I walk up to the window at the break of dawn and look for birds. The birds fall from the roof of a tall building and suddenly soar back up, defying the relentlessness of motion, and scatter like ash. They replace my morning readings. I have many unfinished novels: on my desk, in libraries, in my sister’s room, in my car. Last week, I was getting myself in the mood to reread Goncharov’s Oblomov or any one of Philip Roth’s works. I pick up Oblomov and start off quite well. Soon I stop, take a leafy bookmark out of a drawer, and lay it flat between pages forty-three and forty-four. That’s it. I won’t continue, I know it. I only read the first three paragraphs of one of Philip Roth’s novels and put it down. I’ve been finding myself in front of unfinished stories a lot lately. I stop and for a few minutes I look indecisively at the letters of the name of the writer or the work. It seems to me that when I look indecisively, I look sadly. The bookmark sticking out of the book resembles the tongue of a lifeless cat. I will never resume the book from where I left off and I will never return to the beginning. The book turns to self-defense. Approaching it is death. The existence of my unfinished books reminds me of my own fragmentation. How well I now understand the hero of one of my favorite childhood cartoons, Pinocchio, and his desire to turn from wood into flesh and blood, or Achilles and Jesus who probably suffered the most from malnutrition!
I’m often beginning to feel like a bitten apple on top of a cupboard that has long been forgotten and that is neither thrown away, nor eaten up. Now I can say that I’m one of those left unfinished. I’m the one who abandons a road halfway. I abandon the road, but I don’t have another. I’ve gone from being a reader to a page-turner. I pick up a book, I open to a random page, and read the gifted or weak lines: words that resemble undulating grass and words that have the coldness of copper wires sticking out of slabs of concrete. What I find is only a piece of the bigger problem. It’s a pity no one will get offended. The writers whose novels are always with me are long gone and they can’t see how I corrupt their wholeness one after another, how I finish dozens of years and hours in an instant. They are powerless in protecting the trace of the life they left behind.
I’m reading “Combray,” the first chapter of the first volume of Marcel Proust’s serial novel. During his insomnia, little Marcel’s feelings and thoughts extend like the day of a bedridden patient who suddenly dies in his sleep, unaware of the day’s continuation. In his book Portraits-Souvenirs, Cocteau recalls an event related to Proust. When they visit the writer, he suddenly breaks off the conversation and the reading, leaves the room, and doesn’t return for a long time. Cocteau goes after him and finds Proust in the bathroom gorging down noodles. Marcel was bringing his work to an end.
Days go by.
I live, remembering myself.
Every night my father read passages from his favorite authors and returned to one of them as if he had finished it. We would take breaks around the table set for tea, enjoying cornelian cherry jam and walnut cake. My father’s smile would glide from the brim of his cup to my face, and I would smile back at him in the same way and turn the seed of the cornelian cherry faster in my mouth. He would suddenly get up and run to his room, return with a book and reread his favorite passage. He has never read an entire work out loud. For him, the passage in the book that bestowed delight and amazement never ended, but the book did.. By clinging onto the passage, he made every effort to save that brief moment of happiness, and by returning to it he tried to repeat that same happiness. I don’t know, maybe my father is the one I got my incompleteness from. I, too, constantly return to my favorite passages in books, vanishing in the full images of life. I probably want to repeat myself in my father’s happiness and press myself against it, turning reality into a fairy tale. I’m neither in books nor in life. There is no “in-between” for me. Right now there are only shrieks and death throes. A novel that begins with a sentence and a novel that ends with a sentence. And in the space that stretches between the sentences everything is the same, unchanging. And since the unknown is the beginning and the end, I pick up one of my favorite books without any responsibility or shame, and read the first and last sentence out loud:
“It was in those days when I wandered about hungry in Kristiana, that strange city which no one leaves before it has set its mark upon him . . .”1
“Once out in the fjord I straightened up, wet with fever and fatigue, looked in towards the shore and said goodbye for now to the city, to Kristiania, where the windows shone so brightly in every home.”2
It’s evening. I’m drinking mulled wine at café Achajur, sip by sip moving into the red thickness. The cloves at the bottom of the glass look like sleeping fish. I don’t know if I’ll get to them. I don’t excuse myself, without reason, and continue drinking my wine. Maybe I’ll start reading a new novel tomorrow or maybe this very night I’ll take the thickest book from my library and read until dawn, just like in those days when I had quit my job, when I didn’t have a job, and didn’t want a job. I would leave the house in the morning to look for a job, and I would go to the library and return without a job, but with a new understanding of the world. I finished many half-read books in the reading room for which candy wrappers, sewing threads, apple stems, and tissues served as bookmarks. I collected them with care and brought them home, with the intention of creating a room of keepsakes of the books I had read. Now my mind is on a room of keepsakes for all my half-read books. Maybe in an hour I’ll start reading an epic and let the dawn be victorious, just like in those days when I had a job and read until the first rays of sun shone, when I worked a lot and read even more, when, in that time, I could carve a silhouette sitting by the window with eyes riveted on a page.
Whatever I’ve read I’ve read.
I’ve read to live on, remembering the reader.
Memories of the Reader: this is my new, atypical title, and I’m trying to remember all the images and sentences that were once his feelings. I think about the reader for days and don’t understand why I inhale his absence in pain, why I can’t live in part, why guilt appears with a yarn of incompleteness. Why do I suddenly feel embarrassed when I’m talking to people, and why do I eat directly in front of my library, sadly caressing the covers of my books? I don’t want to surrender. I’m trying to weld all my passages together, drop everything in the middle of the day, run home, and open up a book again:
“But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made.”3
And the book closes and nothing comes out and the squeezed juice of the peel of the little oranges sputters in the fire and the flame flares up in blue and thought loses its meaning and the tongue works without a subject and memory is merely one sentence and gesture a meeting.
The lights of lampposts pour down from the street like thick drops from a candle. The names of the books stacked around my bed change every day, but none are ever opened. I can’t sleep. Now I have to wait until dawn and dream that the incompleteness on the other side of my window will irreversibly abandon me, when birds will circle in this mysterious expanse and yield to the swift rolls of the wind while I scatter with the feathers, bequeathing my final passage to freedom.
According to Roland Barthes, when we kill an author, we give birth to ourselves as readers.4 By contrast, when we breathe life into an author, we presume that possessing information about the author is essential to our interpretation of the text we are reading. In other words, we give the author authority over our interpretation of the text, and by doing so, we kill ourselves as readers.
Unlike readers, however, who can choose to kill or breathe life into an author, translators have traditionally been expected to be mouthpieces of the author. In John Dryden’s words, a translator ought to “perfectly comprehend the genius and sense of his author, the nature of the subject, and the terms of the art or subject treated of.”5 If a translator is caught with even the slightest “error” in translation, he or she is frequently judged for it, and sometimes very harshly: “The Pilgrim’s Progress, the only book in our language which rivals Robinson Crusoe in popularity, has failed to produce any effect in Portugal. This is the translator’s fault; for never was book more cruelly mutilated.”6
With the rise of literary criticism as an academic discipline, we have come to understand that interpretation is not the work of one authority informing us of what a text means. Rather, interpretation is only one point of view through a myriad of windows that continuously change over time. Yet, translators are still expected to somehow have superior knowledge over a text: they are expected to justify their interpretation and the choices they made in their translation. And depending on who reads their translation, the criticism will be leveled with the reader’s expectations. Does the reader expect the translation to be accurate and read fluently? What if the original didn’t read fluently? What if accuracy is a subjective interpretation?
If we agree that it is impossible for a translator to be a mouthpiece of the author, then we must also agree that translation is nothing more than one possible interpretation of a text and that a translator should have the liberty of “killing an author.” In my experience, however, breathing at least some life into an author has been a useful tool. Meeting with the author I was translating, Aram Pachyan, helped shape my interpretation of his texts. Researching material on a dead author like Aksel Bakunts helped me get a more nuanced grip on his stories.
Despite its advantages, it is nonetheless fair to be critical of the notion of “breathing life into an author.” One might, for instance, question the level of interference of an author. How much authority should an author be given over the translation of their work? Should an author be allowed to interfere unsolicited? Should a translator always have access to an author or material about the author? And is there a measurable difference in a translation between those translators who “breathed life into an author” and those who “killed an author”?
Answers to these questions may radically differ between text and translator. My best response, as a translator, is to indiscriminately take in all the tools available, but only selectively choose those that are the most useful for any particular text.
Nairi Hakhverdi
Notes
- From Knut Hamsun, Hunger, translated by Sverre Lyngstad, Canongate Books, Digital Edition, 2008. ⮭
- Ibid. ⮭
- Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 1964. ⮭
- Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, gen. ed. Vincent B. Leitch, W.W. Norton & Company, 2001. 1470. ⮭
- John Dryden, “On Translation,” Theories of Translations, eds. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet, University of Chicago Press, 1992. 31. ⮭
- Article III, “Extractos em Portuguez e em Inglez; com as Palavras Portuguezas propriamente accentuadas, para facilitar o Estudo d’aquella Lingoa,” The Quarterly Review (Volume 1, May 1809), 249. ⮭