“We think Kutya might have had some Hungarian blood. He had a complicated heritage—part German shepherd, part Labrador retriever, and part bass baritone.”
“Your dog could sing? Did he also speak? We had a cat once who could speak.”
Silence.
“What—,” I ventured, and cleared my throat. “What did your cat say?”
The Hungarian professor stared at me. “ ‘I’m hungry,’ ” she sang out.
The one person at the table who had remained completely silent during these exchanges was the English translator: a lithe, handsome man—a former dancer, I later learned—with high cheekbones, narrow eyes, and a faintly contemptuous expression. He spoke British English, with a hint of a foreign accent.
His translation was itself an enigma: there were passages of such brilliance that you would stare from the original to the English and wonder how anyone had arrived at anything so unlikely and yet dead-on, but there were also strange discrepancies. For example, at the end of “My First Fee,” Babel writes, “I will not die before I wrest from the hands of love one more—and this will be the last—gold coin”; the translation reads: “I will not die until I snatch one more gold ruble (and definitely not the last one!) from love’s hands.” In “Guy de Maupassant,” Babel writes: “Night bolstered my hungry youth with a bottle of ’83 Muscatel.” The translation says, “Night obstructed my youth with a bottle of Muscatel ’83.” The book was full of such odd changes. Babel says “at nine o’clock”; the translation says “shortly after eight.” Babel says “at midnight”; the translation says “after eleven.” Freidin didn’t like the way “giving the fig” was rendered as “thumbing one’s nose,” or the passage in which the homeless poet during the Petrograd famine has “Siberian salmon caviar and a pound of bread in [his] pocket”: on the grounds that “homeless people do not carry caviar in their pockets,” Freidin considered the correct translation to be “salmon roe.”
Because of these and other disagreements, we all ended up writing our own translations, with a note that “many translations were used in the preparation of this exhibit, including . . .”
Everything had seemed fine until the end of the dinner, when the handsome translator suddenly turned to Freidin.
“You know,” he said, “I went to your exhibit yesterday, and I noticed something strange. Perhaps you can explain it to me.” He had noticed his own book in a glass case, open to Babel’s story “Odessa”—next to a caption quoting “Odessa,” in a different translation.
“Copyediting,” Freidin said promptly. “Hoover ran all our text through copyediting. You would not believe the changes they made.” He told the story of the copy editor who had translated all the italicized Yiddish in such a way that Luftmensch (an impractical visionary) came out as “pilot”; shamas (the beadle of a synagogue) turned, via “shamus,” into “private detective.”
The translator looked completely unamused. “So you’re saying that the Hoover copy editors changed my translation?”
“Well, I’m saying that these texts went through many different hands.”
“But what am I supposed to think, as a translator? My book is put on display next to something I didn’t write. Is it possible to take some sort of legal action?”
Freidin paused. “Michael,” he said, “we all like your translation, and we are grateful to you. I want us to be friends. Let’s not talk about legal action. It doesn’t even make sense. We didn’t charge admission for the exhibit.”
“That isn’t the point. The point is that there in the display case I see my book, and next to it I see a typed quotation with mistakes. And you’re telling me nobody can be held accountable because you didn’t charge admission?”
“Michael. I want us to be friends. Now let’s be honest. Were there mistakes in the exhibit? Yes! There are mistakes everywhere. There are mistakes in the Complete Works, if it comes to that.”
The translator, who had excellent posture, sat up even straighter. “What mistake? Do you mean in the notes? That was corrected in the paperback.”
“No, I’m not talking about the notes.”
“Well, frankly, I don’t know what you are talking about.”
“Michael, I want us to be friends. The Complete Works is very, very good. We all like it very much. But in translating Babel—in translating anyone—mistakes are unavoidable. I have found mistakes. Elif has found mistakes.” The translator briefly turned his hooded eyes in my direction. “But I want us to be friends.”
“Do you see what I’m up against?” Freidin demanded. We were standing outside the conference hall after dinner. The Chinese were about to give their presentation. A junior professor of symbolism was standing nearby, smoking.
“What happened?” the symbolist asked.
“What didn’t happen? It was a dinner from Dostoevsky, that’s all.”
“In what sense? ‘The Two Families’?”
“Well, there was that.”
“And what else?”
“Well—” Freidin broke off, glancing into the hall, where two professors and one Chinese filmmaker were crawling under a table, doing something with extension cords. “Excuse me.” As Freidin hurried into the conference room, Lidiya Babel came up the stairs trailed by several International Babel Scholars, who were perhaps hoping to learn the things that only she could tell us. “Do you know,” one of them said, “of those two Chinese, one is a Muslim?”
“Which one?”
“The short one.”
“Are there many Chinese Muslims?” Lidiya asked.
“He is not Chinese!” shouted a depressed-looking historian.
Everyone turned and looked at him.
“I don’t think he’s really Chinese,” the historian repeated.
“He does look—different,” said Lidiya.
“Maybe he is a Uighur,” Zalevsky suggested.
“Wha-a-at?”
“A Uighur, a Uighur, a Uighur.”
“When I asked the other Chinese what his religion was,” continued the first scholar, “he said to me, ‘My religion is Isaac Babel.’ ”
“Very strange,” said the historian.
Everyone turned to Lidiya Babel, as if awaiting some response. “It’s an interesting thing,” she said slowly. “I once knew a man who married a German woman, and they went to China and photographed Chinese children. Their pictures were put in a book, and published: a book of photographs of Chinese children. But the really interesting thing is that when they asked the man what kind of women he preferred, he would always say: ‘Oh, ethereal—like a butterfly.’ But when you saw the German woman—she was completely round.”
There was a long pause.
“Ah, yes,” said the symbolist finally. “ ‘The eternal disjuncture between reality and the dream.’ ”
“Completely round,” repeated Lidiya Babel. “Whereas later, she ate nothing but cucumbers and black caviar, and now she’s altogether thin. Of course, this was when black caviar in Russia sold for next to nothing.”
I felt a strange feeling, close to panic. What if that was it, the thing that only she could tell us?
Inside the conference hall, the Chinese filmmakers sat at a long table in front of a flickering screen. The screenwriter smiled and made eye contact with everyone who came in. The director stared impassively into the back corner of the room. I wondered what he was thinking about, and whether he was really a Uighur.
“I used to be a student here at Stanford,” the screenwriter began. “Right here. I used to study computer programming. I used to work all night in the computer cluster next door. Then I took a creative writing class to learn how to write stories. There, my teacher assigned Isaac Babel’s story ‘My First Goose.’ This story changed my life.”