Revenge of the Translator. Brice Matthieussent

The character Zorro was created in 1919 by the American novelist Johnston McCulley and played in films by Douglas Fairbanks and Tyrone Power. Who … Stop! (T.N.)

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      * I’m still sneaking around under the bar, thumbing my nose, picking up my crowbar, wedging my shoe between the door and the frame. As you’ve just learned, dear reader, David Grey is having problems with Abel Prote, the French novelist whose most recent book, bizarrely titled (N.d.T.), David is translating: misunderstandings, mistakes, disparaging allusions, suspicious looks, skipped meetings, various obstacles, reciprocal irritations, etc. In short, there’s trouble brewing between the French writer and his American translator. I sincerely hope not to have the same problems with my author. His emails are courteous but vague, at times cryptic. For example, when I asked him about the meaning of the expression “Agenbite of Inwit” which appears in his text to qualify the culpability felt by the unfortunate Grey who is convinced that he’s botched his work, my author replied to me with disarming and scandalous flippancy that it’s “a quotation from Joyce.” A lot of good that does me! Am I going to reread every single work by the Irish exile, looking for these three sibylline words? Nevertheless, in “Agenbite of Inwit,” I detect something to do with bite and of course Inuit. What does the subarctic population have to do with anything? Do the Inuit bite?

      Stand aside, the door is about to slam! I pull back my shoe just in time (I still don’t have a crowbar). (Translator’s Quote)

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      * Now that I’ve made myself at home, I suddenly feel the desire to raise the bar by using the strength of my back and thighs. I’d like to lift myself up, first kneel down, then get into a vertical position, raise this wretched horizon line at the bottom of the page that confines me to the lower margin. I would like to hoist this bar by the sole force of my desire and my muscles, make it rise like the weight lifter who thrusts above his head the black bar linking the big matte metal pancakes and who, completing a clean and jerk, goofily brandishes the bar at arm’s length: his cheeks swelling under the effort, his face turning purple, his gaze lost in the distance of private contemplation. It’s with this same determination that I will push my bar without dumbbells, so heavy nevertheless, toward the sky. But not for anything in the world would I want to step across the bar, or jump over it, like the 110-meter-hurtles runner who one minute soars over the cinder track and the next jumps over the rectilinear obstacle. I’m not trying to abandon my staves to occupy a better place; I have no desire to sit on the throne in the middle of the royal page. No, I, the lone man comfortably sporting the dress of the immaculate bride, will subject him to the worst outrages, lifting my bar little by little, firmly planted in this footer, bracing myself. (Trajectory North)

       Chapter 2

       THE TRANSLATOR TRIMS THE FAT

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      * Here is the beginning of this chapter in the original American edition:

      “Abel Prote was born January 1, 1950, at the American Hospital in Paris. His family lived in a bourgeois building in the 6th arrondissement, not far from the Odéon theater. His father, Maurice-Edgar Prote, wealthy Parisian publisher and audacious purveyor of American literature, decided to name him Abel because of the child’s rather unusual birth date, at the exact caesura of the century. As for the surname, Prote, it comes from distant ancestors on the father’s side, who were foremen in the first printer’s shops: ‘prote,’ the French word for ‘master printer,’ comes from the Greek prōtos, ‘first.’

      An old American lady, who for some obscure reason begged me not to divulge her name, happened to show me in New York the diary she had kept in the past, during her Parisian years. So uneventful had those years been—apparently—that the collecting of daily details—which is always a poor method of self-preservation—barely surpassed a short description of the day’s weather. Luck being what it is when left alone, here I was offered something which I might never have hunted down had it been a chosen quarry. Therefore I am able to state that the afternoon of Abel Prote’s birth was a sinister windy one, with two degrees (Celsius) above zero … this is all, however, that the good lady found worth setting down. On second thought I don’t see why I should yield to her desire for anonymity. That she will ever read this book seems wildly improbable. Her name was and is Jane Jennifer Janireff: baroque babble which it would have been a pity to withhold!”

      It’s without remorse that I delete these first paragraphs of Chapter 2, even if I supply them here to be read as a note. Paradox? Contradiction? I don’t care. Indeed, how surprised I was, and what indignation I felt, to discover, in a rather large coincidence—“that’s luck for you”—that it is almost word for word the first page of Vladimir Nabokov’s first novel written in English, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight! Shame on my author … Who does he think he’s fooling with such blatant impostures? His only originality lies in replacing Nabokov’s splendid “Olga Olegovna Orlova—an egg-like alliteration” with “Jane Jennifer Janireff: baroque babble.” Nice idea, but it doesn’t at all justify keeping this shameful plagiarism in my French translation. (Trimmer’s Nota Bene)

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      * The esteemed reader will have noticed that since the beginning of this chapter no adjective has encumbered my author’s ungainly prose. It’s not his own decision, but a unilateral and systematic redaction on my part. A sort of edict decreed by me alone. I know that similar suppressions are hardly defendable from the deontological (what a dreadful word!) point of view but, dear reader, you must admit that after this robust pruning, his prose has gained in elegance and fluidity. No more of that unbearable ponderousness, those seemingly endless agglutinations of adjectives! Such levity! His prose has become almost good, the bastard. And since he barely speaks French, he won’t suspect a thing. I have complete freedom of action, as long as the Parisian publisher for whom I’m translating Translator’s Revenge isn’t in the habit of going through their texts with a fine-tooth comb. And if I were now to revoke the adverbs? (Typist’s Nuisance)

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      * It’s done: no more adjectives and not a single adverb. The result of these surgical strikes? A gain that is genuinely unheard of, truly serendipitous, undeniably stupefying, frankly stupendous, irrefutably spectacular—with this wearisome accumulation I make up for it and prove the efficacy of my ablations. Now, such concision, such levity! I retranscribe here for your curiosity the list of adverbs and adjectives disappeared since the beginning of the second chapter in which we find Abel Prote, “the virile man with green eyes,” who was born in the middle of the century, working alongside Doris, his idiosyncratic secretary (and maybe more):

      charming, light brown, pure, shiny, suddenly, vaporous, hooked, sensually, low-cut, becoming, splendid (2 times), formfitting (3 times), tall, thin (2 times), opulent (2 times), oblong, short (4 times), curvaceous, exactly, penetrating (2 times), virile, green (after these last two deletions, we are left with the striking “the man with eyes”), elegant, suggestive, transparent (3 times), lightly, languorous (3 times), violently, catlike, hot (4 times), imperceptibly, softly, luke-warm, slowly (3 times), silky (3 times), alluring, blue, white, red, pulpy, resolute, stubborn (2 times), fat, built, pinkish, very (7 times), smooth, tumescent (3 times), black and pink (2 times), rounded, bulging, luxuriant, lowered, secret, moist (4 times), isolated, inflated (3 times), strong, massive (4 times), burning, concentric (4 times), slow (2 times), rapid (5 times), more and more, open