years later can only be explained by a sincere belief in the power of the art: the desire to share important work that would otherwise go unread; to reinvigorate the status quo with new, untrammeled modes; the desire to bridge different literary communities; the childlike joy of fiddling with syntax and diction like a trapeze artist across the poetic gap between concepts drawn from vastly different experiences; engineering empathy on the sub-atomic level of context and syllable—all these virtues eventually inflected my practice, too. That’s the good that I believe translation, or any kind of writing, can do. To excel necessitates sincerity, and even if it takes a lifetime of failure to learn it, an insincere person who learns sincerity has gained the world.
When I got to the front of the line, I purchased the book and asked him to sign it. He asked who to make it out to. Since we had never met in person, he had no idea who I was—until I said my name. His enormous eyes flashed recognition. He inclined his head a centimeter and squinted at me for an instant. Then I watched it dawn on him—the wasted years, the rejection of his collaborative spirit, the juvenile emails—until his eyes relaxed again and he looked at my clothes and body and face and saw who I was, almost like a mafia don inspecting a supplicant. When he finally smiled at me, his face held a wry, almost mystical aspect. Then he hunched over the book and with a big ballpoint pen between thumb and finger, scrawled a meaty note.
His novel had been so arch, so knowing, so prancingly in-your-face about the narrator’s social perception and his supposedly surprising diagnoses and dismissals of all manner of hypocrites and dilettantes, I knew that if he bore any ill will toward me at all, he wouldn’t be able to resist skewering me in the inscription. I watched him relish each stroke of the pen for a good twenty or thirty seconds, then he put the pen down and closed the book and slid it portentously forward. I took it and was about to walk away when I halted. I didn’t feel right. I turned back and awkwardly apologized, suddenly and sputteringly—for being a pest, for being a prick, for informing him I didn’t like his work—then I told him I was actually looking forward to reading his book, again, in this new context, and I lied and said I’d flown all the way to Ann Arbor just to meet him. I smiled and awaited his forgiveness. Instead, though, he looked over my shoulder at the next person in line and beckoned them forward. He snubbed me.
Still standing there, out of place in front of his throne-like setup, I looked at his novel in my hands, the back of my neck prickling, the tops of my ears suddenly hot. He was already in smalltalk with the next fan. I pretended to check my phone like I’d gotten a text. Then I pretended to look around the room like my friend had texted me to tell me where they were. I scanned the room and stopped, pretending to see the friend in the back corner where the exit was. I put my phone away and walked to the exit then, looking up and smiling as if both my friend and I were amused by the distance between us. The book felt heavier with each step I took, like I was the bearer of some kind of cursed or sacred relic. I imagined everyone in the room’s face suddenly melting into steam and blood if I opened it, like my own personal Ark of the Covenant; his seething inscription glowing gold, heating the book from within, tempting me to crack it open, to free it, to read who I had become in another’s eyes and reawaken the old me who had squandered so much in search of so little.
The book now rests on a shelf by my bedstand—unopened, and never to be opened—though sometimes I do still look up at it and wonder what is inside.
Mark Leidner is a Georgia-born writer of books and screenplays. He currently lives in Atlanta.
Mark Leidner, Under the Sea