The Translator

by John Crowley

  The Translator

  John Crowley

  For Tom Disch, who knows why

  “Poetry is power,” M[andelstam] once said to Akhmatova in Voronezh, and she bowed her head on its slender neck.

  —NADEZHDA MANDELSTAM, Hope Against Hope

  Contents

  Epigraph

  Part I

  1.

  The first time that Christa Malone heard the name of…

  2.

  It’s always a surprise and a wonderment when our plane…

  3.

  It was a university huge even in 1961, a city…

  4.

  Because her family moved often when she was growing up,…

  5.

  In her room in Tower 3, she beat out the…

  6.

  Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays was Psychology, which Fran was taking…

  7.

  The Christmas when Kit was a senior in high school,…

  8.

  The house on East North Street where Jackie had found…

  9.

  In May every year the nuns of Our Lady of…

  10.

  They were thin white lines, not noticeable really, almost indistinguishable…

  11.

  It had been an accident with some ammunition, some shells…

  12.

  Wherever it was, in whatever city, it was a vast…

  13.

  “I thought about it, what he told me,” Kit said…

  Part II

  1.

  When her first semester at the University was over in…

  2.

  First there was the alphabet, which even when she had…

  3.

  So every day that summer she rose early and studied…

  4.

  When his apartment on the edge of the prairie grew…

  5.

  The house that Falin lived in was owned by an…

  6.

  “Mad,” said George.

  7.

  In Kit’s mailbox at the dormitory when she returned to…

  8.

  It had fallen, it had been dropped, but the effect…

  9.

  The next night, as if he knew just where she’d…

  10.

  All that night a storm moved over the Gulf too,…

  11.

  It must have been near dawn. The little town where…

  12.

  “So the poems were lost,” she said to Gavriil Viktorovich…

  13.

  Four days later Christa Malone flew away, from a different…

  Author’s Note

  About the Author

  Praise

  Other Books by John Crowley

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  I

  1.

  The first time that Christa Malone heard the name of Innokenti Isayevich Falin, it was spoken by the President of the United States, John F. Kennedy.

  In February of 1961, Christa stood in a reception line at the White House with twenty other high school seniors whose poems had been selected for inclusion in a national anthology of young people’s poetry called Wings of Song. All but four were girls, a flock of ungainly bright birds in their suits and dresses, all with hats and white gloves too. A gravely courteous aide had arranged them in a row, instructed them how to respond and step away, and now looked at his wristwatch and toward a distant door; and Kit Malone sensed the quick beating of their hearts. The anthology had the sponsorship of a major foundation.

  He was stopping to meet them on his way to a grander affair, Kit wouldn’t remember later what it was, but when the far double doors opened he was wearing evening clothes; his wife beside him wore a gown of some unearthly material that gleamed like the robes of an El Greco cardinal. The aide guided them down the line of young poets; the President took each one’s hand, and so did the First Lady; the President asked each one a question or two, talking a bit longer with a tall girl from Quincy.

  A little longer too with Kit: making an easy joke in his comical accent but seeming to turn her in his gaze like a jewel or object of curious interest. When she told him what state she came from he smiled.

  “You have a new poet living there, I understand,” he said. “Yes. Our new poet from Russia. Falin. You’ve heard about him?”

  She hadn’t, and said nothing, only smiled, her own smile compelled by his huge one.

  “Falin, yes,” he said. “He’s been exiled. From over there. And come here.”

  Jackie took his arm, smiling too at Kit, and drew him toward the next poet.

  There were photographs taken then, and a few words from the President about the importance of poetry, to the nation, to the spirit. He said that the poets were the unacknowledged legislators of the world; he reminded them that he had invited Robert Frost to speak at his own inauguration. The land was ours before we were the land’s. His pale eyes fell momentarily again on Kit, piercing or perceiving.

  That night in their hotel, in the unaccustomed city lights and noise and the girl from Quincy unquiet in the other bed, Kit dreamed of a tiger: of walking with one in the corridors of a featureless palace (his?), watching the heavy muscles slide beneath his gorgeous clothes in the way a tiger’s do and talking with him about this and that: aware that she was to listen more than speak, awed and alert but not afraid.

  In that month she wrote a poem, “What the Tiger Told Me,” the last poem she would write for a long time. And later, years later, she wondered if the President had lingered close to her for an extra moment and studied her with that smiling voracity because he perceived a sexual aura or exudate coming from her. His senses were inordinately acute that way, and had been alerted, perhaps, by something she herself hadn’t yet discovered: that she was pregnant.

  In January of that year, on his way to the United States, Innokenti Isayevich Falin had begun writing a linked series of poems whose titles were dates. The first was sketched on Berlin hotel notepaper with his new German fountain pen, and was revised on the plane to New York. The original—later lost with all the others—is a sonnet, fourteen lines in Falin’s own peculiar rhyme scheme. The unrhymed rough translation that Kit Malone later worked out with Falin looked like this:

  1961

  Tip up this year on the fulcrum of its final serif

  Revolve it through the degrees from right to upright

  Like a lifted flagpole without a flag

  Or a flat raised upon the stage of an empty theater

  Before which histories will soon be enacted.

  Now drop it farther, push it entirely over

  As the statue of a deposed leader is thrown

  Supine, his gloved finger that pointed Onward

  riven into earth to point Endward instead.

  See what you have accomplished?

  This rarity comes but once in centuries:

  A year that can be overthrown but not reversed,

  And after all our labors seems to become itself again.

  It is not so. As always, we will never be the same.

  2.

  It’s always a surprise and a wonderment when our plane breaks through a ceiling of cloud and, as though shedding some huge entangling dress of tattered lace, comes out naked into the naked blue sky and the sun. We on earth think there are blue skies and gray skies, but in fact of course the sky is always clear.

  Then the reverse too. Christa Malone’s plane descended out of the clear desert air and was clothed again in clammy batting; came down through the ceiling into the house. There a light rain was falling: steely ocean, colorless heaped-up city, air of tears. Remembering what earth is like. Auden once said that it shocked him that airplane passengers, able to look down like gods on cloud
s and the earth, so often paid it no attention: pulled down the blind, read a thriller.

  “I don’t know if it’s still the same now,” Christa’s seatmate was saying to a man across the aisle. “This was before ’89. Aeroflot. You took your life in your hands. And shabby. And mean. These stewardesses like prison camp matrons. About fifty of us on a big jet, Moscow to Vladivostok. They let us in the back door, and she walks up ahead of us directing us into seats, starting in the back row and filling every seat till we’re all in. No changing seats. Two-thirds of the plane empty!”

  “Different now,” said his listener. “In the republics there aren’t even reserved seats. Everybody tears across the tarmac and fights to get aboard. Devil take the hindmost.”

  “Democracy,” said the other, and they both laughed.

  In Russian, then in English, then in French, the stewardess asked them softly to prepare for landing.

  When she was a child, and for a long time afterward, Kit Malone always imagined Russia as dark. It was dark then; a Dark Continent from which no real news came, a dark star absorbing its own light. When she thought of it she saw long roads leading into the hinterlands, cold featureless steppe without color or sound, and huddled people silent too, their backs turned to her.

  It was all she had, this metaphor of her own ignorance, because she wouldn’t believe or couldn’t believe in any Russia then offered her. She didn’t believe in the Russia the nuns taught her about in school, where priests were killed and churches despoiled and nuns were beaten by booted commissars. She didn’t believe it, not because she had evidence that such things were not true but because the nuns insisted on them, insisted so much that Kit withdrew her assent. She decided they were wrong about Russia and Communism, which probably weren’t so bad. Who would do dumb things like beat nuns just to be mean? Who would care that much? Kit saw, beyond politics and religion, a grown-up world where these childish exaggerated oppositions were put aside, admitted to be false: like her parents admitting at last that there was no Santa Claus.

  No God either, eventually, on whose side to be. And yet the dark country persisted, unfolding inwardly under dark skies, through the years as she grew up; she never imagined traveling there, as she imagined traveling almost everywhere else.

  Christa looked through the scumbled cloud still tearing past her window. The gray city, turning like a piled platter in a waiter’s hand as the plane maneuvered, was called St. Petersburg, once again. Gavriil Viktorovich Semyonov’s handwritten invitation was in the bag in her lap that she was clutching somewhat too tightly: she didn’t like landing, though she loved taking off. A celebration of the 75th anniversary of the birth of Innokenti Isayevich Falin, and of his life and poetry. June 1993, St. Petersburg, Russia. Had it been gratifying to him to write the real name of his city, as though a fog had lifted from it?

  It had still been Leningrad when Semyonov had first written to her, twenty years ago now. In the same exquisite tiny handwriting, learned in a prison camp it seemed, a hand for writing down poems on cigarette papers. The weird orthography so like Falin’s own that for a minute she had been unable to open it, only stared at her own name on the front of the envelope and felt the hard beating of her heart.

  But of course it hadn’t been from Falin; it was from this man G. V. Semyonov, asking her in the most delicate terms what no other Russian apparently dared to ask: what had happened, what was the truth, and what had become of the last poems of I. I. Falin.

  Semyonov had sent her that letter because of her own first book of poetry, a book newsworthy not for her own slight poems (she would write stronger ones later on) but for the fifteen poems of Falin’s that it contained. “Translations without originals” she had called them: poems neither his nor hers, or both his and hers; poems written in a language that she couldn’t read, and surviving only in a language he couldn’t write.

  Russia had been deep in the Brezhnev freeze then; nothing went in unauthorized, nothing came out; how this Semyonov had even got hold of her book she didn’t know, nor how his letter had reached her. She had answered it as well as she could, but she heard nothing more. She couldn’t learn if her letter had been received or not; answered or not. But ever since then she had gone on explaining to the writer of that letter what had happened: answering, trying to answer, the charge that he had not made: that she had let their poet die, and then taken his poems for her own.

  Now at last he had written to her again, in a new world, and summoned her. Invited her, actually, and in the kindest and most flattering terms. But she felt it was a summons, and one she couldn’t refuse.

  The airport was a frenzy, with uniformed men and women everywhere whose role seemed to be to make things worse, to stand in the way, stir rage or frustration. Not for Russia the sterile cool calm of big European or American airports. It was like a vast crowded living room, with a faint homey repellent smell too. Christa waited for her bags to appear amid the expensive leather suitcases of her traveling companions, and then she joined the lines at the customs counters.

  “Passport, please.”

  The man in a green uniform with red tabs looked once, twice, three times from her passport picture to her and blew expressively, in boredom or exhaustion. She handed over her visa, and she had the invitation to the conference ready in her bag too, and a little speech prepared; but she was waved on, and when she put her bags before the customs clerk he also wearily waved her on, and she sailed out into the crowded space where everyone was hugging and kissing, old people, children, men in suits; and there ahead was a tall and very thin, very old man, who held up a small sign, a torn piece of cardboard, with her name on it in that same odd orthography, a sign that shook slightly in his hand. His face was infinitely sad and yet his smile was kind, as though he waited to conduct her to an afterlife that was better than she deserved yet not all she might desire. He turned his eyes on her and seemed to know her immediately.

  “Good morning,” he said, in English and then in Russian. “I am Gavriil Viktorovich Semyonov. Welcome to my country.”

  Already she was uncertain she had heard correctly; she replied with a Russian greeting, and he began to speak again in Russian, turning away and pointing toward far parts of the terminal.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s thirty years since I spoke Russian. Is it possible to speak in English, at least at first?”

  “Of course,” he said with great courtliness. “In English I am not fluent. I am fluent in Russian, Estonian, Polish, French. Not English however, unfortunately.”

  “No?” Christa said. “Oh well. You speak it better than I’ve ever spoken any language but my own. Americans, you know…”

  “Yes,” he said. “I know.”

  He insisted on carrying a bag for her, and she chose the lightest to give him; he led her down corridors and up escalators until they emerged into a vast garage where dozens of ugly black cars were waiting, their motors running. Semyonov looked a long time before locating the one he wanted and waving it forward. A ZIL sedan; Christa could read that name at least. The windows were tinted and the backseat huge; it smelled of smoke and sweat.

  “Vasili Vasilievich is driver for government official,” Gavriil told her. “Once he spent hours waiting for his official to be done with meetings, et cetera. Now, rule is, instead of waiting he is allowed to use this car for taking others. Like ourselves.” He smiled, as though the situation were comical, which it was: the fearsome car, the thick-necked driver, the innocent moonlighting.

  When he had done talking to the driver and the car began crawling from the airport with other traffic, Gavriil Viktorovich turned to her, for a long moment only regarding her with his face of tender apology, which maybe meant nothing that it seemed to mean, was just an old Russian’s face.

  “So,” he said. “We meet.”

  “You know,” she said, “I did answer your first letter. Long ago. I did.”

  He made a wonderful elaborate shrug that forgave, proclaimed ignorance, dismissed the q
uestion, invoked Fate, all at once.

  “I wanted to tell you,” she said. “What I knew. It wasn’t much.”

  “Here nothing at all was known of what became of him in U.S.,” Gavriil Viktorovich said. “This was our period of reaction, after fall of Khrushchev, after Cuba missiles crisis. Here we withdrew again into our castle, or we were again locked in our closet, however it is put. Very dangerous once again to talk to foreigners, or about foreigners, or about past, or the dead. Poets then who wrote about the dead were always saying only farewell to them, turning away to face future, you see.” He was smiling. “The dead had just begun again to speak to us when we stopped for a long time listening.”

  “But now again,” she said.

  “Yes. Now again we listen. Some of us.”

  Vasili bore them through a region of identical concrete apartment and office buildings, a bad idea that seemed to have been given up on lately, idle cranes and piles of building materials that looked as though they had been standing untouched for a long time. It made her think of her father’s apartment. Oh forget it he said when she tried to gather up years-old magazines or wash the windows.

  “We have program,” he said to her. “First, to restore his citizenship, which was taken from him. To put up monument perhaps, though where? We don’t know where he was born; he lived in many places. And many places now gone: homes, schools he was in, places of work. Gone. As though time ate up these traces of him as it moved along.” He laced together his long yellow-nailed fingers in his lap. “We would want above all to bring him home. But he was not ever found.”