Trotting about at my rhythm, I come to my point: the Prote of Scattered Figments was nothing, I dare say, but a clumsy prototype of the brilliant French writer that appears here. Moreover, this ruined novel should have been retranslated before even being printed by the pitiful Éditions du Marais: 238 copies sold in ten years (including those sent to the media) …The rest of the books were pulped, so much so that the book is a rarity today.
Where was I? Yes: despite its faults, Scattered Figments contains many keys to understanding Translator’s Revenge …Thus the obsession with the revealing detail, the glimpse of fleeting and marginal apparitions, evoked here by the first Prote (in my translation):
“Nearly all that is presented to me in the spotlight, centered in a frame, proudly positioned in the middle of a space or in the middle of the page, posing confidently beneath the light of the projectors, bores me. I don’t believe it for an instant, I am suspicious of it. It is very often impossible for me to accord the least confidence to such pretention, impossible to appreciate or even agree with these images that are offered up without suggesting the mysteries of their creation. No vacillating would be able to disturb those images, nor those texts so sure of themselves, of their prerogatives, of their blowhard progress fully exposed. I don’t care for luminosity except in radiant women, in the resplendent brilliance of their complexion, their gaze, their pearly white skin. But for the rest, no. I can immediately discern the insipid posturing, the overripe prose, the conceited ostentation, the assertiveness—at once authoritarian and ridiculous—of what quickly reveals itself as a weak cliché, a stereotype, a contemptible desire for glory.
“On the contrary, I like apparitions that are ephemeral, unexpected, risky. For example, the Nabokovian nymphs on roller skates, weaving at high speed from shadow to light and from light to shadow, defying gaze and desire, moving through the shaded landscape as though on a chessboard where a piece crazier than a madman, more menacing than a rider, zigzags from one square to another, pushed on only by the desire to escape a scrutinizing view or long-lasting examination thanks to a sharp and fast game of hide and seek, rendering prolonged observation impossible: the black square of the trunk of a tree, the white square of a puddle of light, then nothing, then there they are again altogether in the shadows, a violet form drawing the eye before disappearing again. I like these will-o’-the-wisps, these constantly changing images, imprecise, intangible, intermittently occupying the periphery of the field of vision, creating a fluttering of the senses, of conscience and desire, black white, then nothing, black white, a turmoil that does not grow but remains elusive, jagged, like the jerky flashing of these scrambling images, wet, striped with meteorites, that provoked the fascinated stupefaction of the first moviegoers.
“Happily renouncing any kind of global expanse, I like the fragment, the remedy to continuity, the ruin of the monument, the part that replaces the whole, that suggests without pretention, level with the ground, among the couch grass, the creeping insects, the debris, the scum and the reptiles, right next to the sole of the foot that serves as the lower margin and the forgotten root of my flights of fancy.”
Thus, when the first Prote, the one in Scattered Figments, recalls a woman, it’s the pink and translucent flesh of a perfectly curled ear that comes back to his memory; recalling another person, the shimmering reflections of a precious stone splashed with light bathed in a milky bosom; or else the muffled tonality of a murmur, the seed of a voice soaring in a perfect void, the fold of an elbow, a dimple hollowing a cheek, the texture of skin, a fine fuzz in the hollow of a lower back, the clamor of love. In New York, where he goes sometimes, it’s the subway turnstile, a gigantic sign flashing on Times Square, a rancid odor that grabs hold of him in the street, a brief jostling at the entrance to a movie theater, the strap of a burgundy bra glimpsed on the round shoulder of an elegant woman who, like him, is going to see Buñuel’s Diary of a Chambermaid, the big snail that crawls on the already-cold thigh of the little girl lying in the forest, the boots that the fetishist makes the maid wear at night.
Or else, still in Manhattan, the humming mosquito that keeps him from sleeping all night, caracoling nonchalantly through the overheated bedroom, with a perverse and exasperating grace avoiding the loud smacks dealt to the already-slick cheek and the bolsters thrown against the immaculate walls, a mosquito that in the early morning ends up flattened against a pile of blank sheets of paper, under the substantial weight of Joyce’s Ulysses, a paper tome that he uses for the first time as a fly swatter. Asterisks and perils, he thinks foolishly, both drowsy and on edge from insomnia. Then, that blank page stained only by the violet flyspeck of the flattened insect, as if the tiny cadaver constituted a mysterious footnote, the beginning of a work of fiction, that darkly stained page gnaws at him and keeps him from falling asleep: even dead, the mosquito continues to disturb him. Seized by a sudden idea, Prote envisages writing a novel entirely composed of footnotes. His fondness for the fragment encourages the idea. He gets up from his bed and sits in front of his computer. A star stamped nearly in the middle of the screen, then a few blank lines, then a series of dashes. After a page break, another star and he begins:
“I reside here below this thin black bar,” he writes before lighting a Lucky Strike. “This is my place, my den.” That’s luck for you … But haven’t I already read these words? (Twirling Nymphets)
*
* Three weeks before Easter, Abel Prote and David Grey decide to exchange their apartments for two weeks. It’s an entente cordiale, at least in appearance. After the storm, a lull rife with suspicion and ulterior motives. In Manhattan, Prote will live temporarily in the two-room apartment in SoHo where Grey normally lives: a light-filled living room with white walls, a large bedroom stripped of anything superfluous, where Grey does his translation work looking out onto a calm interior courtyard. As for David, he will reside during that time in Abel Prote’s Parisian apartment, a vast and somber residence situated on the ground floor of a former eighteenth-century mansion, in the middle of the Latin Quarter. Before leaving for New York, Prote gives him a tour of the place in order to supply Grey with all the indispensable practical instructions for his Parisian stay. Despite the blue spring sky, the lamps need to be turned on in the middle of the day. In the office and the living room-dining room, high windows with small panes look out onto a courtyard with uneven cobblestones where two large hundred-year-old chestnut trees hang over the multicolored flowers of the few flowerbeds carefully maintained by the building concierge.
In the middle of the bathrooms is a deep bathtub of enameled steel, standing on four clawed feet, each one clasping a shiny brass ball; the bulbous faucets provide a parsimonious stream that leaves traces of concentric rust at the bottom of the basin. Throughout the apartment, the paint, discolored and flaking in places, has clearly not been redone in many years. There are drab tapestries—depicting Diana’s bath, a hunting scene, the passing of a comet above a bucolic landscape where rural peasants seated on the threshold of their cottages raise their astonished eyes toward the black sky streaked with a thin pale stripe—all these images darkened with time suck even more light out of the rooms and accentuate the feeling of a permanent dusk. A great heavy armoire of dark wood, half embedded in the wall of the corridor, almost blocks the passageway entirely; its two doors don’t close properly. The apartment has belonged to the Prote family since the Second Empire. An only child, Abel inherited it after the death of his father, the publisher Maurice-Edgar Prote, killed in a plane accident at the end of the 50s, on his way back from New York, where he had gone to see publisher or writer friends and had met a few newcomers to the American literary scene. September 6, 1959, issue 4608 of the newspaper Le Figaro announced the catastrophe on the first page, next to a column consecrated to “the latest