by Yoko Tawada
The word for “victims” began with an “O.” I noticed there were “O’s” scattered across the first page. Or perhaps it would be better to say that the page was full of holes eaten away by the letter “O.” There was a wall behind formed by the white page so I couldn’t see inside and the harder I looked the more it seemed I’d never break through. I colored the insides of all the “O’s” black with my fountain pen and felt a slight sense of relief.
I didn’t know the banana grove was built like a prison until the day before. Initially I couldn’t figure out what I was looking at—gray concrete blocks stacked up and secured by barbed wire. The blocks formed a wall about two meters high that continued on and on along the road and because there wasn’t a break no matter how far I walked I finally couldn’t keep myself from pressing my nose to a crack and peering in to see banana trees lined up in rows and planted exactly the same distance apart. Bunches of bananas were covered with blue semitransparent plastic bags tightly tied with rope at the bottom. The bags were clouded with steam inside and through the plastic you could see droplets trickling down. What surprised me was that the earth the trees grew out of was flat and bald without a single blade of grass. Also missing were the sounds of living things so the whole area was absolutely silent. There were no birds or bees or dogs. A little further on there was a tin door in the wall that seemed too small to walk through without bending over. The door was misshapen and looked as if it might pop open at any moment so I pushed it but it was locked. Beside the door was a sign made of plywood. Painted on the sign in white was the picture of a skull. The message below announced in crude handwriting that entry was forbidden because the air inside was poisonous. The thought of the compound having been sprayed with a pesticide so strong it would instantly turn you into a skeleton made me even more eager to sneak in. Turning around I caught sight of a man in a straw hat. Looking down I took off my shoe in order to shake out the gravel and hoped he wouldn’t notice me.
… ninety percent, of the victims, mouths, sewed shut …
The word I translated as “mouth” was used only for the mouths of animals never humans. I drew two lines through the word “victim” and wrote “sacrifice” instead. Sacrifice. A sacrifice needn’t be human. The mouths of sacrifices. My new choice didn’t sound right either. I rubbed my ring finger across my upper lip from left to right and discovered a little bump like an insect bite just right of center. When I touched the bump I felt a sharp pain and then an unbearable itchiness. It couldn’t be a mosquito bite. I remembered the internist confidently telling me there were no mosquitoes on the island. This felt like the tingling you feel in your lip when the tiny transparent hairs hidden on the seemingly smooth skin of a peach you start sucking on not really out of hunger but just for fun pierce the skin and infuse your lips with acidic juices. I wanted to tear my upper lip from my mouth. Then I thought of putting it in an empty imported tea can as a present for George.
… and, almost all, always, they, alone, are, friends, people to help them, relatives, near, are not…
The house where I was staying alone was of a simple construction: the weird pieces of rock that rolled down during a volcanic eruption had been piled up and cemented in place which seemed “simple” to me although I could be mistaken since I’ve never built a house and yet these stones of many different sizes certainly appeared to have been arranged in a haphazard manner. Perhaps it was the work of an amateur who had let the pieces fall where they may. But then why would those two small round stones have been placed like stars above the diagonal of that huge diamond-shaped slab? I wondered and as I carefully examined each section I decided the pattern couldn’t possibly have been due to chance. You couldn’t fit rocks together in this way without thinking which meant that whoever had done it must have had something in mind. But what? I had no idea. What people think about while they’re assembling rocks is completely beyond me.
Hardened lava flowed by the house and continued in a narrow belt down to the sea. The black path was like a “river.” I didn’t know what else to call it. At dusk the path looked like a real “river” and I could even hear the sound of water. I found myself walking on that black river beside a woman I had never seen before. Without asking I knew she was the “author.” As she walked the author sometimes stumbled and almost fell but in such a charming way that without thinking I almost reached out to help her although I couldn’t tell whether she had really lost her footing or was just pretending. She was twenty years older than me so it seemed unfair that her clumsiness could be so winsome but then again women of her generation must have had to be attractive in order to make a living I thought deciding to accept this rationale for the time being. It wasn’t the author’s charm itself that made me jealous so much as the fact that it existed for the benefit of an indefinite number of men I didn’t know.
The burnt charcoal-like substance under our feet would occasionally crack with a dry popping sound. Through the holes left behind we could see dark caves of immeasurable depth spread out beneath us making me wonder what would happen if we fell. But as I’d hate to hear the author say “You’re as timid as a deer” I pretended I wasn’t afraid. Nothing frightened me more than clichéd criticism. Yet when I was with someone who didn’t seem likely to deliver one hackneyed saying after another for some reason I myself could think of nothing but trite phrases. When I picked up a broken piece of lava it was as light as styrofoam and colored my fingers black which clearly outlined my fingerprints clearly.
“Does it look like there’s a cut on my face?” asked the author. Cautiously I looked up at her. I saw nothing like a “cut” not even a “face” just a blank space shaped like the letter “O”.
… completely, seldom, most, from the background, emerge, one or two, young ones, appear, at times, stay of execution, is granted, murderous, sight, wounds of the heart, however, cannot be avoided, for that very reason, they also, as though they’re trying to howl, look, at any rate, their, small mouths, wide, are open …
What kind of suckling beasts would open their mouths so wide? They might be something like cicada larvae or perhaps baby birds. Whatever they were I had a warm almost nostalgic feeling toward them although I couldn’t remember the sound of those howling voices. Somehow I seemed to be thirsty again. The air here was so dry your throat was always parched even if you didn’t move. The island itself seemed desiccated. I remembered the doctor explaining to me how the banana trees needed so much moisture that subterranean water had to be continually pumped up to spray them so the soil was left completely dry. Nevertheless the view that it would be unfeasible to stop exporting bananas both from a diplomatic and an economical standpoint was accepted as established fact. The doctor himself seemed convinced of this but to me such an argument was like saying people in so-called developing countries would immediately starve to death if economic aid were cut off which I also didn’t believe. I put my lips to the earthenware pot in the corner of the kitchen and drank. The handle either because it was poorly made or perhaps due to mold felt rough and hurt my palm. I didn’t have any gloves though so I had to pick things up barehanded.
While I was squatting by the entrance to the banana grove shaking the gravel out of my shoe the man in the straw hat spoke to me.
“Did you come for this? Or this?” he asked first mimicking the breaststroke and then mountain climbing.
“Neither. I came here to translate.”
“Oh, I see.”
Contrary to my expectations he didn’t look the least bit surprised which embarrassed me and I regretted even having brought up the subject rather than simply saying work. Now he was standing there in silence and it was my turn to speak. “I’m translating a story from a foreign language into my own,” I added uselessly.
I wished I hadn’t said that either but it was already too late. When I have nothing to say I tend to pointlessly talk too much.
Leaning against the concrete wall the man suddenly said, “Think you’ll make it in time?” He touched
a nerve which startled me at first but I told myself he must be either shooting in the dark or talking about something entirely unrelated to what was worrying me.
“I have to finish in time. There’s money involved you know,” I lied. Even if I did finish I probably wouldn’t get paid and furthermore the magazine specializing in literature in translation where I was planning to publish the piece had been in the red so long my friends were afraid it would fold before anyone received royalties for the next issue. So I’d have to compensate for the loss by working random jobs to earn my living expenses though the reason I absolutely had to get this translation done on time was an entirely different matter. I had made a habit of mentioning money because it always seemed to help the conversation flow smoothly even with people I didn’t know.
The man stood and stared as if he didn’t hear me which made me so mad I wanted to slap him with a really nasty remark. I prepared one in the back of my throat: If money means nothing to you then why are you working in this banana grove? But I kept silent and I was happy that I did. After all a man wearing a straw hat standing next to a banana grove doesn’t necessarily work there; this man merely fit my image of what a fruit picker might look like. I actually knew nothing about men whose work involved physical labor. So it was rude of me to try to read his thoughts and perfectly natural perhaps that I didn’t have a clue as to what was going through the mind of a person of the opposite sex in a straw hat whom I wasn’t even sure was a laborer in the first place.
…for them, is waiting, the same, lot, they, grow up, into it, to become sacrifices, just once, far from that, are shown, the young, together, being killed, with one stroke, two at a time …
Unconnected words scattered across the page. I knew I had to link them together into sentences but I was physically deficient. My lung capacity wasn’t good enough. “The trick is to read one sentence slowly while taking a deep breath, hold your breath while you translate the sentence in your head and rearrange the words, then, while carefully exhaling, write the translation down,” my translator friend Ei told me but reading only one word left me panting and with all these breathless thoughts running through my head I couldn’t seem to get to the next one. Even so I was at least being faithful to the unfamiliar texture of each word and I was beginning to think maybe this was more important for the time being. At least I created the sensation of throwing each word over to the other side with great care. Which was why the entire text was breaking into fragments but I simply didn’t have the energy to think about the whole. The whole didn’t even seem to matter. If translation meant “passing something over to the other side” then perhaps forgetting about the “whole” and starting out with fragments wasn’t a bad idea. But then again translation might be something entirely different. Perhaps translation was something like metamorphosis. Both the words and the story were transformed into something entirely new. Then all the words should casually line up on the page as if they had always looked this way. I could never pull this off which must mean I was a lousy translator. At times the thought that I myself might turn into something else before the words did was absolutely terrifying.
University professors occasionally criticize my work. Other translators haven’t though scholars seem to think translators are like students and like to point out my mistakes and dismiss my style as “translationese” while complaining that my Japanese is wrong or my use of Chinese characters strange. One scholar even wrote in a review, “Due to the blatant ‘translationese’ one simply cannot feel one is reading a literary work.” As there’s no money in translating literature and certainly little praise my friend Ei gave it up altogether and started to write novels. Although Ei has suggested I do the same and I’ve gotten similar advice from others as well I keep translating despite having to work random jobs which gives people the impression that I’m overly confident in my ability when actually I’m not. How could I be when I’ve never received a single word of encouragement from anyone? Once an author I translated did get a few favorable comments but even then the reviewers moaned “If only it weren’t for the terrible ‘translationese’ style” or “It’s a shame we can’t experience the flavor of the original” which means that far from praising my work they were actually blaming me for everything they didn’t like.
For me one unpleasant thought invariably leads to an endless string of anxieties. And now there was plenty to worry about: Not just whether I’d finish but when I was ready to go home would I be able to find a plane ticket right away and if so could I pay for it and if not who would I borrow the money from and what to do about the key to the basement I had lost? That lost key haunted me while I was translating. And furthermore the hand that held the fountain pen itched so bad I was forced to stop writing after every line to put the pen down and scratch my palm.
… especially, have met, people, the sacrifices, in churches, in chapels, in monasteries, in art museums, they, as before said, alone, however, not entirely, accompanied, by their torturers …
I had an intriguing encounter in the island church with something I had once seen in the National Gallery in London. It happened two days ago while I was on my way to the market to buy some bread and cheese. Since the slope to the village was terraced I couldn’t see the grocery or the church from my window but when I walked down I realized for the first time how many places were hidden from view. In one such place I found the church—a conglomeration of black stones. The use of black stones in buildings was now prohibited so this structure stood out as a particularly impressive one though I couldn’t understand why the islanders who thought black was the devil’s color would have chosen this stone for their church. Roman Catholics had occupied the island some five hundred years ago the doctor said and for some reason this date alone stuck out clearly in my mind while I had forgotten the many others such as the years of the volcanic eruptions which seemed like a terrible loss now. The doctor often talked in statistics. So often in fact that I couldn’t remember any of them. He knew exactly how many tourists visited each year and the number of plant species that grew only on this island and even the annual production of bananas in tons but these numbers were completely erased from my memory.
The entire church was leaning forward. Maybe this is why I pushed the door open and walked straight in as if I were being pulled by a magnet. The air inside was cold and dank. Dim rays shone from a small lattice window onto a picture someone had hung between two stone pillars as if to hide it but the light was too weak for me to clearly see what was there—alive. The dark colors in the center seemed to drink in the feeble glow. Frustrated I stood motionless before the picture. As my eyes adjusted to the dark I glimpsed something round and blood-soaked with a spear sticking out of it which I thought must be the “eye” of a living thing. When I finally realized that the dark green shining mounds protruding from the body below the eye must be “nipples” I felt a sharp pain in my right breast and instinctively covered it with my hand but by then it was too late. My own nipple had split in two. I hurriedly pressed the two nipples back together and massaged them hard. As if that would have made the two one again. I actually must have created excessive pressure because the two nipples then split into four. The pain was intense. And I wanted to ignore it. With things like this on my mind I wouldn’t be able to finish my work and in fact I hadn’t even translated the first word yet. Coming to a faraway place apparently wasn’t enough to break my habit of postponing work until the last possible moment. George once hinted in a roundabout way that I always procrastinated not because I was lazy but because I was showing off insisting I absolutely had to do things that I really didn’t want to do in the first place. Deep down George never liked the idea of me translating anyway. He was always nagging me asking me why I didn’t try something more physically active since I obviously wasn’t cut out to be a translator. But I really couldn’t understand why George loathed my translations and I was sure George didn’t have the slightest idea why I hated him either.
… together, appear
, those who kill, with the sacrifices, basically, always, only in a one-to-one ratio, never, come many, against one, to kill, for that, it continues, the appearance of, fair play …
“Thirteen more weeks and the dragon wind will be here. It pushes up from Africa and sometimes blows for days on end. You can’t go outside. This is the best season,” the woman in the shop said as she wrapped my goat’s milk cheese and rye bread in wax paper. Her shelves were a jumble of laundry detergent and melons and weekly magazines in Spanish.
“Is it something like hot air? The dragon wind, I mean.”
Realizing that I was ignorant of the dragon wind she explained angrily, “It’s like an electric hair drier blowing on you all day. Just awful. Your hair starts to fall out and your face gets so dry the skin peels off in flakes. Nothing to do but cover your head with wet linen and crawl into a sleeping bag.”
… nevertheless, brings, the killer, always, only, his own, self, with one, often, comes, he, high, on horseback, and, always, is he, safely, protected, covered, wearing armor, his attack power, is doubled, in a firm position, armed …
I tried to imagine the figure of a medieval knight mounted in armor but when the picture was finally complete in my mind the words I translated immediately destroyed the image. Better not to have a hero anyway I thought though I wasn’t sure why I thought this.
