The same poems which inform this fictionalization of Cavafy double as a touchstone for interpreting ES’s prose. Both in her stories and in this novel, there’s a sense of enormity occurring just on the other side of the written word and at the margin of the characters’ awareness, a tacit, generative, and at times corrosive unity obscured but never undone by the rhythms of daily life. ES’s Cavafy, inching towards the poems which may, a century later, seem inevitable or inspired, doesn’t yet see the homogeneousness of his frustrated sexual desire and his neutered poetic output. To find liberty in the one, at least according to the sections we’ve read, calls for a commensurate liberty in the other. Similarly, in “The Pinball King,” we have a pair of siblings whose lives are at once dislocated and inextricably fused by the political excesses they endured during a military dictatorship in the late 1960s. Despite their move to Florence, their reading of philosophy, and their migration into a second language, the body of experiences which built their figurative city and scarred their upbringing continues to pursue them, ruining any attempt to “find another shore.” Lastly, the thoughts on the nullity of experience with which ES begins “Freehand” transform themselves into the characters’ systematic (and symmetrical) rejection of experience via malaise, intractable organization, and impotent verbal rituals. Experience—the subjective measure of objective phenomena— continues in spite of those efforts to dilute or to deny it. We have, then, three portraits of compensation, three ways of representing “the Alexandria you are losing”: an ambivalent, fictional Cavafy who stands on the edge of artistic fecundity, a sister and brother perversely united, each the support for and the padlock of the other, and finally a husband and wife whose tenuous proximity requires each to facilitate and to sanction the invisibility of the other. I don’t know if this effect is more attributable to ES’s prose or to KE’s translation, but in either case, I applaud a job well done.
I’ve spent the preponderance of my sentient translator’s existence looking for analogies to capture who the translator is and what he does. To that end, I was especially interested in TS’s figures for describing her project with Yi Lei. She calls the invitation of a poem—to read or to translate it—a form of brief and indelible community, and even if I, in my work, don’t have the opportunity to collaborate so closely with an author, I hope to find a similar conversation between artistic sensibilities, a comparable sense that the effect or the sediment of the work endures beyond its scope. A translation, as TS maintains, is a duet, obviously impracticable without the source text but likewise dependent upon the perceptions and the cumulative aesthetic judgment of the translator. Neither party is inert. And we could even suppose, in accordance with TS’s comments on the symbol of black hair, that both texts acquire meaning through translation. Recalling JT’s terming his translations a creative response to the text, honoring it in whatever interventions he makes, I’d say TS, wishing to activate something embedded in the source text, to unearth its “logic that accumulates over gestures,” posits the act of translation upon the same terrain. Both translators aim to capture the essence or the spirit of the line. One last note. TS says she writes for the part of herself that wants a better answer, a consummate way—in my view—of summarizing who the artist is and what she does. The artist, even a derivative one like the translator, never content with things as they are or appear, persists in the indelible illusion of making something new.
-Josh
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