The Translator

by John Crowley

  “A draftsman,” somebody said.

  “A draftsman,” said Falin, tasting the word like a gourmet tasting an exotic morsel. “After that a soldier, trying not to die; after that a maker of furniture, that is worker in a prison camp where furniture was made; after that, draftsman again, and poet too. Then no job. Then exile. Then here.”

  He opened his hands: here.

  “My name you may have heard, from newspapers, but probably not read any of my poems. For a long time none have been printed or published in the language I wrote them in, in the country where they were written. Those that were published long ago have mostly disappeared, though they were sometimes typed up or copied out by friends and passed around. Memorized too.” He tapped his brow. “Recited, one person to another, as we have recited. For a poem to live within a reader, reader must be able to say it in his own mind and heart. And for this reason I tell you now of class requirements and final test.”

  He drew out and piled before him the packets of purple mimeographed poetry, and patted them. “I cannot give you grade on what poetry you write. This would be foolish, as though to grade you for your beauty or your strength. I can grade on how hard you try, and how hard you try to understand poetry of others. And so midterm, and final, test will be only that you write down in blue books the poems we read together. So you must memorize, commit to memory, learn them by heart is how you say it, yes?” He looked around at their faces, which were stunned or amazed or amused. “Which poems will be asked for on these tests? Any or all. Best to memorize all. Observe this motto of Soviet Young Pioneers: Be Prepared.”

  “I think they were all astonished,” Christa said to Gavriil Viktorovich in his St. Petersburg apartment. “We were all astonished. To be told that the only poems you could understand were the ones you had memorized.”

  “Yes.”

  “Like the one of my own, that he wanted me to recite. I could have remembered it if I’d thought a minute. I just never had to, I mean…”

  “Of course not. You need not memorize poetry. You need only to open book.”

  “Yes,” she said. “All we need to do. If we do.”

  He bent his head as though he would not pursue this topic, maybe shaming to his guest. His little apartment, cement-walled like a jail cell, was deep in books and papers. A small ikon amid them on a bookshelf, and by it a small framed picture, a woman with a gray bun and a flowered dress who hadn’t wanted to be photographed.

  “You know,” he said, “we have a view of poets unlike anyone’s.”

  “Yes. I think you do.”

  “We did once. Now, I do not know.”

  “Yes.”

  “Because, perhaps, they arrived so suddenly among us, with Pushkin—almost none before, Russian poets writing Russian. Then perhaps because after the Revolution they spoke truth long after others ceased or were silenced. And even when they themselves were silenced we could say truths they had said, in their voices, because we remembered their poems. Could be banned and burned but not plucked from memories.”

  “Yes.”

  “At one time we greeted one another with these poems. A line, a stanza of Akhmatova, of Mandelstam: if the other could complete the poem or the stanza, perhaps you could trust—perhaps be friends. Perhaps not.” He smiled. “Once poetry seemed capable to bring the dead to life. Maybe only our dead, in that age. Because of that power poets were killed, in several ways, not always reversible.”

  “What do you mean, not always reversible?”

  He regarded her as he had before, in that way that seemed to challenge her, gently, to seek in herself for what she surely already knew. And yet it was she who was to have brought knowledge, or at least news. She said—surprised to find that she was going to ask it, right now, though it was what she wanted to know—“Do you think it was wrong of me, to publish those translations? In a book of my own?”

  He didn’t answer immediately. “It began your own career, I think?”

  “Yes.”

  “So long ago. And now you are most famous of American poets.”

  “Well no. No. And even if that were true, no poet in America is famous really.” She looked down at the wedding band on her left hand, turned it in her fingers, a habit. “I’ve never known if it was right of me. If I did it for the right reasons.”

  He took one skinny knee in both his hands, and smiled. “Tell me,” he said. “Was it perhaps because of this doubt that you never studied Russian more?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “And that for so many years you have not talked of him? Because you thought perhaps you wronged him?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “It might be. I don’t know.”

  The sun came in his window, the clouds passing away, and lit the little place for a moment, then was covered again.

  “What will they say, tonight, the ones I meet?” she asked. “And at the conference? What will they say to me?”

  “I believe they will say Spasibo, chto priekhala v takuiu dal,” he said. “They will say thank you. Thank you for coming so far.”

  When she left the liberal arts tower, the weather had again turned strangely tender; the sun gilded the wet pavements and roofs and turned the piles of snow translucent and black-speckled. Unwilling to go back to her dorm, Kit walked down through the old campus, past the library and the Wishing Well and out the tall gates into town. She felt, absurdly, fledged. On College Street she was invited by stores and streets but gently refused them, until she neared the central square of the town. There she turned, down Elm then Lincoln, not actually choosing these streets. In front of the Reformed EUB church there, a peculiar little car was parked, a man messing in its tiny trunk, from which smoke issued.

  No, she was wrong, the smoke was from his pipe, a big curling gourd thing like Sherlock Holmes’s. And it wasn’t the car’s trunk he was peering into in bafflement but its engine compartment. Yes: it was one of those comical German cars that were just arriving, Kit had seen a few but had never been in one, a car that looked like the one in the circus from which a huge number of clowns tumbled. A Volkswagen. VW.

  “It wants to die,” said the man, looking down at the absurdly tiny engine. “It just wants to die.” He took the gourd pipe from his mouth and spat delicately, a fragment of tobacco. He had not spoken to Kit exactly, but when he looked up to see her, she shrugged in sympathy.

  “Got gas?” she asked.

  “Oh hell yes.” He hunkered again and fingered a part tenderly: the carburetor? “Could I ask you a favor?”

  “Um sure.”

  “Could you just sit in the driver’s seat a minute and step on the gas while I.”

  “I guess.”

  He arose, and opened the door for her. There was the key; there was the choke; that was the clutch, that was the gas. Kit slid into the seat. With its round dials and simple switches, its little pedals and shapely wheel, it was the car, incarnate, that you drew for yourself, wanted for yourself, when you were six. A deep pleasure entered her.

  “Okay,” he called from behind. “Start her up.” He had a slight Southern accent, unplaceable. She pulled out the choke and tried to start the car. In cartoons Volkswagens were shown with a big wind-up key in their backs.

  For five minutes they worked, he calling for Kit to give it gas or turn it off, and finally a little cry of triumph. She eased off on the gas; it ran. He appeared in the window, great pipe in his teeth, and reached in to push the choke in with care.

  “Well hell,” he said, grinning. He was actually not old at all, a young man, very fair, thick blond nearly white hair falling over his brow that he tossed back when he straightened, narrow blue eyes and high cheekbones like an arctic explorer’s. He held out a hand to her, and she took it.

  “My name’s Jackie,” he said.

  “Christa.”

  “Would you like a ride somewhere?”

  “Sure.”

  “Could die again,” he warned her.

  She shrugged. He opened the doo
r and she clambered over the gearshift sticking out of the floor like an old truck’s, and onto the passenger’s seat.

  “Where’d you need to go?” Jackie asked.

  “Nowhere,” she said. “Where were you going?”

  “Out to look at a new room to rent,” he said. “Want to come?”

  “Okay.”

  While they answered each other’s inquiries—year, major, hometown—Kit tried to remember where she had seen Jackie before. There weren’t as yet many places at the University she had been. It wasn’t in the liberal arts tower or the dining room or at the French placement test.

  He’d been around the campus on and off for a long while, it appeared; dropped out one semester, uncertain what he wanted to learn, went to work for his father (plumbing and heating) and read books. Bought this car. Turned twenty-one, which meant he could have it on campus, and live where he liked, but he still had a ways to go to get his degree.

  “Philosophy,” he answered in response to her own vagueness about what she would study. “Knowledge about knowledge. Seems basic to me.”

  She held the VW’s steering wheel for him while he relit his pipe. The pipe, big as a plumbing fixture, should have seemed comic, but it didn’t; he handled it with negligent expertise, stoking and sucking until the bowl glowed and threw off sparks, ropes of smoke snorting from his finely cut nose. Then she remembered where she had seen him: the field house. Not signing up for classes, or enrolling others in them, but amid the long tables set up in the corridors beyond the cashier’s desks, tables which she had hurried past after finding she had lost her money: the tables where registered students could sign up for dozens of clubs, societies, and activities, the Newman Club, Hillel, the chess club, Helping Hands. She had hardly seen them, only marveled at the variety of them and their epigones. Young Americans for Freedom, burr haircuts and striped ties. Booster Club in lettered sweatshirts and box-pleated plaid skirts. The Nietzsche Study Group, a joke maybe, two men in turtlenecks with a hand-lettered sign. One of them was holding a friendly intense discussion with a blond man in a duffel coat: Jackie, who was standing propped against the next table down the line, under a banner that said: YPSL.

  “What did that mean—YPSL?”

  “Young People’s Socialist League.” He looked over at her, and smiled at what was maybe wonderment in her face; she shut it.

  “So are you a member of that?” she asked.

  “Yipsle? Oh no. No no.”

  They were passing the gas stations and auto parts stores of the west end of town, and then the shuttered farm stands; the houses grew farther apart, and between them the corrugated fields, each black-earth furrow topped with frost, all lining up for an instant as you passed by and revealing the field’s secret geometry.

  “He lives down that way,” Jackie said, pointing to a small road running between pied sycamores. “Your Russian poet. I think that’s the road.” Kit had told him about taking the course with Falin, and he had listened with interest. She looked quickly down the road as it went by; the way was blocked with evergreens; she thought she saw a gabled roof.

  “How did you know that?” she asked.

  “Well haven’t you been paying any damn attention?” he asked in mock astonishment. “The man has appeared in every national magazine and the local rag too. A story about his vegetable garden. And that’s where he lives. Right back there.”

  “Oh.”

  “Maybe we should go visit,” Jackie said thoughtfully. “I can recite poetry. I can recite most of ‘Little Orphant Annie’ by James Whitcomb Riley.”

  “Sure, let’s.”

  He made a sudden U-turn in the road, plenty wide enough for the toy car and completely empty.

  “No!” Kit said.

  “No? No?” He spun again, bouncing off the frozen shoulder to take them around again to face the way they had been going. “Now you see you have to make up your mind,” he said with equanimity. “We can’t be spinning here like a damn bumper car.”

  “I never meant it,” she said.

  “I’m happy to do whatever you like,” he said. “Just give me that little advance warning.” He looked at a wristwatch on a gold band. “I believe, however, that I’m now on the wrong damn road.”

  “You didn’t leave the road you were on.”

  “I was on the wrong road from the start,” he said. “I just now figured it out. West North Street, not East North Street. Ain’t that something? North Street, named for a man called North, but then it got so long they had to name it East and West. All the way on the other side of town. It’ll be too late to go visit them.” He turned again in the roadway; as they went back past the poet’s road, Kit could see lamplight in the windows, the short day darkening.

  6.

  Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays was Psychology, which Fran was taking too, a big lecture class followed by lab sections in which students, by feeding them or withholding food, caused white rats to press or not press bars or turn wheels. It wasn’t what Kit or Fran either would have thought was meant by psychology; they had envisioned an array of explanations of themselves, convincing or not. But this university was a center of behaviorism, and in class they were taught never to speculate about what went on within the Black Box into which they fed their Stimulus and got their Response. We never say The rat wants to get the food, we never say The rat is afraid of the electric shock, we only count the number of repetitions or avoidances. Delightful small cold model of aliveness, it was hard to resist extrapolating from the twitch-nose rats to every birthday present, campaign promise, love letter, torture chamber, school prize, and any other human connection that could be thought of. They didn’t resist, either, not the professor at his lectern (a beaky and high-domed Englishman who said shed-jewel and la-bore-a-tree), not his graduate assistants, not his students. Let your boyfriend undo your bra on one date, then forbid it the next two, then maybe yes again on the fourth: you are hooking him deeply through intermittent reinforcement. Stop answering his calls long enough, though, and you’ll extinguish the response.

  Tuesdays and Thursdays it was Falin’s seminar in the same time period. Another world she wrote to Ben, but a world just as exact, just as precise in its accounts and descriptions, and less like a kid’s game somehow, more serious—though she knew the Psychology grad students would have said the same the other way around: to them it was Poetry that was the game.

  “We look now at a famous poem by English poet A. E. Housman,” Falin said, turning the purple mimeo sheets to find the little thing, one of the few in the packet familiar to Kit. He looked down on it, nodded slightly as though in greeting, and then looked up. Kit wrote famose boym in her notebook. “What does it say and how is it made.

  “Loveliest of trees, the cherry now

  Is hung with bloom along the bough,

  And stands about the woodland ride

  Wearing white for Eastertide.”

  Two couplets, he pointed out, in a meter also favored by the Russian poet Pushkin and others writing in that language. Kit wrote in her notebook D’Roshin boyt. The stanza is very simple in form and thought, and has a figure only in the last line: the cherry trees are girls in white clothes, for church at Easter.

  “Now the poet does some arithmetic,” said Falin.

  “Now, of my threescore years and ten,

  Twenty will not come again,

  And take from seventy springs a score,

  It only leaves me fifty more.

  “Arithmetic is hard to do in verse without clumsiness,” he said. “So poets sometimes like to see if they can do this. And I have learned, though I did not know this when I first read this poem in Soviet Union, that the poet was professor of Latin, and worked for many years on a Latin poet who wrote about astrology, a poem filled with arithmetic in verse. So.”

  Kit wrote Sov yetchunion. Then she tore the page from her notebook and crumpled it, looking up to find them all regarding her, including Falin; and she lowered her eyes.

  “Now see ho
w he ends this small poem,” Falin said. “He has said that he is young, but even so he knows life is short; here is what he now says:

  “And since to look at things in bloom,

  Fifty springs are little room,

  About the woodlands I will go

  To see the cherry hung with snow.

  “Now do you see,” he said to them with great strange tenderness, as though for them but also for Housman and the young man in the poem as well, “do you see: the only other figure in this poem is very last word, and it compares white blossoms to tree in winter, covered with snow. With snow, when all blossoms and leaves will be gone. In the very moment of his delight the poem reminds him, and us, that time will pass, blossoms will fall.” He leaned forward toward all of them. “And it may well be that it was not Housman’s thought but the poem itself that produced this meaning; that the poet reached next-to-last line and this rhyme arose of its own accord, with all these meanings. Yes I am sure, sure it did. A gift that came because of rhyme, came because rhyme exists. Because poetry is what it is. And because this poet was faithful.”

  They were all immobile in their chairs before him, stilled maybe (she was) by that word faithful. Kit would remember it: the word he used that day.

  “And how unlikely is this, do you think?” he said. “To have this coincidence, I mean; these words and this man Housman occurring together at this time; this rhyme, this quickness to grasp it before it passed away. What are the odds of this, of exactly this poem existing in the world, coming into being in this form that we can apprehend, not failing somehow along the way or getting lost? I think odds are astronomical. Only the stars can model odds so great. That is the marvel and wonder of this enterprise of poetry: that we have this—and all its fellows, the real poems—among all other things that we have in this world.

  “Which include, you know,” he added smiling, “very many poems that are not real poems at all.”