Revenge of the Translator

by Brice Matthieussent

  Instead of accumulating humiliating images and insidious allusions, the author would do better to restore the profession’s coat of arms, one that should depict a chameleon. (Translator’s No)

  *

  * Concerning the coat of arms: “I must have a sinistral line in my coat of arms,” David Grey says to the beautiful Doris. Here he is citing William Faulkner’s Soldiers’ Pay. The sinistral line is the distinctive sign of the illegitimate branch in a coat of arms. Subtle, no? And, incidentally, the text informs us that David Grey is left-handed. (T.N.)

  *

  * Fragments épars. This is a reference to my author’s second novel (Scattered Figments, Janus Press, New York, 1995), in which the character Abel Prote, the French writer, appears again. I won’t say any more. Mum’s the word. Let’s remain civil. (T.N.)

  I’ll simply add that the French translation (Éditions du Marais, Paris, 1997) is horribly botched: words, sentences, even entire paragraphs forgotten or deliberately deleted, misinterpretations, mistranslations, Anglicisms, solecisms, appalling blunders, and clumsiness. One laughable detail: a confusion of the American volume measurements makes it so that, according to the vile translator whose name I won’t mention, the characters apparently guzzle liters of whiskey, while at the same time the author explicitly describes their desire for drink to be very moderate, “similar,” he clarifies, “to a piece of old blotting paper riddled with colored stains that can no longer absorb anything except the rare drop of ink.” The French translator, distracted or intoxicated—was he drinking?—took no notice of this lovely image. Thus, he proposes a nearly-empty bottle of whiskey that, as if it were a miraculous spring, continuously refills large glasses to the brim numerous times as soon as they are knocked back, as if the protagonists of Scattered Figments were unabashed drunkards downing enormous quantities of alcohol without letting on. Clearly, this novel deserves to be retranslated. I’ll have to speak to my publisher about it.

  *

  * The character Zorro was created in 1919 by the American novelist Johnston McCulley and played in films by Douglas Fairbanks and Tyrone Power. Who … Stop! (T.N.)

  *

  * I’m still sneaking around under the bar, thumbing my nose, picking up my crowbar, wedging my shoe between the door and the frame. As you’ve just learned, dear reader, David Grey is having problems with Abel Prote, the French novelist whose most recent book, bizarrely titled (N.d.T.), David is translating: misunderstandings, mistakes, disparaging allusions, suspicious looks, skipped meetings, various obstacles, reciprocal irritations, etc. In short, there’s trouble brewing between the French writer and his American translator. I sincerely hope not to have the same problems with my author. His emails are courteous but vague, at times cryptic. For example, when I asked him about the meaning of the expression “Agenbite of Inwit” which appears in his text to qualify the culpability felt by the unfortunate Grey who is convinced that he’s botched his work, my author replied to me with disarming and scandalous flippancy that it’s “a quotation from Joyce.” A lot of good that does me! Am I going to reread every single work by the Irish exile, looking for these three sibylline words? Nevertheless, in “Agenbite of Inwit,” I detect something to do with bite and of course Inuit. What does the subarctic population have to do with anything? Do the Inuit bite?

  Stand aside, the door is about to slam! I pull back my shoe just in time (I still don’t have a crowbar). (Translator’s Quote)

  *

  * Now that I’ve made myself at home, I suddenly feel the desire to raise the bar by using the strength of my back and thighs. I’d like to lift myself up, first kneel down, then get into a vertical position, raise this wretched horizon line at the bottom of the page that confines me to the lower margin. I would like to hoist this bar by the sole force of my desire and my muscles, make it rise like the weight lifter who thrusts above his head the black bar linking the big matte metal pancakes and who, completing a clean and jerk, goofily brandishes the bar at arm’s length: his cheeks swelling under the effort, his face turning purple, his gaze lost in the distance of private contemplation. It’s with this same determination that I will push my bar without dumbbells, so heavy nevertheless, toward the sky. But not for anything in the world would I want to step across the bar, or jump over it, like the 110-meter-hurtles runner who one minute soars over the cinder track and the next jumps over the rectilinear obstacle. I’m not trying to abandon my staves to occupy a better place; I have no desire to sit on the throne in the middle of the royal page. No, I, the lone man comfortably sporting the dress of the immaculate bride, will subject him to the worst outrages, lifting my bar little by little, firmly planted in this footer, bracing myself. (Trajectory North)

  Chapter 2

  THE TRANSLATOR TRIMS THE FAT

  *

  * Here is the beginning of this chapter in the original American edition:

  “Abel Prote was born January 1, 1950, at the American Hospital in Paris. His family lived in a bourgeois building in the 6th arrondissement, not far from the Odéon theater. His father, Maurice-Edgar Prote, wealthy Parisian publisher and audacious purveyor of American literature, decided to name him Abel because of the child’s rather unusual birth date, at the exact caesura of the century. As for the surname, Prote, it comes from distant ancestors on the father’s side, who were foremen in the first printer’s shops: ‘prote,’ the French word for ‘master printer,’ comes from the Greek prōtos, ‘first.’

  An old American lady, who for some obscure reason begged me not to divulge her name, happened to show me in New York the diary she had kept in the past, during her Parisian years. So uneventful had those years been—apparently—that the collecting of daily details—which is always a poor method of self-preservation—barely surpassed a short description of the day’s weather. Luck being what it is when left alone, here I was offered something which I might never have hunted down had it been a chosen quarry. Therefore I am able to state that the afternoon of Abel Prote’s birth was a sinister windy one, with two degrees (Celsius) above zero … this is all, however, that the good lady found worth setting down. On second thought I don’t see why I should yield to her desire for anonymity. That she will ever read this book seems wildly improbable. Her name was and is Jane Jennifer Janireff: baroque babble which it would have been a pity to withhold!”

  It’s without remorse that I delete these first paragraphs of Chapter 2, even if I supply them here to be read as a note. Paradox? Contradiction? I don’t care. Indeed, how surprised I was, and what indignation I felt, to discover, in a rather large coincidence—“that’s luck for you”—that it is almost word for word the first page of Vladimir Nabokov’s first novel written in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight! Shame on my author … Who does he think he’s fooling with such blatant impostures? His only originality lies in replacing Nabokov’s splendid “Olga Olegovna Orlova—an egg-like alliteration” with “Jane Jennifer Janireff: baroque babble.” Nice idea, but it doesn’t at all justify keeping this shameful plagiarism in my French translation. (Trimmer’s Nota Bene)

  *

  * The esteemed reader will have noticed that since the beginning of this chapter no adjective has encumbered my author’s ungainly prose. It’s not his own decision, but a unilateral and systematic redaction on my part. A sort of edict decreed by me alone. I know that similar suppressions are hardly defendable from the deontological (what a dreadful word!) point of view but, dear reader, you must admit that after this robust pruning, his prose has gained in elegance and fluidity. No more of that unbearable ponderousness, those seemingly endless agglutinations of adjectives! Such levity! His prose has become almost good, the bastard. And since he barely speaks French, he won’t suspect a thing. I have complete freedom of action, as long as the Parisian publisher for whom I’m translating Translator’s Revenge isn’t in the habit of going through their texts with a fine-tooth comb. And if I were now to revoke the adverbs? (Typist’s Nuisance)

  *

  *
It’s done: no more adjectives and not a single adverb. The result of these surgical strikes? A gain that is genuinely unheard of, truly serendipitous, undeniably stupefying, frankly stupendous, irrefutably spectacular—with this wearisome accumulation I make up for it and prove the efficacy of my ablations. Now, such concision, such levity! I retranscribe here for your curiosity the list of adverbs and adjectives disappeared since the beginning of the second chapter in which we find Abel Prote, “the virile man with green eyes,” who was born in the middle of the century, working alongside Doris, his idiosyncratic secretary (and maybe more):

  charming, light brown, pure, shiny, suddenly, vaporous, hooked, sensually, low-cut, becoming, splendid (2 times), formfitting (3 times), tall, thin (2 times), opulent (2 times), oblong, short (4 times), curvaceous, exactly, penetrating (2 times), virile, green (after these last two deletions, we are left with the striking “the man with eyes”), elegant, suggestive, transparent (3 times), lightly, languorous (3 times), violently, catlike, hot (4 times), imperceptibly, softly, luke-warm, slowly (3 times), silky (3 times), alluring, blue, white, red, pulpy, resolute, stubborn (2 times), fat, built, pinkish, very (7 times), smooth, tumescent (3 times), black and pink (2 times), rounded, bulging, luxuriant, lowered, secret, moist (4 times), isolated, inflated (3 times), strong, massive (4 times), burning, concentric (4 times), slow (2 times), rapid (5 times), more and more, open (4 times), perfumed (2 times), marine, spicy, unfastened, smothered, wild (2 times), contained, aerial, purplish, agile (5 times), wet, hard (4 times), powerfully (3 times), frenetic, again (6 times), supple, defective, brusquely, languid, crumpled (2 times), low, tender, little by little, relaxed, dozing, restorative. (Tamperer’s Nosography)

  *

  * A clarification about my modus operandi: even when I resist the temptation of censorship or when I don’t dilate the original prose as I please, I am an indelicate transporter, a clumsy mover, a seedy trafficker. I dispatch fragile and labeled objects from one edge of the ocean to the other, and although I certainly do my best, I bang them and drop them, I damage and dent them, scuff them and scrape them, I destroy them despite myself and en route I lose the most important crates, furniture, carpets, paintings, etchings, designs, photographs, books, magazines and knickknacks, plates and silverware, bodies and body parts, clothes, tools and machines, stuffed or living animals, china, glasses and crystal, accessories and utensils that are however duly indexed, hidden nooks and love nests, boudoirs and canopies, cabinets and bathrooms, studios and apartments, houses, villas, buildings, entire neighborhoods, arrondissements, towers, towns, suburbs, cities, rivers, ponds, lakes and streams, provinces, states, continents and oceans, planets, stars, constellations, galaxies, nebulas and black holes, that were entrusted to my seemingly nice face, and violently I throw a large part of my cargo to the roadside and it crashes there with a roar, in order to transport to safe harbor a few paltry residues, scraps, trash, mismatched specimens, delivering them haphazardly to the mercy of my readers who are frustrated or naïve, in any event duped, tricked, for they are unaware of all the perils of the voyage and the risks of the trade.

  I preserve only the first half of the phrase import-export and in my tribulations I lose the majority of my fragile merchandise; at the first gust of wind they’re thrown overboard, for they are poorly tied up on the deck of my freighter, crushed during transfers by the distracted or clumsy longshoremen, smashed by life’s obstacles, ignobly swapped for food, weapons, a caravan of camels, a state-of-the-art car, a schooner, or a plane, pillaged by pirates and a thousand more or less shameful duplicities, or else simply forgotten, wasting away at the bottom of a shuttered warehouse. Thus, finally reaching the port, I arrive at the quay and deliver an inferior substitute to my employers, deaf and blind but normally satisfied, a derisory residue of original treasure, meager dregs that I piece together somehow, a balloon that I reinflate using only the force of my nicotined lungs. Disappointment, disarray, general desolation. There remains the empty husk, the sheath deprived of life, the mold without the bronze. In short, I am depressed, I am not the first of the text, but the eternal Poulidor, the second by vocation or by decree of destiny, the eternal afterthought: I always arrive too late and in rough shape. (Transporter’s Negligence)

  *

  *You will have noticed, my reader, that above I deleted all the “stage directions,” conserving only, for excellent reasons of austerity and internal dynamic, the dialogues between characters. Here, for your curiosity, the list of these deleted directions:

  “!” hurled Doris in a defiant voice as she walked toward him.

  “,” Grey replied coldly.

  “…”

  “,” Grey cut her off, drawing right up close to her beautiful face with its slightly hooked nose.

  “?”

  “,” he retorted ruthlessly, grabbing her by the collar of her blue terry cloth nightgown.

  “!” Doris whined, undone.

  “…” Grey insinuated without loosening his grip.

  “,” unleashed that beauty who (etc.).

  “?”

  “,” she confessed, batting her eyelashes.

  “,” he replied dryly.

  He pushed Doris violently down onto the crimson sofa, where she collapsed, a wreck, making sure to modestly tug her dressing gown over her legs, which were shapely / slender / thin as matchsticks / very skinny / could take a footbath in a double-barreled shotgun (I still have to choose).

  The translator left the room slamming the door behind him.

  Here are the stage directions from the next scene:

  “?” the stranger in the frayed black coat, wearing a fedora of an indefinable color, asks him out of the blue.

  “,” Grey replies, still thinking of Doris, of how he left her in tears on the crimson sofa.

  “?” continues the stranger.

  “?” Grey retorts tit for tat.

  “.”

  “?” ventures the translator, suddenly wary.

  “!” says the other.

  “,” Grey concludes.

  They go to the nearest bar, where they drink beers until nightfall. (Eraser’s Numerus Clausus)

  *

  * After the adjectives, the adverbs, and the stage directions, I have decided to delete from here on out all comparisons and metaphors. Often hackneyed, when they’re not harebrained or incomprehensible, they uselessly hinder the reader. As a result of this new ablation, my text (or rather, his text revised and corrected by my efforts: ours, then) gains even more lucidity, strength, simplicity. What would be the point of rendering that constipated prose in French when we can get straight to the point? Here is the list of those insipid flourishes, laughable or convoluted, in any case superfluous:

  his iron grip and her steel gaze (sic), the blanket of the night, the song of the sirens (2 times), a voice of blue velvet (?), with the lassitude of a cat (meh), strong as a Turk from the Bosporus (!), the Trojan horse of her seduction (referring to Doris), the star of the night, like a drove of wild horses, “the Greeks enter Ilion, overthrow the throne, and climb atop” (crossed-out sentence), that exhausted and unruly beast (hope), that Bluebeard killing one after another of his prying wives venturing behind the forbidden door to satisfy their shameful curiosity; stubborn as a red donkey (?); satin-smooth (skin); the muscle of the soul (imagination); the hell of the game; as abruptly as a drop of dew slides down a lilac leaf and falls, before the leaf, suddenly lightened, straightens up (?); like a translucent petal of a red rose (ear); the cruel sting of revenge; old as the dust of roads; he collapses on top of her like poverty over the world; “ten minutes before two: shiny mustache with curled-up tips” (this one makes my hair stand on end). And finally that doubly circular pearl, which I cross out with a capital Z in a vengeful crayon: “the sun was shining, like the sinister eye of a scheming Parisian ogling the gardens of the Palais-Royal through the slight opening of her parted curtains, faded by the sun.”

  Next, after careful consideration and for reaso
ns of conciseness, I have decided to eliminate from the final text of my translation that long and yet rather beautiful digression in which the author describes the work of David Grey:

  “Here the translator David Grey is confronted with the original text of (N.d.T.). He probes, carries out some tests, follows the contours, identifies the lines with the greatest slope, drills, cores, plans, and outlines, he gropes around in search of buried geological structures, the right angle of attack and of adequate ‘positioning’ as one says in certain sports. For him this text is a mining site to exploit, to bleed systematically; he has to get to work, clear the fossil forests of the printed page, these lines accumulated like geologic strata, dig the tunnels, build the mine shafts, advance the front, beat down the blocks of words, of sentences, of paragraphs to see sometimes that the heart of the deposit is elsewhere, higher, lower, farther. Sometimes, an entire tunnel collapses, forcing him to backpedal, to reorient himself, to explore new tunnels, previously unseen means of approach, to modify the tools, the point of view, the angle of attack, the stays, and even the techniques of exploitation.