Face to Face

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  After that first edition in 1947, Smoke Over Birkenau went out of print until 1957, when it was reissued, half-heartedly, it appears, by the prominent Italian publisher, Mondadori, and went the usual way of unpublicized books. In 1979, the author recounts in a letter, she felt something had to be done. “I have no family. I am alone. I realized I couldn’t neglect the future of my book.” With the help of a friend, Daniel Vogelmann, proprietor of a small publishing firm in Florence called La Giuntina, she brought out two editions. In 1986 La Giuntina published a very successful fifth edition, and a sixth in 1991. Since then the book has been translated into German, French, and English.

  I spent most of 1990 working on an English translation of Smoke Over Birkenau. When I recently opened the Italian edition I worked from, I found the list of words scrawled in the front, in my handwriting. Not long ago, I must have known how they got there and why, but now they were a mystery. Insouciant. Astounded. Hordes. Routine. Perfunctory. Fervent. Vitality. Interminable.

  I did the translation in a kind of dream, or nightmare, mentally living four or five hours a day in the extermination camp I conjured up from words on the page, first the Italian, and then my own English words, which made the camp seem closer and more vivid, seen directly rather than through a screen. I didn’t think much about why I was doing it. First, why was I doing a translation at all, something bound to be strenuous and difficult, especially as my knowledge of Italian was not as thorough as it should be. Even more, why had I chosen a book which would plunge me into so grim a setting—for more months, as it turned out, than the actual author spent in the actual camp? Only lately have I begun to think about how the work intersected with my life and with my own work, which was writing fiction.

  In the fall of 1988 I had finished a novel, and for the next six months I didn’t know what to do with myself. The novel was out of my hands, moving through the various stages of getting printed and bound, for which I was no longer necessary. I tried starting another one but couldn’t find any more words. It was as if, in that novel, I had used up all the words I knew, although it was quite short, as novels go. I wrote an unsuccessful story. I was asked to do a few essays and reviews; as always, when writing on demand, I felt I was resolutely completing term papers. I had always wanted to write a musical comedy, so I did the lyrics for several songs which I still keep in a folder and hope to return to some day; they were funny songs but I couldn’t think of a plot in which they might be set.

  I wasn’t teaching; there was no place I had to go each day. I would not be missed anywhere since no one expected me. In the morning I would sit down at my desk as a writer should, but that was as far as I got, sitting there and maybe writing a few more blithe verses for my songs. It got so that I would cringe when I woke and opened my eyes to the light, knowing that yet again I’d have to confront my desk. There were times my body actually recoiled from the desk, and no matter how I admonished myself I could not produce any useful words.

  It was then that I got the notion of translating. I had done some translation years ago and recalled it as serene, absorbing work, wonderful work. It had all the alluring intricacies of writing, the playing with words and phrases and rhythms, except you didn’t have to make anything up. That was the best part. You felt you were writing and in a way you were, but the part of the mind that made things up could rest, and obviously that was what my imagination needed. Of course writing—real writing—is also translation, that is, transferring something into one’s native tongue, except the language from which one is translating isn’t a verbal, audible language.

  An astute friend once told me that when you need any of the basics in life—a job, an apartment, or a mate—the first thing to do is tell everyone you encounter that you’re looking. I did that. I told everyone who crossed my path that I wanted to translate something from Italian. And sure enough, an Italian friend, a professor of American literature at the University of Florence, soon wrote to say that at his urging, the Jewish Publication Society had acquired Smoke Over Birkenau but had not yet settled on a translator.

  I was sent a copy of the book—I remember it was in July of 1989—and read it while on vacation in Westhampton. It was a strange routine indeed, passing the days in the insouciant ambience of the Long Island beaches and the evenings reading of the atrocities of the Nazi extermination camps. I found the book enthralling. More important, it was a tangible thing I could do; as I held it in my hands I felt its shape and bulk could release me from the limbo where I was adrift.

  I developed a yen to do it, coupled with apprehension. The language was simple and direct, but I knew how inadequate my Italian was. I would have to look up so many words, even words I was pretty sure of, to be absolutely sure. On the other hand, I had an affinity for the language and its rhythms. I understood the inner shapes of the sentences, their movements and their routes. I almost felt as if Italian was my native tongue, except that I lacked the vocabulary. I had its forms in my head, in the Chomskyesque sense, but not the words. I also had a feeling for how the book should sound in English.

  There was still another reason. The subject—the Nazi death camps—was something I thought about a lot, as do many writers, perhaps all thinking people. But it would probably not find a path into my writing except in the most oblique way, since it existed in my life only in an oblique way. Even if I knew what to say, even if I had the skill and imagination, I would still hesitate; I would worry about my ignorance, my possible arrogance in attempting it. The translation would be a way of writing about the camps without actually writing, just as I had not actually lived in them. It would be taking part in some way, doing a small service. It would also be an escape from the need or desire to write about the subject, just as my having been born when and where I was was an escape from the reality.

  Haggard. Cantankerous. Imploring. Dreary. Plucky. Banter. Superb. Vivacious. Snarling. Prattled.

  There ensued a lengthy period of correspondence and cantankerous negotiations with the publisher, again, a period longer than the time Liana Millu spent in Birkenau: The endless delays were galling, especially as the project was a modest book of one hundred sixty pages, involving a sum of money in the middling four figures.

  Toward the end of July I wrote a letter from the beach saying I’d be interested in doing the book. A few months later, in early fall, I was invited to submit a sample translation of five pages, any five pages I wished. I chose a passage in which a prisoner sneaks out to the camp’s black market in the evening to trade a bit of bread for a carrot or piece of onion she could smuggle to her thirteen-year-old son, whom she has discovered, scrawny and haggard, working in the garbage detail in nearby Auschwitz. It was a passage which made the despicable outrage of the camps quite clear, as the imploring mother bargains with fellow prisoners over miserable scraps of food.

  It took me two weeks to get the five pages in good shape. If five pages took two weeks, I figured that one hundred sixty pages would take about thirty-two weeks or eight months.

  Early in December, winter coming on, the beach a distant memory, I received a written offer to do the book. I set myself a goal of five pages a day in very rough form—a literal, not yet literary, translation. As anticipated, I had to look up many words. I had a fat, excellent Italian-English dictionary, and I became so intimate with this dictionary that I could turn automatically to the correct page for the first letter of the word I sought, and soon to the correct page for the first two or three letters of the word. This is no mean feat with a dictionary, particularly one so thick.

  But help was not always to be found in the dictionary—for instance in the story of Bruna, the prisoner who one day spies her half-dead son in neighboring Auschwitz. The narrator, Liana, wonders how she can help Bruna smuggle food to the boy to keep him alive, as well as to make his coming birthday a bit less dreary. She recalls how on her own recent birthday in the camp, a friend with an unquenchable sense of style presented her with a “small slice of salted bread and a tiny curl of
margarine,” procured by saving up crusts and trading them on the camp’s black market. This plucky friend, elegant and freckle-faced, she calls “la mia amica fiumana.”

  Fiumana, that adjective describing the friend, was a puzzler. It obviously derived from flume, “river,” and indeed there it was in the dictionary, right above flume, in the “f’s,” to which my trained finger turned unerringly. But it was listed as a noun meaning “broad stream” or “large stream”; another meaning was “flood.” Figuratively, fiumana could also mean a crowd or stream of people, as in “a stream of people came out of the theatre.” “My streaming friend?” No, that wouldn’t do.

  I spent some time pondering this freckled, stylish amica fiumana. She must have had a generous, vivacious nature, since in such straitened circumstances she’d managed to give the narrator that gift of bread and margarine. “My generous friend?” No, the author would simply have called her generosa. There was more to it. “My bountiful friend?” I was leaning towards “my exuberant friend,” trying to keep the riverlike, overflowing sense contained in the word. But I wasn’t satisfied. I happened to mention my problem on the phone to the Italian professor who had gotten me involved in the project to begin with. “Fiumana?” he repeated, amused. “From Fiume.”

  Fiume is a Northern Italian city and fiumana was a simple adjective of location like romana (Roman) or fiorentina (Florentine). What threw me off was that in Italian, adjectives derived from proper nouns are not capitalized. Of course I knew this elementary fact, but because of my geographical ignorance—not having heard of the city of Fiume—I never thought to apply it to the situation at hand. Meanwhile, being a novelist, I had developed a whole identity for this friend who exists in a mere four lines—bountiful, exuberant, with long flowing hair and moist, brimming eyes and an undulating way of moving. A common practice of fiction writers is: When you don’t know something, make it up. But it clearly wasn’t going to be the proper strategy for a translator.

  In the end, the narrator decides to emulate her bountiful friend from Fiume and persuades the other women in the barrack to put aside a morsel of bread each day for a week. By this means they amass enough bread to trade on the black market for a clove of garlic for the boy’s birthday; his mother is overcome with gratitude.

  For all I knew, people from Fiume might be noted for their generosity and exuberance, their lush features and fluid grace, the way, for example, people from New York are noted (mistakenly) for their brusque manners and haste and snarling speech. At any rate, I realized that to avoid similar errors, I needed help. A translation therapist, so to speak. For a year or so there had been ads on the New York City buses for psychological services. “Let’s face it,” the ads said. “Emotional problems don’t go away by themselves.” Well, neither do translation problems. I needed someone to elucidate turns of phrase, offhand jokes, and references that are clear only to native speakers or insiders. I had lived in Italy for a year, long ago, but that wasn’t enough.

  I thought immediately of Francesco, a language teacher I had lately made friends with. Francesco was thirty-two years old then, and a polyglot. True, he was not a native speaker of Italian—he was from the Bronx—but he had grown up speaking it with his Italian father, as well as speaking Spanish with his mother, who was Dominican. Along the way, at Cardinal Spelman High School in the Bronx and later at Cornell, he had picked up Latin, French, and Portuguese. When it came to matters linguistic, Francesco was the ultimate authority. During his first few years out of college he had worked for a bank, where he was a most valuable employee since he could be sent anywhere in the world. If he didn’t already speak the language he’d pick it up in a few minutes.

  It was plain to see that Francesco was not born to bank. He was slender and sprite-like, full of vitality, with quick, lithe movements—rather like the friend from Fiume. He had darkish skin, straight coal-black hair, and a gap between his teeth; he had huge dark soulful eyes, and he was warm and ebullient, full of laughter and banter. He read religion and philosophy and was a fervent believer who went to church regularly—a Protestant church, not the church of his parents. He had also studied history, and knew the dates and names of everything that had ever happened in Western Europe and perhaps elsewhere. After a few years in a business suit he’d quit the bank and begun giving language lessons; that way he could wear jeans and his superb and colorful silk shirts.

  I imagined bringing the translation to him for help: we would sit in the tiny living room of his fifth-floor walk-up, or else climb the spiral staircase to the room with the birds. He kept two finches in a cage, and if they made too much noise when he had friends or students over, he would spread a towel over the cage to make them think it was night, and the gullible creatures would immediately shut up. Or we might go out on the roof terrace, which he’d decorated with thriving plants and colored banners—red, purple, green, pink, blue, and yellow—and look out over the city as I told him my translation problems and he listened with sympathetic nods.

  But Francesco said regretfully that he was too busy with students and suggested someone else, a young Italian woman across town. Her name sounded familiar. I remembered I had known a couple by that name when I lived in Rome in the 1960s. There might be no connection at all, but then again it was an unusual name. I went to her apartment and asked her if her parents’ names were Dora and Ruggiero. Yes, they were. “I knew your parents in Rome,” I said in astonishment. “We were friends. I knew your mother even before that, back in Philadelphia. In fact I think I even baby-sat for you once or twice. Were you a year or two old in 1964?” “Yes,” she said, “that must have been me.”

  She was pleasant enough, but she didn’t seem astounded at the coincidence as I was, or even terribly interested. Her interest was perfunctory, as I prattled on about how I’d stayed at her parents’ beach house at Fregene and looked after her and her sister as a favor—I was hardly more than a girl myself then. I grasped that while it was for me indeed an astounding coincidence to be referred to the daughter—living unaccountably in New York—of friends I’d known almost thirty years ago in Rome, for her it was simply running into an old friend of her parents, ho-hum.

  Insipid. Puny. Taunt. Rejoinder. Seethed. Rancid. Drab. Halting. Surly.

  I had met the young translation therapist’s American mother, Dora, shortly after I graduated from college: she was the personnel director who interviewed me for a typing job at the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia. I had just married and was to be the breadwinner while my husband went to graduate school.

  Typing for a Quaker social service agency was not my first choice. Since I’d been an English major, I had initially looked in the field of publishing, specifically Curtis Publishing Company, whose headquarters were in Philadelphia and which published the Saturday Evening Post and other popular magazines of the day. The interviewer at Curtis—I remember her still, a bony woman in a narrow, insipid little dress with a cap of dark hair that clung to her puny head—raised her eyes from my resume and said, as if it were a taunt, “I see you are married.” In those days such information was included on resumes. “Yes,” I acknowledged. “If you’re married,” she countered, “you might get pregnant.” That was definitely a rebuke.

  I could hardly dispute the bare statement. “But I don’t plan to get pregnant for a long time,” I said. “The best laid plans of mice and men go oft astray,” was her rejoinder.

  Fresh from college and steeped in English literature, I might have told her that the line she misquoted was actually, “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ Men, Gang aft a-gley.” But I didn’t have the presence of mind. I seethed with outrage. In 1959 we didn’t know that what she was doing was a form of discrimination, of sexism, as well as intimidation. Or was it? Is injustice abstract? Does it exist before it is officially recognized as such? Well, that is a metaphysical question, like the tree falling in the forest. In any case I felt very badly used, but at the time there wasn’t anything I could do about my reject
ion. It’s possible that enough of those encounters might make a young woman go out and get pregnant in a fit of spite, to fulfill the prophesy. I left the Curtis building with the rancid taste of injustice on my tongue.

  I wasn’t too successful at hunting up jobs. Another I applied for was in a laboratory, removing the legs from fruit flies, the kind you swat in the kitchen. The man who interviewed me was a drab person with halting speech. “You know about fruit flies?” he mumbled. “Drosophila melanogaster.” As a matter of fact I did know, even though I was an English major. I remembered from high school biology that because of certain physical properties, and perhaps also because of their ubiquity, fruit flies were commonly used for experiments in genetics. Not only had Mendelian genetics been one of the few topics in biology that interested me, but I liked the fruit flies’ Latin name: Drosophila melanogaster. Perhaps they are still used, though with recent discoveries about DNA and the Genome Project under way, they may have been superseded.

  Despite a certain repugnance, I was considering taking the fruit fly job with the mumbling scientist, when I was offered the typing job at the American Friends Service Committee by Dora, future mother of the translation therapist. Typing was not what I’d had in mind all those years I pored over English literature, but it seemed preferable to fruit flies. I had tried to rationalize the fruit fly job by telling myself I’d be contributing to genetic research, and now I tried to rationalize the typing job by telling myself I’d be contributing to peace in the world, for the Quakers who ran the AFSC were doing a variety of good works in trouble spots such as Algeria and South Africa and Harlem. But I think what clinched it was the vision of myself interminably plucking the legs from fruit flies—after all, who knew how long it might take my husband to finish his graduate studies?