To know the ice, then—tabula rasa, the unwritten—is to know silence, complete and absolute. Says Scott: “We will make unto ourselves a truly seductive home, within the walls of which peace, quiet, and comfort reign supreme. The word ‘life’ is struck out and ‘window’ written in.” Perhaps we might call it eternal death. Yet it is to be empty of desire in perfect repose, the profane spectacle of eternal bliss and the machinations of extinction abandoned.
NOTE. Appropriated text in section IV from The Mysterious Stranger, by Mark Twain, and Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley.
Ravished
Chris Tysh
NOTE. Ravished is the closing section of a three-book project, entitled Hotel des Archives, consisting of verse recastings from the French novels of Beckett, Genet, and Duras. It is a deterritorialized type of literary translation I’ve been calling “transcreation.” Taking the French prose of Le ravissement de Lol V. Stein, Marguerite Duras’s 1964 novel about female voyeurism, as a point of departure, I operate a double shift: one of language and genre. Consonant with postmodernism’s practice of appropriation and détournement, this tactical move away from ground and origin directs me to writing as a site, passage, or arcade, where the lyric opens up to the endless traffic of signs. Ultimately, transcreation signals to both the first text and its afterlife, the graft that lives on under a new set of linguistic and formal conditions. This regeneration is a participatory, dialogic communication beyond continents, languages, and temporalities. Duras’s admittedly always-already poetic narrative is carried into prosody as a mode of expression, that, without entirely losing the novel’s diegetic arc, travels along its border ever so nimbly, and yet always retains the libidinal shadow that haunts her lines.
V. AS IF STITCHING A SHEET
As soon as she sees him
come out of the theater
Lol recognizes the man
in the dark valley of her mind
something incendiary no doubt
rapacious leaps out from the eye
the way he looks at women
wanting more with each gaze
enough to recall
the one she’d known
before the ball?
Maybe she’s wrong
What heat and fatigue!
She’d gladly slide
this heavy brooding
right here in the street
I see the following:
The man has a few
minutes to kill
before his rendezvous
scanning the boulevard
a vague hope Lol finds
divine
of meeting yet another girl
than the one she spied
in the garden
in tune with his step
she tails him at a distance
intent on placing her feet
in the same black prints
as if stitching a sheet
with big hasty needles
She must be wearing
those flat ballet shoes
I imagine or invent
a gray coat maybe a hat
that can be taken off
any minute to pass
out of sight indiscernible
like a blade under the tongue
Roving eyes he ferrets
the teeming square
mourning every woman
in advance of the one
who doesn’t exist yet
for whom he could
at the last minute ditch
the very lover they both await
Given the black and vaporous
mass of hair that
small triangular face and
immense eyes outlined
by the ineffable guilt
of this adulterous body
given unlimited funds
of soft round hips
as she steps down from a bus
against the crowd
golden combs to the side
of a dark voilette
he will be the only one to free
in a single gesture that goes
snap around the shoulders
inside a minuscule cry
They are together—trains winds
heartbeats a summer solstice
come to as if pushed
by the same high tide
on the surface of an inlet
sensation of thirst misread again
Lol will have easily guessed
the name that trails there
spell or apparition
had known it for weeks now
the round vowel sounds
dance on pursed lips:
Tatiana Karl’s migratory
beauty approaches the Forest
Hotel past waving alder trees
and a large naked field of rye
Sheets of ice one could say
where she’d gone in her youth
with Richardson forgotten
about crystal cup
she spins under her footsteps
No use to shadow them too close
since she knows where
they’re headed
How she lowers herself flat
out barely visible dark stain
In milky-green shadow
a few feet from the light
that just went up
on the third floor
At this distance she can’t hear them
and only catches a glimpse
if one of them crosses the room
up and down a bluish shape
holding a cigarette
elbows on the sill
smooth as a stone
Tatiana reappears in the frame
Night has come mixed with lies
about a greenhouse on the edge
of town accounting for Lola’s
return at such a late hour
Husband and children pity
her numb hands—can’t help
believing her tall tale
almost lost the thread
VII. TOSSED FROM SELF TO OTHER
What happens next
at the Bedford house
is hard to explain even less
form a contiguous shape
that curves around the guests
wavy and restive
balls on a pool table
about to break
It’s a question of who sees
whom outside the fan
of windows skirting the grounds
The women are poised
by French doors voices
loop together like an étude à quatre mains
In truth, it’s the husband’s violin
we hear bursting from the upper floors
Jean has a concert tomorrow
Lol explains stroking Tatiana’s hair
Something strange a sudden proximity
of opposites begins adrift
an arc that cuts flower beds
tears apart what’s left of truth
oh sweet venom
“Not sure I can visit as often
I have lovers, you know”
Tatiana’s pink mouth pouts
velvety phonemes
In this blind man’s bluff
it is Lola Stein who is “it”—we think—
and maybes
infinitely translatable
language temporal and deictic
as “here” and “there”
When I look up again
from behind the bay window
Lol’s eyes seek mine
belying a certain gaze theory
the consoling fiction men wear
like an armband
Here I am again stepping
&n
bsp; into a bayou deep mossy folds
where love changes hands and color,
over black and blue skies
On the periphery of her lie
I shall howl and be quartered
in the wide sense of the word
she utters to prove she’s back among us:
“I’ve met someone recently”
Having just smelt a burning house
Tatiana feels like shouting, “Watch out, Lola”
instead she turns toward Jacques Hold
“Shall we go?” He says, “No,”
like a convalescent stretching his long legs
IX. THE LONG SPOON OF FEAR
That Lol is not yet “cured”
shows up in the way guests
hang on her words
when she laughs
too much or stops
midsentence
They pass the long spoon
of fear ever so polite
not to spill a single drop
of the old belief
that women rarely come back
intact from such passion
All want to know more
about this act of translation
where one language
picks up someone
staggering
in an empty street
only to precipitate her further
into a gorge of substitutes
in the other—faint thumbprint
of alarm about her temples
Now radiant amid the seated
company she draws
a pattern on the tablecloth
as if plants and meaning
shared a common plot
I look down at my shoes
any minute now the ship
will break into pieces
and I’ll be swallowed
by the whale of a lie
But the moment passes
and Lol’s husband drops
the stylus on a record
that sounds like rustling
on dry leaves
I whirl Lola away
in a zigzag dance
toward the bay windows
“You went to the shore”
I say like a detective
coaxing a confession
Almost pitching
against my shoulders
—a cargo I’ve stolen before—
we’ll go together, she says
tomorrow very early
meet me at the train station
Like a border guard
Tatiana takes up her post
but the noise of the phonograph
blurs our words—a fence
she squeezes through
on the edge of tears
She begins to understand
an intimation of things past
that a sudden explosion
has altered the grammar
that is to say binding agreement
between I and me she and her
When Pierre Beugner appears
at her side I know for a fact
that should Tatiana cry even once
I’d be out of a job on the spot
Superb in her new dress of pain
she almost faints at the idea
as if death were a sheet
come to cover our nakedness
I invite Tatiana Karl to dance
“What does Lol mean when she claims
to have found happiness?”
Her hair cascades so close
to my lips I should start
running
Instead like every rake
I simply say, “Je t’aime.”
On Translation’s Inadequacies
A Personal Essay in Two Languages
with Interpretive Translation
Minna Proctor
PIO
—Cosa fa un pulcino di 40 kg?
—Non so. Cosa fa un pulcino di 40 kg?
—Fa PIO PIO PIO.
Anche se gli uccellini parlano la lingua di fede, non vuol dire che è una lingua semplice. L’uomo Pio che conobbi, non lo era. Pio non fu pio. Tutt’altro. Noi ragazze lo chiamammo Il Lupo. Cose così:
—Com’è andato con Il Lupo ’sto weekend?
—Bene. Andato veloce senza freni.
Freni … Non frenare. Parlavo cosi perché ero principiante e Pio me l’aveva insegnato. Ero giovane, semplice, piena di fede nel domani. Una gallina, piccola, tenera, preda di notte agli avanzi del lupo.
—What does an eighty-pound chickadee say?
—TWEET. TWEET. TWEET.
Birds speak systematically. The bigger the bird, the louder the voice. The louder your voice, the more love you find. The more love you find, the more love you give. Whence love whence faith. With faith, you leap. With faith, little bird, you fly.
Birds, I learned as a young woman, speak differently in Italian. As do dogs. Dogs say “bau bau.” Roosters say “circhirichu.” And birds, chicks to be precise, say “pio” to mean “chirp” or “tweet.” Pio also means pious. And Pio is a proper name—as in Padre Pio, the beloved saint who came from Campania, a region in southern Italy. I knew a man from Naples named Pio—not a saint. Not even a little. We called him The Wolf. Wolves ululano. Pio was a wolf—all Drakkar Noir and a fussily groomed five o’clock shadow.
Pio and I both worked for a small company that ran LCD subtitles at film festivals and one weekend ended up together alone in a hotel in Pescara, a battered cotton-candy beach city on the eastern coast of Italy. My Italian was crummy. Although I’d lived in Italy for almost two years, I was only just beginning to have the courage to say things. I was eighteen, courage was capricious and often more reckless than it was impressive. For some reason that wasn’t clear to me in the moment but became so later, Pio spent a great deal of our first meal together that weekend trying to teach me the meaning and pronunciation of the word “frenare”—to brake, like the squealing brakes of a car. It is astonishing how long perfectly bright people can discuss the meaning of words with beginning speakers and have it pass as actual conversation. Really, you don’t need small-talk skills if you’re an American abroad. Especially if you’re pretty, blonde, innocent, so young you don’t know the difference between reckless and courageous. Between faith and falling. Between braking and breaking.
BETWEEN TRANSLATION
Se c’è fosse solo un modo unico dire una cosa, non ci sarebbe bisogno degli scrittori, ovvero il bisogno ci sarebbe già stato, compiuto, tempo fa nella C’era una volta. Detto. Fatto. Non c’è da dire niente di più. Finché le cose non si cambino da se, senza l’intervento linguistico.
Invece siamo noi tutti esperti dei varianti, noi traduttori delle esperienze della vita e dalle ombre, di quello che è e quello che viene detto su quello stato. Sia meglio. Sia diverso. Io lo capisco così. Tu lo capisci cosà. E così vanno i verbi. Senza di che ci troviamo in compagnia di uno scrittore di discreto fama in sua casa gentile in un elegante quartiere della città, noi due, volte intense, insieme seduti davanti ad una scrivania d’autore molto ben curata, le pagine scolte dappertutto con degli appunti nelle margini in due anche tre lingue fallite. Chiedo. Ascolto. Che angoscia per lo scrittore, che fatica l’essere preciso ed evocativo. Lunga pausa e lo scrittore e la moglie ballano una bellissima danza stile Portoghese. Il consumato non ha traduzione. E se non questo … Che angoscia l’essere imprigionato dall’idea che ci sia solamente un verbo. Ed è verbo suo. E se ho capito bene, vorrei sapere che cose succeda quando muore?
My mother and I argued at length about the translation of the word alma, which appeared in a line of poetry she was setting to music. She set poetry to music al
l the time, but it was often instrumental and so she didn’t always use the poetry itself in the final piece. The words themselves were inspiration and incidental. But she always included the poetry in her program notes and often consulted me about the Italian translations. We disagreed about alma, which has several meanings in Italian but in English it’s just a proper name that seems derived from alms. In the end we agreed that all translations were inadequate but settled on the English word sigh, because that’s what the music it had inspired sounded like.
I worked once with a famous author on a translation of his short stories. People kept asking me if he was an asshole, because that was his reputation locally. I found him instead to be charming, respectful, dedicated to his art and his beautiful wife. We labored over his lush, baroque stories, stacked with literary references that spanned periods and languages, complicated by his impatient, roguish, and ambitious mind. We spent many ten-hour days comparing texts and choices, confirming variations and testing the implications of every English decision I made. We’d break for strong sweet black coffee and one day instead of coffee he and his wife danced. They twirled gorgeously and easily around the living room—as if the word intricacy had never been invented. Piteous Fado on the record player turned up to a deafening volume. All translations are inadequate and just before the book was sent to press he fired me.
I stopped translating. And more recently he died. There is no trace of the stories I wrote from his stories. My version is gone and so there is one less reading in the world of his immutable words.
ALMA CHE FAI?
Da una lingua ad un’altra cambia il cervello, dai ritmi, sensi, colorature. Questo è il perché alma può significare anima spirito nutrice sospiro in Italiano ed in Inglese no. Alma era una parola che discutevo molto con mia mamma prima che morì. “Spirito” dissi. “Sospiro” disse. Ma in verità lei non doveva mai scegliere perché lei si esprimeva in lingua musicale. Spesso componeva musica ad una poesia italiana senza neanche usare le parole della poesia nella musica. La parola ispirava la musica. Un passo oltre traduzione andava la mamma, un passo che esprima tutti i valori di una parola. Eppure io, andando un passo oltre in un’altra direzione faccio conto ora che parlare italiano, scrivere italiano, pensare italiano, è quello che facevo da ragazza. Ed ora non la sono più. Se traduco da italiano attraverso non solamente la lingua ma anche un tempo. Se parlo italiano mi esprimo nella voce di una ragazza, con pensieri, spiriti, sospiri da ragazza. Giovane io sono in italiano. Sciocca pure. E beh. Per lo meno sto qui, a visitare un po’ con la mamma.