Foreign Tongue (17 page)
Authors: Vanina Marsot
“Give us an example,” Althea said, putting a plate of
tarte
in front of me.
I thought for a moment. “Okay. How do you translate
‘séduire’
? In English, ‘to be seduced’ has a connotation of corruption, an inkling of something against one’s will or good intentions;
‘être séduit’
is closer to being beguiled.
‘Elle a un grand besoin de séduire’
doesn’t mean she needs
to seduce people but rather that she needs to be liked—and yet, while there is a notion of seduction that isn’t sexual, it isn’t nonsexual either.
‘Légèreté’
means lightness, but in some contexts, it seems to describe an almost Zen-like state of serenity. How do you say ‘lame,’ or ‘rude,’ or ‘confused’ in French? Why is ‘violence’ in English so physical, whereas the French use it for emotions as well? Why do French people believe in love at first sight, and we think it’s adolescent?”
“I don’t think it’s adolescent,” Ivan said, blowing Althea a kiss.
“You translate a whole culture when you translate a novel,” Charles-Henri declared. “
C’est normal
. You must give the flavor of the psychic landscape that produced the work in the first place,
non?
Otherwise, it’s anachronistic.” Justine stretched a languid arm out to play with the back of his neck.
“But if the ideas themselves are difficult to translate, how do you find the words?” Althea asked.
“You can’t get caught up on trying to find a one-to-one correlation with each word. You have to understand the author’s meaning and intention and translate based on those,” Fred said. “That’s the only smart way to do it.”
“The problem is,” I said, bristling at his sweeping pronouncement, “I don’t know the author’s intention—I don’t even know how it ends. I get a chapter a week, and I don’t know how many there are. I’m translating in the dark.”
“That seems a half-assed way of going about things,” Fred said, shaking his head.
“I get paid,” I snapped and shoveled a piece of apple tart in my mouth.
“Who wants coffee, who wants tea?” Althea asked, getting up.
Fred leaned over. “You might enjoy reading what other translators have to say on the subject.” He scribbled a couple of website addresses as well as his e-mail on a piece of paper. “Start here. Let me know if you need help—if you get in over your head.”
“Thank you,” I said politely, putting the paper in my pocket and vowing to shred it as soon as I got home. I got up to help Althea in the kitchen.
“What do you think?” she whispered, measuring out ground coffee.
“Kind of condescending.” I stacked the plates in the washing machine.
“Really? I think he’s cute,” she said, loading the dishwasher. I shoved dessert forks in the cutlery basket. Althea gave me an inquisitive look.
“Sorry. Being patronized makes me surly,” I explained.
“You’re being overly sensitive.”
“You say that as if it’s a choice. It’s not like I sit here and think, Oh, today, I’m with friends, let me be overly sensitive, whereas tomorrow I’ve got to deal with the plumber and the bank, so I’ll be thick-skinned. It’s just the way I am!” I exclaimed.
She put soap tablets in the machine and turned to me. “You’ve been quiet all evening. What’s wrong?” she asked. I tossed a dish towel on the counter in frustration.
“I’m worried about Bunny. And…something’s up with Olivier. Out of the blue, he was brusque on the phone and said something about not being reachable for a couple of days. Something he had to take care of. I don’t know what it means, and I’m trying not to read anything into it.”
“Which means you’ve already read ten thousand things into it and are driving yourself mad?” she asked.
“Yes,” I sighed. “It’s very annoying.”
“I’m sorry about Bunny. But chin up about Olivier, I’m sure it’s nothing,” she said. She gave me a hug and sent me back in the dining room with the coffee cups and saucers.
When I got home, there was a message from Olivier.
“Excuse-moi pour cet après-midi, mon ange. C’est compliqué, mais je t’expliquerai. Je t’embrasse.”
His apology filled me with a warm-kitten sensation that everything was right with the world. Being called “my angel” helped. Of course, the next moment, I felt a spike of resentment that my mood was so susceptible. I went to bed.
Translation is entirely mysterious. Increasingly I have felt that the art of writing is itself translating, or more like translating than it is like anything else. What is the other text, the original? I have no answer. I suppose it is the source, the deep sea where ideas swim, and one catches them in nets of words and swings them shining into the boat…where in this metaphor they die and get canned and eaten in sandwiches.
—
URSULA LE GUIN,
Dancing at the Edge of the World
I
woke up with Fred’s words ringing in my ears. I made coffee, turned on the computer, and surfed the Internet, cobbling together a Cliffs Notes version of translation theory. Clicking past the business-oriented sites and the reference sites, I focused on the academically oriented sites, with journals, book reviews, and forums on the nature and study of translation.
One academic journal, called
Palimpsestes,
was devoted solely to translation issues between French and English. There were articles with titles like “Reflections on the Transposition of Clichés and Stereotypes” and “Not-So-Dead Metaphors: Reinvigorating Dead Metaphors in
Moby Dick
and Its French Translations.” An article on the difficulties
of translating the Harlequin novel focused on the problem of preserving the tropes of the genre; another meditated on the complexities of adjective placement. Like most gold mines, it was totally overwhelming.
It was also riddled with an unfamiliar vocabulary, with terms like “source text,” “target text,” “discourse,” “meta-contexts,” and “honorifics,” which referred to the various ways languages have of showing politeness, as in the French use of the second-person plural. I was entranced by
“chuchotage,”
a term used to describe the whispering of simultaneous interpretation into the client’s ear. It came from
“chuchoter,”
French for “to whisper,” but it sounded like something you did in bed. Maybe it was, if you spoke to your lover in a foreign language.
My favorite new word was “idiolect,” defined as the “features of language variation characteristic of an individual speaker; [meaning] basically, everyone has a unique way of talking.” On another website, I came across the concept of “deverbalizing,” meaning “[to strip] away the words of the original document until we are left with only the representation of what the words describe” (Karla Déjean Le Féal,
“Pédagogie raisonée de la traduction,”
pp. 18–19). This notion suggested I ignore the words of the source text and privilege instead their meaning or feeling. Once free from the distraction of specific French words, I should be able to concentrate on finding the English words for the notions I’d isolated and understood. The author made translating seem like a scientific process, like curing olives or decaffeinating coffee.
I kept stumbling onto the word “palimpsest.” From a college class, I remembered it referred to the ghostly shadows of erased words that remained, like clues, on Roman wax tablets and, later, on pricey recycled vellum back in the days before paper. Victor Hugo’s
Notre-Dame de Paris,
written in the nineteenth century about the fifteenth century, was a palimpsest of a book, set in a palimpsest of a city. The metaphor was unending and perfect, an infinity mirror, and I thought of it whenever I saw other iterations of Paris: old street signs, carved into stone above the modern painted metal ones, or fading vintage advertisements on the
sides of buildings. The idea of looking for the ghost of the original had stayed with me.
In translation, it is necessary to keep the ghost around as well, I thought now. Otherwise, you might stray too far from the original and start inventing things.
I got up to make toast and thought about an article I’d read in the
Los Angeles Times
about language and brain tumors. Through experimental surgery, scientists had determined that language isn’t located in one section of the brain but spread out in nooks and crannies, like the melted butter in an English muffin commercial, with different areas for different languages. This means that if you had a stroke in one part of your brain and lost the ability to speak, the part of your brain that spoke another language might be able to retrain the damaged part to speak again.
As I’d been obsessed with brain tumors at the time, I’d found this reassuring. But now I wondered if bilingual people had different styles in each language, or if they spoke certain subjects or feelings better in one language than the other, or if they were funnier or wittier in one language or the other.
I ate breakfast, thinking about my new favorite word, “idiolects.” If everyone had a particular way of speaking—and this didn’t mean the voice-recognition spy technology of Hollywood movies but a style of slinging words together—could you recognize it, scientifically, and identify someone? Someone, say, who was writing a novel?
Did it follow that if everyone had a particular way of speaking, everyone also ascribed slightly different, personal meanings to the same words we all shared?
Maybe all language was translation, all words metaphors. Maybe we were always translating someone’s words into our own personal concept of what we thought he or she said. It’s amazing that we communicate at all. I pictured the brain as the universe, with neurons firing like comets and asteroids.
I turned to the translation.
Our last night in Venice,
it began. Oh, right, they were still in Venice.
Our last night in Venice, we ate cuttlefish and squid-ink pasta in a trattoria in Cannaregio. We held hands across the table like adolescents, pretending to have intelligent conversation about Italian writers: Svevo, Calvino, Buzzati. Afterward, we walked around the canals, lured by the dark sky, an invitation to discover the sinuous city. Eve spotted the new moon, a blurry sliver in the night. She turned and kissed me.
“For luck,” she said, her voice breathless, hinting of melancholy.
I felt it, too. Tomorrow, we would return to Paris, and the intrusions of the real world would not delay in finding us. Her hands wrapped around the back of my neck, and she pressed her face into my collar. I put my arms around her and rested my cheek against the top of her head. For a moment, nothing else mattered.
She looked up, tugging on my coat lapels. Her mouth found mine. I pulled her into an alcove. We kissed in the shadows, our bodies pressed against each other…
I got up for more coffee and peered outside. Right now, in late morning Paris, right this very moment, there were probably couples making out in alcoves, not to mention on balconies, park benches, street corners, sidewalks, while waiting for taxis, or sitting in the backseats of taxis. It was banal, commonplace, ordinary. Run-of-the-mill.
Quelconque
. I ran out of synonyms. I wondered where Olivier was.
We strolled along the deserted streets, prolonging the evening as we glimpsed bits of Venetian life. Beneath an open window, the sounds of a soccer game on television blared into the night; through an arched glass door, the night manager of a small hotel turned the pages of a newspaper and pushed his glasses up his nose; down a narrow alley, an
old woman stepped onto a balcony, shook out a tablecloth, and closed her shutters. We passed a foursome of elderly German tourists, who pointed at stone carvings and Madonnas, repeating “Das ist schön” in admiring voices.
Then, no one. The city retired, and the cats took over. At the sound of our footsteps, they sprang away on agile feet, feline spies gone to warn their comrades…
Clunky; a little arch. I made a note and stretched. My back was sore.
It was then that I knew I’d fallen in love with her—while walking along a minor Venetian calle, whose name I didn’t think to retain. The realization was as startling and luminous as a lighthouse beacon slicing through a sky of ink. The world as I knew it crumbled. I grasped her shoulders, filled with dread.
“What is it?” Eve asked. Her voice eased the constriction around my heart.
“Nothing,” I answered, hoping she wouldn’t see the fear in my eyes.
That night, we were nervous, careful around each other. I was clumsy. Eve was distant, aloof: even her hands were cold. But once we found our way back to each other, we were lost, swept up by a feverish ardor. Our lovemaking was heady, almost painful. A small, ragged cry escaped her lips, and I grabbed fistfuls of her hair.
I couldn’t sleep. It felt as if there was someone watching us. I imagined the cherubs on the walls were conniving bookmakers, craftily setting the odds of our survival. You will pay for this interlude later, they seemed to say. I could hear them laughing. In the morning, I woke up knowing I’d dreamed I couldn’t sleep.
Those few days we’d spent together existed in a bubble: a glass bubble, blown by a Murano craftsman; or a soap bubble, multihued,
impossible to hold, as ephemeral and specific as the scent of her perfume on my collar when she kissed the side of my neck outside the Hotel Saturnia. I would not return to the same Paris I’d left. Our story had changed. Everything was different.
I put the pages aside. I didn’t want to read about their trip back to Paris. All the signs were pointing to a bad ending. I wanted them to stay in Venice, walking along the canals, eating weird seafood, and telling each other stories. I wanted the rest of the novel to be that night, an endless night, a story that would stay put, fixed, in place, always on the edge of something, never tipping into it.
You were supposed to outgrow “happily ever after”; it was a children’s phrase. But I wanted their story to end well. Was that too much to ask?
It was time for lunch. “Inspire me!” I commanded the fridge, but the contents refused to oblige: shredded carrots,
fromage blanc,
a tube of
harissa
; below, in the freezer, frozen vegetables and salmon steaks in a sorrel sauce. On the ledge, the lovebird pigeons crooned their monotonous ballad.
The smell of food wafted up, seemingly through the floorboards: roast chicken and buttery potatoes. I wondered who the cook was. Aside from the concierge and her husband, the only people I’d ever seen in the building were a Chinese family; a stocky man who was always carting sporting gear around; and a grim, redheaded woman who wore flowing capes and always seemed late for something.
I poured sugar into the
fromage blanc
and took it back to the desk.
We landed in Paris. Eve was distracted, as agitated as a little bird. I’d never seen her like that. I was preoccupied by the intolerable idea of returning to the apartment I shared with Daphne. Moreover, I suspected she would subject me to a raffle of questions about my invented business trip to Italy.
I massaged my earlobe as I stared at the screen. Something was off. I homed in on the word “raffle” and cracked open the French-English dictionary. I’d mistranslated
“une rafale,”
which meant a squall or a hail, as in a hail of bullets. Maybe “a volley of questions”? Would Daphne “pepper him with questions”?
Eve refused to let me take her home, insisting instead on a drink at La Closerie, though it was neither on my way home nor on hers. We sat at a small, round table.
She further surprised me by ordering a kir, a drink she claimed to dislike. This was a warning sign, and I watched as she drank half of it, grimacing.
“I can’t see you for a while,” she announced. She swallowed the other half of her drink. I could see the thin, ringed muscles working under the white skin of her neck.
“What does that mean?” I asked, keeping my tone light.
“I should have told you before, but I didn’t want to discuss it,” she said. “It is too tiresome.” Her voice turned soft, placating, as if she were already trying to make something up to me.
“Eve—”
“Please don’t argue, I hate it when you argue,” she said, and asked the waiter to call her a taxi. This little piece of melodrama was beneath her. It was third-rate penny theater. Baffled, I waited for an explanation. She gave me a quick, almost frightened glance. How was it that she could make such an ominous declaration, then look at me as if I was her executioner?
Find a better equivalent for
“bourreau,”
I wrote in the margin. “Torturer”? It was associated with the devil, bedevilment, but perhaps too old-fashioned. “Oppressor,” maybe. If I couldn’t find a word, I’d have to use a phrase. “Tormentor”?
She pulled on her black leather gloves, struggling to fasten the button on the inside of each wrist. Her fingers slipped, missing the buttonhole once, twice, before pulling it through.
I knew her looks, her gestures. I knew the sly look that demanded I take her in my arms; I knew a one-shouldered shrug meant she was humoring me. She had a way of playing with her hair that sometimes meant melancholy, sometimes boredom. When had I started watching her so closely?
She hadn’t buttoned her gloves once in Venice. Now, in that delicate gesture, I saw guilt. I thought of the man at Longchamp. I hadn’t asked her about him. Now I knew why. This was no penny opera. No, it was a story as famous as it was common.
“Where are you meeting him?” I asked, conversationally. “Does he come to you, or do you go to him?” By her look of surprise, I knew I’d guessed correctly. I pulled out my wallet. “Go to your other lover, wherever he is. Give him my regards. Here’s fifty francs for the taxi,” I said, tossing a bill on the table. I spoke without thinking, as if I, too, were acting out a role I hadn’t known had been written for me.
“I don’t—” she started, then stopped. We exchanged a long, cold stare: we were two strangers now, taking refuge from each other, instead of in each other. She bent her head. Her eyes shone with unshed tears, but it didn’t matter. I didn’t believe them.
Ah, we were in French Movie Land. Everyone was being Very Dramatic. “It’s our Latin sensibility,” Pascal had explained once. After a Kieslowski film, Timothy had said, “All French movies are about sex, even when they’re not about sex.” I’d accused him of being reductive, but sometimes I thought he had a point.
I wrenched my attention back to the text. Why was the narrator being such a jerk? So what if she had another lover? Dude, it’s not like you weren’t still sleeping with Daphne! The notion of fidelity among people who were having affairs eluded me. If the narrator was still sleep
ing with the girlfriend, surely Eve had the right to sleep with someone else. Or were there ground rules I didn’t know about?