Most of the time, we didn’t make small talk, concentrating on the work at hand, though once she asked me if everyone in Denmark spoke the way I did. And what way is that? I replied. My English, according to her, wasn’t like theirs. (She meant the Anglophones.) I seldom used slang and my pronunciation was very clean, very easy to understand. There was something rigid about my grammar, she concluded, and I wasn’t sure from her tone if she meant it as a compliment or not. For many Danes, English was like a second mother tongue, a faithful shadow, a watermark: I read in English more than in Danish, I watched more films in English, but on a daily basis it was Danish I spoke, not English. In the end, I told her that it was because English wasn’t really my language; it’s easier to be rigorous with a language that isn’t one’s own. I wasn’t sure if Maryvonne took my answer seriously. She wasn’t one to laugh at a joke, and I found it impossible to guess what she was thinking at a given moment. Nevertheless, I would commiserate with her when we received our exam results: in general, my French-to-English was as high as her English-to-French, her French-to-English as low as my English-to-French. It occurred to me that if we could somehow become a single person, we would be a force to be reckoned with. I told her this, smiling to let her know that it was meant in jest. She gave me one of her nameless looks, as though she felt sorry for me, and I immediately regretted my remark.
Of course, there was already someone like that: René, the diplomat’s son. He alone held his own in the company of both Michaels and Fauchier-Delavigne. Every bilingual has a language he favors, the way an ambidextrous person always has a weaker hand. But it was hard to tell with René. As one might expect, he did well on his exams, which two- and three-language students took together in the big auditorium. I would glance up from my paper to see him walking serenely past the rows of heads bent over desks, and I had the impression that, for him, the exams were a mere formality. They consisted of two 250-word articles, extracted from newspapers and reviews of recent date; we had just under an hour. A monitor stood behind a lectern and, in a show of vigilance, occasionally walked up and down the rows. But it was obvious to me that keeping watch over an auditorium full of students was difficult, if not impossible. Individual seating was left to our discretion, the rows of seats sharply graduated in concentric semicircles around a “stage” where the monitor stood. Such an arrangement also gave me a view of the students in the rows below me. Each seat—bolted to the floor—did not quite line up with the seat in front, one level lower, due to the way the rows curved around each other, and I found that I could look down and glimpse an eraser, a hand gripping a pencil, an exam sheet partially obscured by a shoulder, and that, by leaning forward a little, ever so discreetly, I gained a better view. If I squinted a little, I could even make out some of the handwriting. How many others, through the years, had realized the same thing?
I have Maryvonne, or her presence in front of me, to thank for my little discovery. It was customary for the two of us to walk into the auditorium together, coming as we did from the bibliothèque where we did our last-minute revising before an exam. Naturally, we ended up choosing seats near one another. Sometimes Maryvonne sat behind me, other times I sat behind her. (We never sat in the same row, because she found it distracting.) I did not set out to cheat; I simply wanted to see where she was on her copy. Any moment, I expected her to turn around in her seat but she never so much as looked up from her exam. The idea of cheating did not enter my thoughts, or at least not right away. This wasn’t a mathematics or chemistry exam, with correct and incorrect answers; we were being tested on the quality of our translations, and cribbing another student’s sentences would have been stupid, an admission of guilt. Nevertheless, I let myself glance at Maryvonne’s paper when I was stuck on a word (the French formulation of “dandy roll,” “chives,” “fair trade”)—i.e., a small and easily definable unit of meaning, something that a glance inside a dictionary would have resolved in other circumstances, that is to say, anywhere outside the auditorium. I did well—better than on any of my previous exams, where, all too often, not knowing a word or the full meaning of an expression had undermined and compromised the rest of my translation. Not being hampered by vocabulary allowed me to concentrate on the text itself as a whole. Practicing translators—unlike, say, interpreters—would always have their dictionaries at hand, and to forbid their use during an exam was to emphasize unrealistic working conditions. Or that was how I justified it to myself. After all, no one else at the school had to work in two languages not his own; I was simply re-establishing the balance.
Maryvonne congratulated me. I didn’t ask what she had scored on her French-to-English. It seemed more and more likely that she would not have her first year. I considered telling her about my discovery, but at the same time I feared her reaction. (I remembered her glaring disapprovingly at a group of students smoking in the common lounge, underneath the no-smoking sign.) She might very well forbid me from sitting behind her after that. In the end, I decided to keep it to myself. At the next exam, we entered the auditorium together as usual, and ever so subtly I let her fall ahead of me so that she would sit down first. Earlier, in the bibliothèque, she had been unusually subdued—even for her—but I chalked it up to nerves: this was, after all, the mid-semester exam. I stared at the back of her head, her silvery gray hair which she didn’t bother coloring like most women her age, and I experienced in that moment a flash of tenderness for her. If she only knew! That was when I saw René: he was sitting at the edge of one of the rows, and looked up as we approached. Our eyes met, but there was no change in his gaze: no way to tell if he had recognized me at all. In front of me, Maryvonne suddenly paused, then took the only empty seat in the row directly behind his. All of the nearby seats were taken. It had been so unexpected that I just stood there for a full second, staring down at Maryvonne, who was already busying herself with her little zippered case, the kind used by French schoolchildren for carrying pencils and erasers. Had she figured it out? But how? And why hadn’t she said anything? There was nothing else to do; with leaden steps, I continued up the aisle.
The next day, when it became clear that she wasn’t going to bring up what had happened, I tried to broach the matter as delicately as possible. But confronted with her blank, unwavering gaze, I found myself hemming and hawing, fumbling for words, and it dawned on me that what she had done—at least on a basic level—was choose a seat because it was available. To dig any deeper was to risk exposing my own motives for bringing up the subject and open myself up to other questions that I wasn’t in any position to answer. A few days later, we were given our exam results, and Maryvonne received her highest score ever on her French-to-English. I, on the other hand, had done even worse than usual, on both my English-to-French and my French-to-English. I did my best to pretend I was happy for her, but the more I thought about it, the angrier I became: at her, at myself, at the school. I caught up with Maryvonne after Michaels’s class—where, for once, she had been rather sure of herself—and I asked her, right there in the hallway. Or rather, I accused her. In any case, that was how it came out. I told her that I knew she had cheated on her last exam. Anyone walking past could have heard me, but she didn’t seem bothered in the least. Her face, calm as a mirror, betrayed nothing. She gazed steadily at me and asked why I thought that. I crossed my arms and replied that it wasn’t a matter of thinking it but of knowing it. She had fooled the others but not me. I went into detail about obliquely angled seats, the discretion involved, until the pitying expression on her face made me falter. Finally, I stopped talking altogether and walked away, leaving her standing there—a solitary figure in the corridor that a moment earlier had been full of students—not daring to look behind me before I had turned the corner and was safely out of sight.
I could have apologized, of course. She was pragmatic, if nothing else, and I like to think that she got as much out of our relationship as I did. Had we been more than classmates or study partners, I might have seen things differently,
perhaps. I might have given more thought to her feelings. But there was no getting around the fact that I had just admitted my own guilt to her. In accusing her, I had only managed to accuse myself. What if she went to Michaels or Fauchier-Delavigne? What if she denounced me at the secrétariat? When she did neither, I began to avoid her. She seemed to take the hint and didn’t insist. We ignored each other in class and in the corridors. She didn’t sit behind René again, and he didn’t sit in front of her, either. As for me, I made a point of sitting behind one of the Chinese students, to show her that I wasn’t cheating. My exam scores suffered, and the thought occurred to me that, all along, it should have been her and me sitting together. Not one of us behind the other but, rather, side by side, glancing at each other’s tests when necessary, she at my French-to-English and I at her English-to-French. She was my dictionary as much as I was her grammar, and vice versa. It would have been the logical arrangement, a happy marriage of convenience. But things could never go back to what they had been. I had sought her out at the start of the year because I felt that it made sense, given our respective weaknesses. Deep inside, I had never liked the silent judgments, the reticence, the general lack of feeling. A part of me began to suspect that she hadn’t cheated on the exam at all, and in some ways that made it worse: she had managed, without cheating, to get a good score on her French-to-English.
Alone, I studied more assiduously than ever before. Each new expression or word in French I noted diligently in a large Clairefontaine notebook. I read as much as I could, and always with a pencil in hand: a book I didn’t take notes on was a book I hadn’t really read, I told myself. My marks improved, though I feared it wasn’t enough to save me. One afternoon, in the bibliothèque—I tried to use it when I knew Maryvonne wouldn’t be there—René walked in and sat down at one of the tables. The entire time, he did nothing but stare blankly at the wall. Or so it seemed to me. Then, just as suddenly, he stood up and walked out. In the auditorium, observing him from several rows away, I grew familiar with his exam-taking habits. He always took off his watch before he started, and every so often he liked to pick his nose discreetly with the eraser end of his pencil. There was also a steady supply of sweets—gummy bears, usually, or a chocolate bar of some kind. He worked unhurriedly, methodically, rarely changing what he’d written. It was almost as though he wasn’t taking the same exam as the rest of us. Sometimes, on my way to hand in my copy, I would walk past his empty seat. The only trace of his presence was one or two crumpled candy wrappers on the desk.
2. Crow the Aesthète
Edward Michaels was, to say the least, one of the more eccentric professors at the school for translators and interpreters. He owned a vintage motorcycle—a beautifully restored Triumph Bonneville—and there was a chair in his name at the Collège de France. Rumor had it that he had missed being elected to the Académie française by a single vote not once but twice, and was waiting for another académicien to croak and vacate a seat so that he could try again. (Victor Hugo had also made it on his third attempt.) If elected, he would be the first Englishman to join the ranks of the Immortals.
The day he gave us Marcel Moiré’s poem to translate, one of the Anglophones questioned the choice of material. This being a technical school, literary translation was relegated to the background, when not ignored altogether. Michaels—who considered himself the last bastion of the old guard, its self-declared defender, a role he seemed to take both seriously and as an obscure joke he was playing on himself—replied that anyone could translate a technical document with the right vocabulary, because there was nothing hidden beneath the surface. (He made a joke about juridical language being the exception, and a few people laughed.) On the other hand, the number of poems defying translation were legion. A poem was, by definition, untranslatable. And that was where, from time to time, every translator worthy of his profession should test his mettle.
We were given a week to translate Moiré’s poem into English, which to me seemed excessive. An entire week to translate six small lines? I couldn’t help but wonder if there was something else, something more, that Michaels wanted us to discover; if, perhaps, the poem might be a litmus test, a shibboleth for translators, his way of asking us a question, though I wasn’t sure what the question might be.
My initial effort was a word-for-word translation:
A crow / landed on an island / in the middle of a river. / The discerning bird / equally pedantic and clever / did it for the rhyme.
With my next, less-than-literal translation, I attempted to reproduce the rhymes of the original:
A black-jet / alighted on an islet / there amidst a rivulet. / The corvo / clever little thing, did so / for the archipelago.
I had maintained the poem’s principal elements—the bird, the piece of land, the body of water—but Moiré’s plain vocabulary had been swallowed up by my baroque language. Over and over I retranslated the poem, toying with different registers and styles, as I tried to replicate in English Moiré’s elusive voice. For most of the week, I worked on the poem and little else. The more I pored over the words, the more I became convinced that a week wasn’t enough. A lifetime wouldn’t be enough. I gave up on meter and then on meaning as well:
A crow / took roost atop a château / near a mound of snow
A crow / perched on a garrot / in the shade of a chestnut
A weasel / stood on an easel / within a patch of teasel
A lizard / shook its gizzard / amidst a blizzard
A mink / sipped a drink / on a kitchen sink
By the end of the week, the original crow had become every animal under the sun and performed, for the sake of the rhyme, all manner of aleatory acts. The words themselves were not important; Moiré’s doggerel was not dependent on meaning at all. Was that, I wondered, the answer to Michaels’s unspoken question?
Crow the aesthète / smartest bird I ever met / did it for the couplet.
I don’t know what methods my classmates opted for, what conclusions they arrived at. No doubt, some chose to translate the poem literally and were done in a few minutes, while others took longer to find a suitable compromise between the literal and the idiomatic. The purpose of the exercise, I imagine, was to demonstrate the difficulties of translation, in the face of which a good translator must always find an adequate solution. You are not translating a language, you are translating a text. That was what Edward Michaels had told us at the start of the semester. A good translator is neither faithful nor unfaithful. A good translator goes beyond content and form to reveal the impossibility of defining a language.
On the day we were to discuss our translations, I noticed right away that René was absent. Michaels had yet to arrive. (He was often late.) The Anglophones, as usual, were chattering amongst themselves. At that moment, my gaze fell on Maryvonne. She was sitting in her usual spot, and I realized with a start that she was staring at me. Her gaze felt strange after so many weeks of ignoring each other. How long had she been watching me? I continued to return her stare.
Only the other night, I had dreamt that Maryvonne was waiting for me, as usual, at the far end of the platform. As I approached her, she said, “If you want, I can put you in contact with her.” When I said nothing, she went on: “I know that you’ve lost someone. At the translation school, from the moment I first saw you, I could tell.” Unexpectedly, she smiled. “You needn’t be afraid.”
“Who says I’m afraid?”
“You blame yourself for her death. But it wasn’t your fault; you didn’t kill her. She killed herself.” Then: “It’s important that you continue to translate in both directions, as you’ve been doing. From English to French and from French to English. It’s the only way.”
Before I could question her further—the only way for what, exactly?—the dream ended and I woke up.
Lying there in the darkness, I wanted nothing more than to ask my former study partner how she had translated Moiré’s poem. What had she come up with? Had she decided in favor of meaning or
rhyme, or both? I saw myself going over to her and apologizing, suggesting that we study together again. But then I saw her eyes narrow, knowingly, and I realized that the loneliness I saw reflected there was none other than my own. I remembered my father once telling me that in a dream, I was everything and everyone (and everything and everyone was me). We had argued about it for a long time. Perhaps he had been right, all along. I got up and left the room; I made my way down the deserted hallway until I came to the biblio, where I found René, alone, in the corner. He didn’t look up when I approached the table—the same table where Maryvonne and I had spent many long, studious hours. To my surprise, he was still working on Moiré’s poem. It’s hard to say how many translations there were. I counted at least forty or fifty—I myself had not gotten past thirty—by the time his pencil stopped moving and he acknowledged my presence. I deduced, from the scattered bits of paper, that he was translating his own translations, going back and forth between his two languages.
Forgot the time, he muttered, and I told him not to worry, Michaels was late again. No doubt practicing the elbow lift in his office, René said, mimicking someone raising an invisible drink to his lips, and we both smiled as though at an old joke. Hastily gathering up his papers, he asked me why I had sought him out. How had I known he would be here? I pretended to study the dusty shelves, the rows of outdated dictionaries in a dozen languages that didn’t include Danish. A sort of restlessness, or should I say loneliness, or sadness, had led me to the bibliothèque. How do you know I came here for you? I said to him. It was a challenge, the way I said it, and he laughed, suddenly no longer in a hurry. He slowly, lazily, threw himself backwards in his chair, like someone who has made a decision. I don’t feel like class today, he said. Let’s go downstairs.
Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost Page 14