There, above, in the open air, above the bar, that airtight, insurmountable lid, I am certainly omnipresent, but in a way that even I don’t really understand, in a bizarre form, ectoplasmic and constrained. I maneuver around incognito, disembodied, an obedient and faithful phantom like a shadow fastened to a body, since the beginning of time existing in the mold of the other, of my noisy neighbor who struts in the spotlight, that tall beanpole you came to visit, but who has suddenly disappeared without leaving a forwarding address.
This is not a life; it’s barely existing. My notes? Apparitions as fleeting as those of a ferret or a mole, of a shooting star or a green flash: the servile explications of the exegete fear-stricken by faith. (Translator’s Night)
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* Mon père, ce géant au regard si doux. In French in the original English text, as are all the passages in italics followed by an asterisk.
Each time I appear it’s after this little typographical star, the humble asterisk. Here I write like the tail of a black comet, zooming from left to right in the white margin of the page. But I’m tied down, I’m a comet not only relegated to the negative space, but also on a leash, a pet star: far from roaming as I would like through the firmament and doing as I please, I am steered, radio-controlled by the upper asterisk that summons the note, that hails me like a master calls its dog and orders: “Fetch.” Stick in my mouth, gaze full of gratitude and tail wagging to show the measure of my admiration, I present myself before my superior and exist only in relation with him, in relation to him. Held up to his measuring stick, I am but a millimeter tall. Nevertheless, on both sides of the black bar exists a curious symmetry: the two asterisks are the same size, as if the star in the firmament were reflected in the sea of my text. And then, dear reader, all you have to do is pivot the book you’re currently holding in your hands 180º and everything flips: now it’s me who’s up in the sky, level with the horizon and the clouds and the layers of pollution looming on top; my pretty star dominates that of the other, flyspeck floating in an insipid bowl of milk.
Enough.
This French quotation in the text is erroneous. June 18, 1850, Victor Hugo actually writes in La Légende des siecles (Après la bataille): “Mon père, ce héros au sourire si doux.” The two errors—géant instead of héros, regard instead of sourire—can potentially be explained by faulty memory.
Regardless, according to the testimonies of his close friends, the author’s father was, in reality, an authoritarian, sometimes brutal, man, subject to sudden and spectacular fits of rage. From the first pages of his novel the author evokes the paternal figure: this is surely not insignificant.
Have I gone too far? Am I being too much of a chatterbox? (Tapir’s Nose)
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* This time it’s Racine who is maimed. Instead of expressing his resentment toward Rome, he writes (in French in the American text): “L’homme, unique objet de mon ressentiment.” I wonder whether this blunder, this lapse that takes us from romanthrophy to misanthropy, from Rome to homme and from pillar to post, whether this violent translation* doesn’t make us reflect on the act of translation itself, this Tarzan’s jump from above into the unfathomable abyss of a dense jungle. (Tarzan’s Nosedive)
* In English in my French text.
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* The crowbar that here allows the stranger dressed in a large black cape to force his way, by night, into the restored Normandy cottage owned by the French writer Abel Prote, to break into, collect, or erase the data on his computer, this crowbar slipped under Prote’s white door, is running through my mind. This crowbar titillates my birdbrain. For all you need is a solid pull on the handle of this tool so that the lever raises itself at the same time, and that’s all there is to it, the door vanished, the path clear.
Thus, it would perhaps suffice for me to accumulate enough of these lines here at the bottom of the page for the white door, the thin black bar signifying the bottom, to violently swing off its hinges. My inferior remarks, my commentaries and other digressions would act, then, as my crowbar. What would I see next, after the fall of the white panel? What unknown space would we discover together? Is the asterisk the peephole permitting me to scrutinize what lies beyond, the secret passage behind the mirror?
But, until then, a doormat I remain. (Notion’s End)
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* Antique père océan: this phrase refers to Proteus in the Odyssey. He’s the god of the sea who watches over the grazing of herds of seals and other marine animals that belong to Poseidon. Gifted with the power of metamorphosis, Proteus can become not only an animal, but also an element, such as water or fire, to escape from inquiring minds. He lives on the island of Pharos, not far from the Nile Delta.
In the book that I’m translating, Translator’s Revenge (in French it should be, if the publisher agrees, Vengeance du Traducteur, but the publishers of course consult the managing editors as well as the sales representatives who in their turn consult the booksellers who then …Anyway, the jury is still out on the French title, it could just as easily become Panique à New York or La Séductrice de Saint-Germain-des-Prés, or worse). Where was I? Oh yes, Proteus. This Greek god often reappears in the text under various forms as the tutelary divinity of the young American translator David Grey. (Translator’s Rote)
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* Hide-behind. In French: le Se-cache-derrière. The author, whom I questioned about this neologism, immediately responded to me by email that he discovered this bizarre term in the The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero, in the chapter entitled “Fauna of the United States.” I quote: “The Hide-behind is always hiding behind something. Whichever way a man turns, it’s always behind him, which is why nobody has ever satisfactorily described one, though it has killed and eaten many a lumberjack.”
That the author is comparing his hero David Grey, American translator of French novels,† to a Hide-behind, a furtive and voracious assassin, serves as proof of the nebulousness of his prose. I, for example, have never killed or devoured even one lumberjack, no character or any author of the numerous American novels that I’ve translated into French. One could nevertheless make the claim that I have masticated their texts, but discreetly, on the sly: not only the delicious flesh, the choice and daring cuts, the tasty tendons and crunchy passages, but also the bones, the cartilage, the tough nerves, the descriptive tunnels, the clogged arteries, the indigestible joints, the nails, the repugnant hairs, the contrived dialogues, the misplaced voices, the twisted prose … All of that cannibalized, digested, absorbed, then vomited back up in my own language. Sometimes you have to have good teeth and a solid stomach.
This Hide-behind, invisible because he is always hidden behind the back of another, makes me think of the Courbet painting La Source. In a pastoral setting, we see, in fact we devour with our eyes, a young nude woman with sumptuous curves, depicted from behind. Nonchalantly resting on a large rock, she is absorbed in the contemplation of a little spring into which she has plunged her hand. Standing before this painting and behind that engrossing beauty in which I, without her knowing, admire her large hips, her fine waist, her shapely back, her languid