The purpose of this attachment, he explained, was to instantly crush sugarcanes of the greatest conceivable quantity with the highest possible rapidity and yield of pure juice—by the power of nature and his Satellite alone—without the use of any labor whatsoever. That is to say, human muscle and blood and bone and sinew. Including, Mr. Etzler stated loudly, his chest now visibly inflated, EAST INDIAN INDENTURED LABORERS who are, in point of fact, no different from the African slaves who preceded them! Human beings procured by a trade—now a capital crime in all civilized countries of the world, with the exception of the United States!—that abominable bartering of human souls that disgraces the history of mankind, is a stain and blot on the reputation of our ancestors, that disgraceful and abhorred practice of so-call CHRISTIANS!
Disregarding the angry shouts of his spectators—the majority of whom could care a jot about the Africans who had long been emancipated throughout the British Empire anyway, or these Hindoos who were so exotic they could scarcely be imagined—Mr. Etzler continued shouting in a similar vein. Seemingly oblivious to the growing danger of his own predicament.
Finally, when he could no longer be heard over the uproarious protests of his audience, he took up the small black box sitting on the table before him. With his free hand he took out a handkerchief to wipe away the beads of sweat that had gathered across his brow. Mr. Etzler waited patiently for the boisterous crowd to quiet itself.
“Now,” he said at last, “zee reason for today’s gathering: a demonstrachion huff zee prowcess for crystallization wizout zee use huff fire or fuel—a chemical principle utilized by my patented invenchion, soon to revoluchionize sugar production in zee West Indies, unt throughout zee worlt!”
Here, with the exaggerated flourish of a master magician, Mr. Etzler lifted off his bottomless black box. He revealed to the crowd a plate upon which sat a glass beaker half filled with a viscous-looking clear liquid, a pencil lying crosswise over the container’s open mouth, from which there appeared to dangle a thickly encrusted piece of twine—
“Ladies unt gentlemen,” Mr. Etzler said proudly, “I give you zee rock candy!”
There were bottles of the finest French champagne that Willy taught himself to uncork. To enjoy the pop and fizz of the foam surging forth from the bottles’ narrow necks, then tingling along the back of his parched throat. Bottles of the most coveted twelve-year-old Irish whiskey, which he learned to drink with the foamy champagne as a chaser. Willy now utilized the blunt back edge of his penknife’s blade to scrape away some salt crystals that remained—the sharp edge to hack off wedges of hard, semitransparent, desiccated skin with a few wayward tufts of coarse hair—then, finally, carving for himself paper-thin slivers of the finest acorn-fed Spanish ham, stamped PATA NEGRA. It melted on his tongue like curls of butter. There were globe-shaped cheeses the size of ships’ buoys encased in their skins of bright red wax, labeled HOLLAND EDAM. Swiss cheeses and rounds of Italian PARMESANO big as wagon wheels. Smaller cheeses in flat, mold-splattered boxes of light wood labeled ENGLAND STILTON, FRANCE CAMEMBERT, ESPAÑA MANCHEGO.
In the shadowy light of his kerosene lantern, locked into the hold of the gently rolling ship, Willy ate patiently. He ate purposefully. Willy paused from his eating for a sup of whiskey, a long cool draught of foamy champagne. He ate until he could eat no longer. Until he was satiated. Engorged. Bloated. Willy drank until he could drink no more. Until he had filled five entire champagne bottles with his own piss, and carefully recorked them. His stools wrapped ritually in lady’s negligees of the finest silk, the packets tucked into an enormous discarded glass bottle, its lid clamped-down tight, labeled ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΗ ΦΕΤΑ ΣΤΟ ΕΛΑΙΟΛΑΔΟ.
Willy outed his kerosene lantern and tumbled with a groan and a thud onto his back. Onto the rough plank flooring at the bottom of the ship with the pleasant sound of bilgewater sloshing back and forth someplace, the unceasing creak and jar of the ship all about him—those faintly nauseating yet delightful smells of mold on the cheeses and across the desiccated skins of the hams hanging from the ceiling and swaying gently back and forth in unison like another ocean floating above his head—Willy passed out and he dreamed of eating and drinking. He awoke again and lit his lantern and ate and drank with such studied, slow, precise, and celebratory enjoyment, such patient, purposeful pleasure, that he felt he must be asleep dreaming that he was awake drinking and eating. Or else he’d died in his sleep and woken up in heaven, dreaming and drinking and eating.
After three days and three nights locked into this particular storeroom of the hold—after a final, uninterrupted sleep of fourteen hours—Willy awoke clearheaded, despite a somewhat persistent throbbing at his temples. He felt mildly hungry. Most definitely he felt thirsty for a sup of whiskey or a long, deep drink of cool, foamy champagne. Willy did not eat. He did not drink. He lit his kerosene lantern and located his frock coat and embroidered vest where he had hung them on nails among the swaying hams three days before. His top hat where he had set it safely on a shelf beside the Stilton cheeses. Willy put them on. He made his way toward the plank door.
Willy outed the lantern again, reached into his pocket for the keys.
Like a pirate Captain Damphier swung on a rope of the rigging over the heads of the enraged passengers. They were all shouting, climbing onto each other’s backs and shoulders in their attempts to reach the top of the tall crate where Mr. Etzler stood scared out of his wits, eager to tear the little man limb from limb. So many of them had tried to climb the ladder at the same time that it had tumbled backward, sending a dozen men sprawling across the deck and very nearly over the railing. Captain Damphier landed safely at the top of Satellite’s crate beside Mr. Etzler. He swiftly tied a loop at the end of the same rope he had swung across on, bowline knotted and pulled tight around Mr. Etzler’s waist. With the same smooth motion he reached behind to the thick post of the mast, and uncleated a halyard securing one of the enormous mainsails in position high overhead.
With an economy and efficiency of motion and countermotion that even Mr. Etzler must have appreciated, the huge mainsail with its thick heavy boom dropped down along the mast with its canvas flapping loose in the breeze, and hoisting Mr. Etzler, simultaneously and smoothly, up into the air almost to the top of the mainmast of the Rosalind, as though he were flying. He hung there, perfectly safe, high above the heads of the enraged and shouting passengers, swinging slowly side to side with his little arms and legs flailing, his crimson vest in the bright sun.
Mr. Etzler was still hanging from the top of the mainmast on the following morning, fourteen hours later, when Willy made his way up the stairs from the hold, dressed in his new boots and top hat and embroidered silk vest and frock coat. As he walked past the dining hall for the first-class passengers, he looked through a window and noted Mr. and Mrs. Whitechurch taking their breakfast. Willy made his way across the vacant forecastle deck, oblivious of the little man dangling high above his head (not before evening, under cover of darkness, would Mr. Stollmeyer dare climb the mast to cut his comrade down). Willy descended the short flight of carpeted stairs to the upper-class cabins. He recognized Mr. Whitechurch’s walking stick, with the shiny silver panther standing on its hind legs for a handle, leaning against one of the door frames. He entered without knocking. Willy proceeded past the empty, enormous four-poster bed (big as the entire cabin he shared with his sisters; that cabin he now recalled as though from a distant dream, seemingly so long ago he had lain in his cramped berth). He walked directly and as if by instinct toward a smaller bedroom off to the side, where he found Juliette sleeping peacefully.
Willy sat gently on the bed beside her in his frock coat and embroidered vest and tall top hat. He watched her sleeping with her silken hair spread across the pillow, a faint rosette of the sheet’s creases upon her cheek, the ribbon at the neck of her gown loosened to reveal the soft white skin covering her clavicle. Willy watched the slow rise and fall of her chest. He felt her warm, moist breath.
; Eventually Juliette opened her eyes, still half asleep, staring up at him dreamily. After a moment she sat up against the pillows, smiling—
“Such a silly outfit, Willy! Wherever did you get it from?” Juliette shook her head. “You look like the boy who brings my breakfast—though considerably more handsome!”
“Never you mind,” Willy said after a second, taking her hand. “I’ve a place for us finer than these clothes and even this cabin. Finer than the royal chambers of Buckingham Palace!”
*The possibility of a choice for the indentured laborers to remain in Trinidad, or to be granted a small parcel of land in exchange for their return passage, would not be introduced until substantially later.
**Chickpeas or garbanzo beans.
***The local population and the former African slaves demanded wages in excess of eleven cents per hour.
****See “The Sugar Question Made Easy,” by C. F. Stollmeyer (London, John Wortham Publisher, 1844), “Everyone who is acquainted with the cultivation of sugar knows that the labors of the sugarhouse are most dreaded by the slaves, or free workmen, and also what waste and other casualties are attendant upon the process of boiling sugar. It is therefore with pleasure that I can announce that this very difficult point has at last been overcome by a gentleman of great talents, extensive learning, and extraordinary inventive powers—J. A. Etzler, who has succeeded in crystallizing sugar without heating or boiling, at one-fifth the cost of making sugar in the usual way. Experiments have proved this fact without a doubt,” italics mine, pp. 16-17.
The Translator
Mary Caponegro
WORDS ARE SLIPPERY—AS treacherous on the tongue as ice under one’s feet, and as wondrous as the latter’s vitreous texture to the gazing eye. German is a solid language, all agree; Italian, French: more liquid. But what language would be flattered to be designated flatulent? Considering the coexistence of these varied states of language matter, one could hardly expect the Tower of Babel to be as charming as the Leaning Tower of Pisa. It is therefore a foregone conclusion that language is to blame for almost any complication one encounters in one’s daily interactions. And when you spend your hours gallivanting among languages, I assure you, the likelihood of complication becomes exponential. For we rely so heavily on the fiction of translation.
Ironically enough, a translator, who strives so valiantly to be, as the expression goes, part of the solution, may inadvertently compound the problem. According to these less-than-subtle mathematics, I am intrinsically a prime offender. Please note my dutiful formation of a fist, its somber placement on my chest’s left quadrant, the standard Latin recitation of the penitent: yes, I’ll say it, mea culpa. And then, because I am a pedant to the core, I’ll follow penance with a lesson.
When matter changes state, we learn in elementary chemistry, energy is neither gained nor lost. But in the case of verbal matter, the rule reverses; the rule itself perhaps evaporates. Call it perversity or unpredictability or merely instability—that an hour of haste, American style, transforms into a Mediterranean hour of punctuation; of stasis. Ora: hour/time; punta: full stop, period; di is obviously of. Thus the term rush hour is freeze-framed to stop hour, by the time it moves from US or British to Italian soil—or more precisely, asphalt.
It’s a cliché, I realize, to say Americans are always in a rush or uniformly crude or fat! (Given their country’s infamous obesity epidemic, some do rather saunter!) But in all earnestness, I’ve embraced Italian attitudes more than I’d care to admit, and haste is clearly sacrilegious in this nation, never mind counterproductive. Among the English-speaking academics of my acquaintance (that vocation that I myself might have entered were I more enamored of stability, more practical, or more—all right, yes, Liza, even more—pretentious), the idiom favored in the analysis of complex ideas is to unpack. How glib this infelicitous expression sounds to one whose ears have been attuned to nuance.
Legend sees perniciousness in my profession. This cursed prejudice derives from an Italian (or Sicilian?) uttering the famous epigram: traduttore traditore, the translator is a traitor! But perhaps you could forgive this sort of traitor for a fancy prose style, as it goes with—that’s the idiom, yes?—the territory. The deed accomplished by a translator is surely less piacular than murder. All right, here is a question less rhetorical: isn’t it betrayal when some complex, carefully elaborated argument or thesis is greeted by the cavalier proposal “Let’s unpack that.” You know as well as I do that the mascot of our millennial era is that uniformed Cerberus, male or female, who stands at every airport security checkpoint, that stern, earnest individual who grills you to insure that you yourself performed the act of packing your valise, without assistance or intrusion, thus insuring all personal effects therein to be your own, completely your responsibility. Unpacking thankfully remains uncensored. And I am fully guilty of collaboration regarding my American friend Liza’s unpacking.
Who is Liza, you inquire, as if there could be some analogously simple three-word answer, in the manner of a grade-school catechism recitation. Who indeed is Liza? I formulate this strenuous equation daily. I’ll start abstractly, as I often do. Consider Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne at the Museo Borghese—a museum that, for the record, once did not require these elaborate advance reservations; so much for spontaneity. Is not Bernini’s majestic sculpture the quintessential artistic embodiment of haste turned to stasis? And in my own subjective version of the myth, starring as the stopped-in-her-tracks sylvan nymph is in effect my Liza, passively enacting the hypostasis by which moment turns memory, flight, as it were, taking root. (Pedant that I am, I must here recite Ovid but I can’t as yet produce translation in verse on the spot.) If it is the case that Daphne was ingeniously protecting her virginity, sensibly avoiding any congress that divested her of what my academic friends call (please insert inverted commas) agency, my Liza has inverted this scenario: she too has made stasis of haste, but in her own contemporary manner, by eschewing agency, though she wants so desperately to be unburdened of her version of—insert again inverted commas please—virginity.
If you’ll excuse my mixing mythemes, let’s return to Cerberus, and the layered repercussions of one’s packing. I’d like you to consider whether customs officers and security personnel, as they forage for controlled substances or box cutters or over-quota measurements of liquid, or blighted foreign produce bearing vermin or bacteria, whether they censor the more nuanced, subtler—one might call it metaphysical—contraband that is the bread and butter, if you will, of cultural translation. I’d posit that only a security officer possessed of some exotic, paranormal, psychic X-ray vision would discern that Liza brought the rushing (and its paradoxical fruit, paralysis) with her, that she packed it unassisted and unconsciously, just as people say, colloquially, you brought the weather with you (as a compliment or an accusation, depending on whether what’s been brought is rain or shine: scuro or azzuro), and she is thus either the casualty or the beneficiary (depending on one’s view) of the capriciousness of cultural translation.
Standing in inverse relation, Italy, for its part, is either blighted or boosted (depending also on one’s view), engaged as it has always been in this perpetual tourist sweepstakes—recipient of yet another awestruck, culture-shell-shocked tourist, in this case the winner of the Liza prize. Italy has cut a deal, one might say, and Italy itself might say the following: you ogle the Berninis, Caravaggios, and Michelangelos, and we in turn will ogle you, bionda bella. But my Liza doesn’t realize she has already signed on the dotted line—with Italy, that is. With me she is not so much oblivious as tentative. Let me supply the background.
The bargain that we struck was this: if she was bold enough to remain in Rome indefinitely without the required permesso di sojourno, then in exchange for her temerity, she would acquire indefinite permesso to reside with me. This permission will, I’ve told her, have no expiration date. Do you think me perverse for putting Liza at risk? I do not think myself perverse (though as I mentioned earlier, m
y vocation is perceived as such). Would you like to hear a sampling of the risks that I take on a daily basis? For example, if one translates clumsily, one is accused of lacking nuance and not doing justice; if too elegantly, one gives undue credit, as in an inflated grade; in each case, one misrepresents the author. Meanwhile, if one tries to be, as they say, fair and square, one is accused of being pedestrian, middling, workaday, nothing more. When I goad Liza to be brazen, it is toward much milder risk taking than I have just enumerated. I merely want to teach her to express herself, fully express herself—directly. A so-called crash course in boldness, you might say.
She, on the other hand, thinks her insufficiencies will be cured through one or two so-called immersion courses in Italian language, taken locally at one of the innumerable Italian programs customized for foreigners. She yearns to fully comprehend Italian idioms; her battered brain swoons with confusion before the conjunctivo. But what she needs more fundamentally, in my opinion, is an entry-level course in taking chances. She thinks she can cut a bella figura in speech if she masters the subjunctive and its nuanced applications. She is bella, both in viso and figura, molta bella, but I have also made a bargain with myself that I will not exploit her unless I can equip her with the means to seduce me, i.e., any man or woman, anyone—of any nationality. Because I will not overpower; that’s too easy, not a level playing field so to speak, so easy it’s … immoral.
You’re still not satisfied. You want to know how I arrived at Liza? (Patience, reader dear, answer in transit.) Why does she intrigue me? Were I a photographer, I could answer more expediently, more succinctly: present her as a figure in the foreground of the landscape, that is, cityscape, of Roman rush hour, though she appears at first unfettered by this urban frenzy: a slender blonde, a striking one, at times seeming to float above the pavement in her romantic, empire-waisted, sweeping-skirted, linen sundress, its fabric tinted the most perfect shade of pale mint green. She is somewhat ill at ease with the inevitable attention paid her. It unnerves her; looking closer one can observe the line of her lovely mouth harden, her elegant jaw tense, the incipient panic in her intriguingly unstable aquamarine eyes (les yeux bleu, die augen blauen, gli occhi azzuri), whose own tint shifts as if a polarized lens, when she moves from inside to outside, under saturated blue sky. Just wear the attention, I often advise her, just wear it like a cape thrown about your shoulders, casually yet elegantly. The secret, my dear, is this: do not let it trip you, drape it about you. At my elaborate extended metaphor, she rolls those gorgeous eyes, as if to say, how quaint you are, how useless is your silly simile. Does it not encapsulate contemporary culture: that the grandeur of a sweeping cape devolves into the coyness of a shrug?
Fifty Contemporary Writers Page 45
