Why I Read: The Serious Pleasure of Books (19 page)

SIX

ELSEWHERE

To be honest, I have not actually read the undulating sentences and endless paragraphs of
A la recherche du temps perdu
. What I have read are their successive English versions. It is a bit like Zeno’s paradox, this journey that approaches nearer and nearer to the thing itself without ever fully arriving. It began in my very late teens, when I first attempted C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation of
Remembrance of Things Past
in the seven-volume pastel-colored paperback edition. That time, I foundered on the closely printed pages of
Swann’s Way
. Later, in my twenties and early thirties, I made my way through the silver-and-black volumes of Terence Kilmartin’s intelligent and clarifying revision of Scott Moncrieff, which still carried the Shakespearean title. And then much later still—nearing sixty, and thus older than most of the white-haired characters who attend that ghoulish party in the novel’s final section—I once again went through all seven books, this time using D. J. Enright’s fine completion of Kilmartin’s and Scott Moncrieff’s work, now retitled
In Search of Lost Time
. Each time, I would have described what I was doing as “reading Proust,” but I am sure any French-speaker would have begged to disagree.

I may be an avid reader, but I am also an appallingly monolingual one. The English language is the golden prison I inhabit: richly and divertingly adorned, but with all the exits closed off, preventing me from making my escape to French or Russian or Italian or German. Only the Spanish door is slightly ajar, but its opening is just barely wide enough for me to peek through longingly. That is, I can read a novel in Spanish if I’m desperate, but I will get far more out of it if I read the same thing rendered in someone else’s English.

Because of this handicap, I am dependent on the work of translators; they are the kind emissaries, you might say, who bring news of the outside world to my cell. I could dispense with these do-gooders, I suppose, if I chose to read only works written originally in English, and I
did
so choose, during a brief period of callow youthfulness. But even the great outpouring of nineteenth-century English fiction can seem insufficient and tedious after a while, and if you start venturing into the twentieth century, particularly the late twentieth century, you will soon find yourself in need of foreign companionship.

So rather than resent my helpers, I have come to feel a deep affection for these selfless workers, these brilliant shadows, these people whose highest aim is to remain at the very margin of visibility. No translator wants his achievement stolen or denied, yet just as certainly, no translator wants her voice to overpower that of her source author. It’s a very careful balance. And however well the disappearing act is done, something of the translator’s own sensibility invariably enters into the work we’re given in English.

This is not to say that a Margaret Jull Costa translation of Eça de Queirós sounds like a Margaret Jull Costa translation of Javier Marías; not at all. If it did, Jull Costa would have failed in her primary aim, which is to let us hear the writer’s voice as she herself hears it in the original Portuguese or Spanish. I want to stress that word “hear.” The way Margaret Jull Costa works, I gather, is that she reads aloud every sentence of every translation she produces—the hundreds of pages of Eça de Queirós’s
The Maias
, the thousands of pages of Javier Marías’s
Your Face Tomorrow
, the novels, essays, and stories of José Saramago, Teolinda Gersão, Bernardo Atxaga, and others—to test its sound in her actual ear as well as her internal one. What she is listening for is not just the musicality of the English line, though she demands that, too; she is searching as well for an echo, a correspondence between her formulations in English and the author’s voice as it comes across in his own language. These correspondences are a matter of rhythm, of punctuation, of diction, of sentence structure, but they are also something more elusive and mysterious than that. The American writer Leonard Michaels used to say about his own short stories that when he finally got a sentence to
sound
right to his ear, he knew he had solved the problem of meaning. Margaret Jull Costa uses a similar standard when she brings forth the writing of others, and her quiet genius lies in her ability to repeatedly transform her own authorial voice into the recognizable voice of someone else.

Yet she never disappears completely. Something of her own character must remain embedded in the lines, however tenuously, for the translation to be persuasive, for it to feel like the work of an individual rather than a conglomerate or a machine. This is why a Margaret Jull Costa translation of Javier Marías will sound slightly but noticeably different from an Esther Allen translation of Javier Marías. He is clearly the same author in both cases—witty, self-aware, elaborately eloquent, fascinated by sex and violence, immersed in movies and television, drawn to Anglo-American culture, but with a saving distance that makes him seem totally unlike anything we could have produced. (That, after all, is why we go to foreign writers, why we
need
them.) Still, Allen’s Marías is not quite Jull Costa’s Marías. The difference is so subtle it’s hard to define: something to do with Allen’s expansive American ear, something to do with Jull Costa’s uncanny ability to locate Anglo-Saxon equivalents for Latinate terms. If I were pressed, I would say that Esther Allen’s Marías sounds more like a Spaniard, Margaret Jull Costa’s more like a native English speaker. Which is preferable? I suppose it depends on what kind of reader you are, or perhaps on which translation you encountered first.

Priority may be what accounts for my allegiance to Michael Hulse as the translator of W. G. Sebald. The first books I read by this postwar German writer (Sebald was born in 1944, and his works all seem to be rooted in the aftermath of the Third Reich) were
The Emigrants
and
The Rings of Saturn
. Both were translated by Hulse, in such a marvelously poetic and yet down-to-earth way that they felt almost like works of English literature. This was especially true of
The Rings of Saturn
, a book built around a walking tour of England and containing numerous references to the English author Sir Thomas Browne, a favorite of Sebald’s. The Germanness of the book’s narrator was impossible to miss, but it had been transmuted, in Hulse’s sinuous sentences, into an Anglo-German melancholic sensibility. In fact, Sebald—who lived more than half his life in England, though he continued to write in his native tongue—may be one of those writers who actually appeals to English readers more than German ones, because he offers us something we Anglophones feel we collectively lack. Whether that is moral seriousness, or endless patience, or an inbred awareness of history, or an almost planetary distance from our daily habits and assumptions, or a deeply secular sense of what you might call original sin, is impossible for me to say; it’s probably a combination of all these and other things besides. Whatever it is, it lends Sebald’s works in English the kind of estranged pertinence one finds in a book like Penelope Fitzgerald’s
The Blue Flower
or Louise Glück’s
A Village Life
: pertinent because we feel ourselves to be somehow implicated, yet with a safety net of foreignness that protects us from the author’s too-direct glance. It is as if Fitzgerald and Glück, reaching over from English toward something else, have arrived at the same contemplative midpoint that Sebald occupies when his strangely hybrid works—neither fully fictional or nonfictional, but always infused with an uncanny combination of imaginative reconstruction and displayed evidence—are brought into English from German.

At least, this was the feeling I got from those first two Hulse translations. So when I came to
Austerlitz
, translated instead by Anthea Bell, I was startled. I suspect that on some level the Bell translation is as good as the Hulse, but it was nonetheless a barrier I felt I had to overcome, a new voice added to Sebald’s old one; my “Sebald,” that is, had apparently consisted of Sebald plus Hulse. And there was again the shock of a change when I moved to Michael Hamburger’s elegant, attentive translation of Sebald’s posthumously published
After Nature
. (Sebald died suddenly at the age of fifty-seven in a car crash near his Norfolk home, and for those of us who had only recently discovered him, it was like losing a new friend.) This time, though, I realized what was happening and was able to brace myself against the unexpected. Also, in the case of
After Nature
—a book-length unrhymed poem, set out on the page in broken lines—I was alert to the way in which the transformation of genre would inevitably mean a transformation of voice. This, I subsequently reasoned, had also been true for
Austerlitz
, which is Sebald’s closest thing to a real novel, a sequential story featuring a fictional character other than the narrator. So what I took as a shift attributable to the translators might well have been just as much, or instead, a shift in Sebald’s own writing style. In any case, despite the differences I was sensing, Sebald remained essentially Sebald in all his manifestations, for great writers can never escape themselves, whether through translation or through their own development or even through death.

My most intense experience with translation, thus far, has involved a Japanese author. Like Javier Marías and W. G. Sebald, Haruki Murakami is a writer who is intimately acquainted with Anglo-American culture even as he remains outside it. (I think writers of this kind may well make the most interesting test cases for translation; at any rate, I find myself repeatedly drawn to them.) Murakami, who has translated Raymond Carver, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Paul Theroux into Japanese, is partial to the Beatles, jazz, Scotch whiskey, Marx Brothers movies, and many other products of Western culture. He often injects something akin to an American sensibility—a rebellious, non-salaryman’s sensibility—into his hapless fictional protagonists. Yet the novels are written in Japanese and set, for the most part, in Japan, so when we read them in English, we get, as with Marías and Sebald, a strange sensation of foreignness mixed with familiarity, of worlds collapsing in on each other.

The first three novels I read by Murakami—
A Wild Sheep Chase
,
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World
, and
Dance Dance Dance
—were all translated by Alfred Birnbaum. When I finished the books, I was mildly curious to know more about Murakami; I was
desperate
to know more about Birnbaum. Who was this guy who could come up with two completely different kinds of English, an old-fashioned fairy-tale diction and a sharp-edged modern idiom, to render the two intertwined plot strands of
Hard-Boiled Wonderland
? How did he manage to do that weird, youthful, but never annoyingly with-it voice in which Murakami’s narrator-protagonists spoke to themselves? How, in short, could he make a Japanese writer sound so remarkably American without losing any of his alien allure? All I could find out from the jacket notes was that Birnbaum was born in Washington, D.C., in 1957, grew up in Japan, and lived at various times in Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, and Barcelona.

Then
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
came out. This may still be Murakami’s best-known novel in America; it was his first crossover book, the one that signaled his emergence from the ghetto of Kodansha to the more exclusive precincts of Knopf. I started the first chapter as soon as the book was available, but right away I sensed that something was wrong. Turning to the front of the book, I noticed the name of a new translator: Jay Rubin. What had happened to my dear Birnbaum? I called Kodansha, Knopf, the Society of Translators—no answer. Nobody knew anything about the missing Birnbaum. He had apparently completed the transformation required of The Ideal Translator and become a figment, a ghost, an invisible man.

But then I remembered some additional evidence of his corporeality, or at least of his presence as a translator. Before publishing his novel with Knopf, Murakami had given that same publisher a collection of short stories called
The Elephant Vanishes
, and the first story in the book consisted of the opening section of
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
. I checked my copy of the book, and yes, my memory had not deceived me—that story, that beginning, had been translated by Alfred Birnbaum. So the two translators of Murakami, the two alternate realities, existed side by side.

Here, submitted as Exhibit A, are the opening sentences of the Rubin translation:

When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini’s
The Thieving Magpie
, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.

I wanted to ignore the phone, not only because the spaghetti was nearly done, but because Claudio Abbado was bringing the London Symphony to its musical climax.

Not bad, eh? Perfectly good English sentences presented by a reasonably interesting narrator. But now listen to Exhibit B:

I’m in the kitchen cooking spaghetti when the woman calls. Another moment until the spaghetti is done; there I am, whistling the prelude to Rossini’s
La Gazza Ladra
along with the FM radio. Perfect spaghetti-cooking music.

I hear the telephone ring but tell myself, Ignore it. Let the spaghetti finish cooking. It’s almost done, and besides, Claudio Abbado and the London Symphony Orchestra are coming to a crescendo.

And there he is, my Birnbaum—or rather, my voice-in-the-ear version of Murakami, my Birnbaum-inflected Japanese narrator, my unemployed cosmopolitan wastrel who loves jazzy rhythms and thinks of his life in the present tense. Even the small details (the Italian rendering of the Rossini title, the use of the term “crescendo” rather than “musical climax”) seem to me crucial to the smart but strangely innocent voice. In this translation, the logic of cause-and-effect English sentence structure has been jettisoned in favor of some other mode, and it is that mode—the intrusion of the surprising and the foreign and the unknowable into the mundane regime—which marks the world of a Haruki Murakami novel.