Revenge of the Translator. Brice Matthieussent

not caught, but carnivorous.

      Little by little, I climb. (Trickster’s Nook)

† There are so many passages, even entire pages, that I have redacted in my translation that I have to give a bit of explanation of the novel’s plot.

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      * The bar, the lid under which I marinate in my gravy, this lifeless slab, reminds me sometimes of the fish sleeping at the bottom of the turbotiere, hermetically sealed before being cooked, cut, and savored. Meanwhile the other man strutting on the floors above plays the charlatan, the street peddler, luring customers in with his stentorian voice and turnstile arms, gathering visitors onto whom he offloads his glass beads and multicolored strings, to swindle them and convince them on top of it all that they have taken part in a grand affair … I’m thrilled to shut him up.

      But I am no longer within the confines of my role, I overstep my duties, I forget my place, as they say. Frankly, what’s the point of losing my temper? Am I jealous? Claustrophobic? Probably a bit of both. I must bring myself back to task, curb my delirium, rediscover the lucid, the serious, rigor and sobriety, precision and concision, discreet and efficient erudition, etc., etc., etc. For I am—as we all know—a humble artisan, the man behind the scenes, the coal miner digging in the darkness of his tunnel, his dictionaries serving as his only light, his wisdom his only tool, fidelity and drudgery his only objectives, even though infidelity and laziness are the two mammary glands of the novel!

      The mole digs his underground tunnels, the other above parades and struts before his audience of admirers and flatterers.

      Enough. (Delirium’s Mainspring)

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      * Dumbwaiter, le serviteur muet. Here, once again, the author misleads his reader with a web of prejudices, all humiliating to my profession. In fact, the dumbwaiter, le serviteur muet, is a goods elevator that, in certain old New York buildings, is at the disposition of its tenants. It’s also a vertical pass-through that you sometimes find in a restaurant. In Great Britain it’s a dessert stand. Comparing a translator to a dumbwaiter, a goods elevator, a serving hatch, or a dessert stand makes my blood boil. For, in the end, without this pass-through, the author wouldn’t have any say in the matter. And if I serve him soup, it’s only this poor substitute that allows him to stay, somehow, above the bar: not the solid, rustic, homemade broth, but the sachets of freeze-dried powder whose exact composition we would rather not know.

      Or else, kind reader, my author is a poor stage actor who doesn’t know a single word of his text. And I, hidden from all gazes except his in the prompter’s hole, whisper his lines to him one by one; I read his text in a drone, I feed him beakfuls. From my lips he takes his sonorous nutrients and immediately spits them out for the delighted public who, nine times out of ten, see nothing but fire. Invisible, I brood at the bottom of my obscure opening while in the spotlight he brims with pride.

      The following comparison the author makes is even more unpleasant. He equivocates the translator David Grey with a lazy Susan, une Susan parasseuse. A lazy Susan is a rotating tray installed in the middle of the table in certain restaurants, especially Asian establishments! (Toiler’s Nausea)

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      * I notice with stupefaction that I, the humble goods elevator, the pass-through, the rotating tray, etc., have succeeded in sliding, insinuating myself into the bottom of each of the novel’s pages thus far. A bit unusual, isn’t it, a bit audacious, for the translator is ordinarily a discreet, self-effacing being who knows how to behave himself. But why shouldn’t I? In any case, what’s the point of burying my head in the sand? This novel is utter nonsense and the author a scoundrel. In my opinion, I should never have agreed to translate this book … I should delete these sentences, the publisher will not allow them. Then again, no, I’ll leave them. Like the driver stretching his legs when he finally reaches the rest stop on the highway, I feel better and better: I no longer have pins and needles in my limbs, my aches are fading, my cramps dispersing. When translating nonstop, one gets stiff, atrophies, fades. And I notice that this escapade is oxygenating my blood, that this improvised stop is doing me a great deal of good.

      Where was I? Oh yes, this novel is utter nonsense. Imagine, dear reader, that the hero of Translator’s Revenge, the young and sympathetic David Grey, a professional translator (from French to English), a native New Yorker, whom you don’t know very well yet, sometimes mistakes himself for Zorro, the masked avenger dressed all in black who always appears without warning, where no one expects him. In fact, a bit like me, I’m suddenly realizing … Sometimes, Grey also disguises himself as the enigmatic character you find on the labels of certain bottles of port: a man dressed in a long cape and a big hat that plunges his face into darkness. All of this is of course ridiculous, for as soon as a translator feels even the slightest desire for vengeance, his work suffers for it: his head is elsewhere, he becomes absentminded, or worse, dishonest. As for David Grey’s absorption of the man in black on the bottle of Sandeman port, it’s teeming with perfidious double entendres: is the translator drinking? Is he plotting against the creator of the book? Is he an assassin? A mercenary ready to sell his services to the highest bidder? A saboteur secretly slipping grains of sand into the well-oiled machinery of the novel to make it skid out of control or even flip over, bringing a full halt to the mechanism? Or else a coward, a shameful, timid man who constantly hides his face and shows only his back? And so returns the specter of the Hide-behind …

      Instead of accumulating humiliating images and insidious allusions, the author would do better to restore the profession’s coat of arms, one that should depict a chameleon. (Translator’s No)

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      * Concerning the coat of arms: “I must have a sinistral line in my coat of arms,” David Grey says to the beautiful Doris. Here he is citing William Faulkner’s Soldiers’ Pay. The sinistral line is the distinctive sign of the illegitimate branch in a coat of arms. Subtle, no? And, incidentally, the text informs us that David Grey is left-handed. (T.N.)

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      * Fragments épars. This is a reference to my author’s second novel (Scattered Figments, Janus Press, New York, 1995), in which the character Abel Prote, the French writer, appears again. I won’t say any more. Mum’s the word. Let’s remain civil. (T.N.)

      I’ll simply add that the French translation (Éditions du Marais, Paris, 1997) is horribly botched: words, sentences, even entire paragraphs forgotten or deliberately deleted, misinterpretations, mistranslations, Anglicisms, solecisms, appalling blunders, and clumsiness. One laughable detail: a confusion of the American volume measurements makes it so that, according to the vile translator whose name I won’t mention, the characters apparently guzzle liters of whiskey, while at the same time the author explicitly describes their desire for drink to be very moderate, “similar,” he clarifies, “to a piece of old blotting paper riddled with colored stains that can no longer absorb anything except the rare drop of ink.” The French translator, distracted or intoxicated—was he drinking?—took no notice of this lovely image. Thus, he proposes a nearly-empty bottle of whiskey that, as if it were a miraculous spring, continuously refills large glasses to the brim numerous times as soon as they are knocked back, as if the protagonists of Scattered Figments were unabashed drunkards downing enormous quantities of alcohol without letting on. Clearly, this novel deserves to be retranslated. I’ll have to speak to my publisher about it.

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