Not long ago, I received an email with a curious request: could I translate a passage quoted in Life is Hard from syntactically skewed into unskewed English so that a translator could translate it and then reskew it?
The passage was from Joshua Prager’s sublime, prosaic book about the “shot heard round the world”: Bobby Thomson's National-League-pennant-winning home run for the New York Giants, on the final playoff pitch of 1951. Prager writes against the tendency to see our lives as linear narratives, driving onward to predestined ends:
He contests it in the structure of his book—doubling back on his protagonists’ lives in detours that suspend the sequence of events—and in the structure of his sentences, which explode or invert expected syntaxes, as if to step outside of time.
After saying which, I quote three sentences from Prager’s book:
Thus did a bloody digit and enflamed appendix now convene Durocher [the Giants’ manager] and Horace Stoneham [their owner] in New York’s center-field clubhouse. . . Durocher was obnoxious, would from short instruct his pitcher to throw at opposing batters. . . . All about [Brooklyn] were starting nines, and the consequence most embraced of its newfound proficiency was the overtaking of New York.
I hadn’t thought about the challenge of translating these words. When I tried to mend the syntax so the translator could break it again, I was forced to make further changes:
Thus, Durocher and Horace Stoneham convened in New York’s center-field clubhouse on account of a bloody digit and an enflamed appendix. … Durocher was obnoxious: from shortstop, he would instruct his pitcher to throw at opposing batters. … There were starting nines all around [Brooklyn], and the overtaking of New York was the most welcome consequence of its newfound proficiency.
Pity the poor translator: if indexing another’s book is hard, how much more difficult to recast his words and the words of every author whose words he repeats, which may be the words of another translator, recasting another’s words.
The protagonist of Iris Murdoch’s first published novel—for which this newsletter is named—is a journeyman translator, stirred from his complacency when the hack he condescendingly translates wins the Prix Goncourt.
As it happens, the translator Kate Briggs quotes Under the Net in her captivating book about translation:
‘The coming day had thrust a long arm into the night,’ so closes a chapter of Murdoch’s novel following a heavy night of drinking. Her translator-character Jake, clever and lazy, had been pub-crawling around the East End of London. So here is the dawn, I remember thinking to myself, as I marked down the page. Here is the dawn in a sentence. Here is the dawn, actually, as I have never seen it before. But as I recognize it nonetheless (with the new knowledge that the line seems to be somehow inaugurating in me). Here is the dawn, then, as I now wish to have made it appear. Here is the dawn as I now might have wished to write it.
Briggs makes many arguments; one is about the question, asked by Roland Barthes in The Preparation of the Novel (translated by Kate Briggs): “Why desire to write?”
Really, the question is ludicrous, say Barthes. … But then again. Perhaps there is one answer. One general answer, one very spare answer, the one most likely to be the most broadly true of anyone who has experienced the desire to write. The answer would be: I write because I have read.
That resonates with me: the desire to write as a desire to imitate or recreate the beauty and brilliance of what one reads. Seen this way, the desire to translate is the purest form of the desire to write, what Briggs calls “the focused ambition to write the thing itself, only this time by myself.”
Or perhaps not the purest form: one could simply retranscribe what is written, or to save time, imitate a man Barthes witnessed on the bus:
This guy, as Barthes tells it, who was engaged in underlining—conscientiously, with a ruler and a black Biro—‘every single one of the lines’ in the book he was reading. In other words, the whole book. Why? Presumably because everything—every bit of it—mattered. Nothing could be reasonably or responsibly left out.
I doubt that my translators feel this way: they are not doing it for love or from a desire to replicate beauty but for a modest fee. (Though I hope they like the book, too!)
But Briggs made me think again of the desire to write as a desire to rewrite, sometimes allocentric—copying another person’s style—but always reflexive: posing in the mirror, reading and revising one’s expression, tweaking one’s outfit, face in flux, the final selfie nothing but a freezeframe. To write is to rewrite and even a finished text is not final. One can reanimate the body in the picture to create new life.
The philosopher David Wiggins is notorious for revisiting his published work, adding endnotes, postscripts, and corrections. He rewrote and republished his first monograph not once but twice. I try to let go, myself, but there are exceptions: ironically, the bit on Prager’s book in Life is Hard revises something I had written thirteen years before.
In truth, it’s not ironic, but apt: who could say where those words would wind up, what purpose they might serve, reworked. A lot of the writing I did from 2005 to 2009 feels now like practice for writing I would only do a decade later. I promise you it wasn’t planned. My life was not a narrative, driving on to a predestined end. Still, it makes me wonder: are the words on this page, too, provisional, unwitting preparation for an unenvisaged future, waiting for translation by an older me?1
BONUS CONTENT: I wrote about Under the Net for last week’s TLS.
BONUS BONUS CONTENT: Miles Leeson on Murdoch’s lost novel, Jerusalem.
Thanks to Evgenia Mylonaki for inciting me to read This Little Art.
I'm enjoying An Unofficial Rose at the moment!