I walked up behind him and kissed the top of his head.
Thank you, I whispered. Thank you.
17. TRADUTTORE/TRADITORE
It was raining the next morning when I took Romei’s pages back to Cuppa Joe’s and read them again, this time as a translator.
I’d once loved translation, before I got all complicated about it. Weighing poetic elements, deciding which to highlight, which to sacrifice — because not everything can survive translation. The eleven-syllable Italian line doesn’t transfer easily to our English pentameter: you’d think it would exceed the capacity of our ten-syllable line but, being syllable rich, Italian condenses at the rate of four English feet per line. What’s a translator to do? Preserve the length of the original line by padding the translation? Sacrifice meter for concision, semantic accuracy, the original line breaks? It’s something of a lose-lose situation. Hence the age-old notion that she who translates is both translator and traitor: traduttore e traditore.
Over my computer I’ve taped a quote from Nabokov, who knew something of the chasm between languages, and strongly preferred the “literal” to the “literary”: “I want translations with copious footnotes,” he wrote, “footnotes reaching up like skyscrapers to the top of this or that page so as to leave only the gleam of one textual line between commentary and eternity. I want such footnotes and the absolutely literal sense, with no emasculation and no padding — I want such sense and such notes for all the poetry in other tongues that still languishes in ‘poetical’ versions, begrimed and beslimed by rhyme.”
Indeed!
At Joe’s, I identified two questions I’d need to think about. First, Romei’s Song of Songs fragments: had he played with the original? I had no idea. I’d have to consult some English Bible translations. Then there was the matter of Romei’s first poem. If Dante’s first poem describes a dream (in which Love feeds Dante’s heart to Beatrice), Romei’s describes a wet dream: his inkless pen, refilled by Esther, explodes onto the page in the form of a self-fulfilling prophecy (a sonnet about an inkless pen refilled, exploding). I’d have to check, but I was sure it had been fashioned out of fragments of Romei’s earlier work, recast here out of context as something new.
His “pen,” for example (his penna, or quill) was free-floating in the earlier poems, never associated with anything other than itself (penna qua penna); now it resonated: it meant pen, but also wing, the poet’s words, the uomo di penna (the man of letters), even the poet himself, as in Italian, penna can be a figure for writer. Penna, penna, penna. Dante’s birds fly with plural wings (penne), but in Romei, one might well ask: What is the sound of one penna flying — maybe the sound of Icarus spennar (defeathered) and falling?
How I wanted Benny’s opinion! I looked out of Joe’s window, hoping to see Benny on the street. Then I could “run into him,” let something slip.
Bad girl.
But I would need Benny, wouldn’t I? He could tell me about the Song! He knew everything there was to know about the Bible. His rates would be reasonable: a single vegan donut oughta do it.
It had stopped raining. I gathered my books and papers, waved goodbye to Joe, and rushed to the Den, where I emailed Benny and faxed Romei: I need a Bible consultant, Benny’s a Hebrew scholar, could I possibly show him Romei’s work?
Did I specify that I only wanted to discuss a few lines? Why split hairs?
18. REAL PEOPLE
After dinner, Andi staged a Miss America pageant for her dolls. Ahmad played Bob Barker (in the left corner, weighing in at a sturdy seven ounces, is … Julie? Julie is a corn husk doll from the Indian Plains. She likes to water-ski and … what? Make brownies! Please welcome Julie!). As judge of this solemn entertainment, I tried not to laugh as Tink and her teddies strutted their stuff down a Wheaties-box catwalk.
When my phone rang, I didn’t want to answer.
Romei didn’t say hello: He just wanted to know, did I get the first pages? What did I think? He was calling from Rome, there was a strange delay in his responses.
Why would the Great Man care about my opinion?
Time for a station identification, I whispered.
What do you mean what do I think? I asked, buying time as I slipped into Andi’s room. I only got ten pages. What happened to the rest?
I send you the first part; the rest is not finish.
Not finished? How could he know the beginning if he hadn’t written the ending? He’d hired a translator before he’d even finished the work? I didn’t believe him. He was testing me, just as I thought, prepared to cut his losses!
So what are you thinking? he asked.
As it happened, I’d scribbled my “thinking” in my Door Number Two notebook just that afternoon.
As best I can tell, I said, your object is to write a mature, postexilic love story, an inversion of Dante’s youthful, pre-exilic fantasy. Undoubtedly, you hope to define an ultimate poetic, a poetic perhaps related to love, or perhaps to eros, more broadly defined. Indeed, the tension between Dante’s narcissistic form, concerned with the solitary writing subject and the inaccessible love object, and Esther’s interest in a mutual, embodied passion, where the beloved co-authors the text, as it were, is established early and suggests a competing poetics, a dialectic which I assume will be resolved by the end of the book.
I looked up. Ahmad had poked his head into the room.
Real people don’t talk like that, he whispered, then left the room.
Silence.
I took a breath and sat down on Andi’s bed.
And the story? he asked. What are you thinking?
What do you mean?
Are you interesting in this?
Was I interested in his story? As it happened, I wasn’t. I suspected the author’s purpose to be self-serving: the world should forgive him for breaking up a marriage. Assuming the world cared — and I didn’t think it did. I certainly didn’t.
I’m reserving judgment, I said. The characters don’t seem quite real.
He made a sound like a snort. I tried to explain: Why would a lovely stranger initiate erotic play-acting in a park? Was the narrator that irresistible? By his own admission he wasn’t. Would she turn out to be something other than a projection of the narrator’s erotic fantasies?
I knew I was talking about his wife, but I couldn’t help myself: “Esther” and the narrator were characters in a work of art. It wasn’t my job to “like” them, or pretend they were real!
This is the response of a spinster, Miss Greene. You think I give one fig for poetics? You are not the reader you think you are. I call again in one week.
And he was gone.
Fuck him! I thought, and pounded Andi’s guilt quilt with my fist. Where does he get off talking to me like that!
He called me a bad reader! Me?! A bad reader!
What had I missed? I hadn’t missed anything. Had I?
No! I thought. Real people don’t talk like that! Real people have it out, they say what they mean! If he thinks I’ve missed something, he should say so!