Translator (3 page)

Hanne had noticed this problem when she read the novel the first time, but she thought Kobayashi would be available to clarify. Kobayashi's last missive was months ago: “I'm not the translator, you are!” written in Japanese. What should she do? She just can't see Jiro carrying on like this. It's too emotional. Too melodramatic. She looks out her study window at the brick siding of the building next door. A small alley separates the two apartment buildings, and during the day only a bit of light funnels through. She puts this dreary section in Aiko's point of view.

She keeps working, writing words on the board, erasing them, rearranging them. When she glances at the clock, she sees it's nearly midnight. She has forgotten to call David. Will he forgive her? Tomorrow, she'll do it tomorrow. Besides, working until she is exhausted is one of the few ways she manages her insomnia. She has her faults, but discipline is not one of them.

She realizes her stomach is still upset. She heads down the hallway and stops in the living room. Her big window offers her a sweeping view of the Golden Gate Bridge. For a moment, the dense winter fog has cleared. The black swath of sky provides the perfect backdrop for the red-orange of the bridge. She stands at the window, watching the red taillights of the cars as they speed across to the other side. It's been years since she's hiked the headlands. Not that she's yearning to go. She has plenty to do here, and besides, she's hiked those trails enough times. She already knows what's over there.

At the university, Hanne finds
David in his office grading papers.

“There you are. I've been impatiently waiting for you to reemerge,” he says, smiling.

She kisses him on the cheek.

They head to Café Grandissimo, their usual spot across from Colbert University. He's finished teaching for the day, and she doesn't have to be in the classroom until Friday. The last chapters of the translation have been sent to the publisher, who'll send the manuscript to Kobayashi, who lives in Tokyo. The translation required a Herculean effort sustained over twelve months to transform the novel into something worth publishing. Before seeking out David, she called Tomas and left a message that she finally had sent off the beast. Good riddance. She hoped to never see the likes of Kobayashi again. She was being ironic, of course. She loved every minute of it. After months of being steeped in it, she can't get Jiro out of her mind. She keeps thinking she's going to run into him on the street, at a restaurant, anywhere.

In the coffee shop, a couple of students wave at David. He teaches composition and Classical Greek; she, Japanese. He loves it and the students reciprocate, showering him each semester with outstanding evaluations. She, on the other hand, is lukewarm. Most of her students sign up for Japanese because of their interest in manga and anime, and they couldn't care less about learning the standard form of Japanese. Though she started out enthusiastic, Hanne now sees the job as just another source of income because her first love, translation, is hardly lucrative.

David sits beside her and holds her hand. Ever since his divorce two years ago, they've had a casual relationship. It's an arrangement that suits them both, since David has three children, two of whom are in middle school, and he's stretched in all directions.

“So is the world ready for Hanne Schubert?” he says, smiling.

She's explained that Kobayashi is positioned by the publisher as the new Japanese writer with worldwide appeal. And the publication in English of
Trojan Horse Trips
is his big debut. In the world of translation, this is Hanne's big break. It will, most likely, lead to accolades and a slew of work, so much that she'll have to turn projects down. After twenty-five years of translating, with the publication of Kobayashi's book she finally will reach the lofty heights of her profession. To say she's been waiting for this for a long time is an understatement. While staring at the menu, she turns the fantasy over again in her mind.

The waitress brings them two coffees. The shop is efficient and Hanne approves, though she wishes it was farther from school, away from the students who keep interrupting, saying hello to David and fawning all over him, and tossing only a cursory nod to her, as if she's someone who must be recognized solely because of her proximity to him.

“I've something for you.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small box. A gift to mark this moment, he says. “Few people become recognized masters of their field.”

A turquoise bracelet that, when she tries it on, hangs too loosely around her wrist. “It's lovely.”

“I can have it properly fitted.”

“No. It's perfect,” she says. “I love it.”

She's always amazed when someone gives her a gift. She never expects it, and so the present, whatever it is, gives off a glow. And the gift-giver? She immediately assigns him the attribute of generosity. She's always been attracted to David, his extensive vocabulary, which he uses to make the ordinary shimmer. Having grown up in London, David is proof that the English educational system is superior to the American, at least when it comes to language. It also helps that he has a handsome face, with dark liquid eyes and long lashes, and chestnut hair cut short. There's something tidy and clean about him, an attention to detail that she finds necessary as one ages.

“So, what will you do with your newly earned freedom?” he says.

She tells him she's been invited to Japan to speak at a conference about language and translation. She turned it down, though, because she doesn't really enjoy traveling anymore. And before she's buried under a mountain of new translation projects, she wants to try her hand at writing. For years she's wanted to write about Ono no Komachi, the premier poet of her time. “Maybe a play. I'm interested in her early days in the court when she was wooed by every man.”

“Sounds like the perfect time.”

She smiles. “With all this free time, how about we go away? This weekend?”

“I wish I could.” There's the older boy's baseball practice and the younger one's soccer, and a spaghetti fundraiser. On and on. “Why don't we steal an hour away,” he says, “right now.”

This is another reason she appreciates him. She's not by nature an impulsive woman, but sometimes he manages to coax it out in her. For these occasions she gets to believe that there may be more to her than what she already knows, that her life isn't going to be a humdrum steady beat of what's come before. And for that, she is grateful.

By now they know to head to her apartment, not his. Though he's a fastidious dresser, he has no standards when it comes to housekeeping. When she's there, she can't resist washing the stack of dirty dishes in the sink, wiping down the counters, picking up clothes, and anything else she can find until he grabs her and tells her to stop, my dear, please stop.

In her apartment, he stands in her living room. “I love it up here. It's like you're on top of the world. Not bombarded by images and sounds and people. Only the grandeur of that stunning bridge.”

She bought it twelve years ago, after her husband moved out of their two-story house and down to Stanford. For convenience, they told each other, but Hanne worried it was more than that. It's a big apartment, three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a study, with plenty of space for her and Brigitte, who was thirteen at the time, and for Tomas when he visited from college.

She offers him a glass of white wine.

He opens his eyes wide in mock surprise. “In the afternoon, my love?”

She leads the way into the bedroom. A man slightly older than her, he knows how to make love to a woman; a man who is receptive and who also initiates, a man who knows what she wants. And if he doesn't, if for some reason Hanne feels more blunt and fiery, as she does this afternoon, they have enough history that she can tell him.

“You have confined yourself for too long,” he says, stroking her bare thigh and kissing her all over again. “And I'm the lucky beneficiary.”

She smiles. He wasn't the sole beneficiary. In her imagination, she made love to Jiro. She didn't intentionally invite him into the bedroom, but if he insisted on a second time, she wouldn't say no. Of course she knows he's a character in a book. Still she marvels at how real he's become for her. Her loyal companion.

“Can you stay for an early supper?” she says.

The usual sigh. The oldest must be picked up from school and then driven to ballet. The youngest needs help with a project for school. “Another time?”

“Yes.”

He's a good father, attentive, present in their lives. She'd like to see more of him, but she won't put any demands on him. Not if it takes away from being a father to his children.

In her study, she begins to clean. Into the recycling go her tall towers of paper—the first draft of the translation of Kobayashi's novel, handwritten on lined paper. The second draft, done on the computer. The third, done to smooth out the transitions and choppy sentences that clunk. The fourth, to fiddle some more with the difficult passages. The tall towers of paper, like a city unto itself, are gone, as if a tornado had swept in and now a wide stretch of polished oak blinks at her, waiting. As always, she keeps the final draft, setting it on the floor beside her desk. Though, really, the story is so tightly woven into her being, she doesn't need to look at it to remember it. She runs her hands over the desk's smooth empty surface. She has found no other way to be in the world, only the movement of words from one language to another. She knows most people don't even think about translation, and when they bother to, they don't assign it much value: a mechanical process, substituting one word for another, a monkey could do it; worse, a computer. She's tired of defending it, of explaining that even though she's tethered to an already-assembled drama, her role is akin to being an author.

Well, now she's ready to make her own drama. She pulls out her notes on Ono no Komachi. During Japan's Heian era, 794–1185, in the aristocratic culture of the Heian court, art stood center stage. An unusual time made more so because women, not men, were considered the masters of poetry. Every significant experience was accompanied by a poem, and Ono no Komachi, who lived in the palace in the capital city of Heian-kyo—present-day Kyoto, was one of the best, writing magnificently about love and the transient nature of life, sending poetic jewels to her lovers to coax, excite, or cool passion.

She has no interest in delving into Komachi's august years. Besides, someone has already done that. She found a Noh play written about the poet. A Buddhist priest takes his young poetry students to a rural area to visit an old woman who is thought to know the secret art of poetry. In this play, Komachi is an old hag, hiding her face under a straw hat. Eventually she reveals that she was once the famous poet who resided behind the imperial palace walls. The final act is the night of Tanabata, the festival celebrating love and poetry. One of the priest's students performs a ritual dance. Touched by the event, Komachi, in her feeble state, rises and begins to dance on stage.

Her play will be about romance and sexual intrigue. There will be five acts, and it will open at a teahouse. A magnificent old teahouse within walking distance of the imperial palace. She picks up her pen and writes: low-ceilinged, nestled among bamboo, the low tables, tatami mats, the thick green broth,
matcha
, in a cup so big it must be held with both hands. She is opening with a scene in which Ono no Komachi sends away one lover so as to begin the seduction of another. During the tea ceremony, she slips a poem beneath the new man's cup.
Like ripples in the water, I want to caress you.

She looks at what she's written so far, but tells herself not to judge it. It's not fair to face inspection so soon. Just enjoy this making of something from nothing; this soaking in words; this remaking of the world. But she can feel a part of her assess what she's done and call it not bad. Not bad at all.

Of course it can't be all romance, sex, and seduction. Someone must get hurt and it will be Ono no Komachi. Looming is her great fall. The final act will be her expulsion from the court. No one ever learned why, exactly, she was thrown out, so Hanne will have to make it up. Literary license.

Something shatters outside. She looks up. Her gaze lands on her blackboard. It's still jam-packed with Japanese sentences from Kobayashi's novel. She grabs an eraser and begins to wipe it clean, chalk dust floating in the air, making her cough. She's about to erase the last bit of it, but stops. That line that bothered her, she fretted over it, rewrote and rewrote.
What you once loved lies there, inert, sucked of all its juices because you forgot it.

She stares at the sentences. It was supposedly Jiro's interior monologue, lamenting that he had sent his wife away, and, as Hanne saw it, chastising himself far too harshly. She didn't want to include it. Haven't you gone through enough, dear Jiro? But it stayed in the novel as it was, despite her personal objections.

The next day, Hanne has been working all morning, but the play is going nowhere. She can't seem to enter the mindset of a twenty-year-old beauty. There are festivals, ceremonies, parties with their gossip, and a new lover who secretly slipped a poem into Komachi's obi. And now she must compose the right response. Should she further ignite his passion? Prolong the courtship? Or snub him outright? Hanne yawns. Really, she doesn't care what Komachi decides. It's just frivolous escapism. She pushes aside her notebook and opens a book of Komachi's poetry.

Hana no iro faturi ni keri na itadura ni

Hanne translates:
Color of the flower has already faded away.

Or she could translate it:
Cherry blossoms pale after long rain
.

Or,
The flowers withered/ Their color faded away.

Or,
Flowers fading. In the long rain of regret.

She moves on to the next verse, then the next. When she sets her notebook aside, she glances at the final version of the Kobayashi translation. She wishes she had just received it and was only now beginning. She opens it to a random page:
Aiko liked to soak in the tub for hours. Jiro told her he sometimes stood at the door and listened. When she stirred, he could hear the water slosh against the porcelain, and it reminded him of their sunny days by the sea. He went on, describing the lull of the waves, the heat of the white sand, and how she said the sun warmed her cold bones. What he didn't say is that he'd been listening with a certain rising panic, waiting for the water to splash so he knew she was still among the living.

What a good man, Jiro, thinks Hanne. And how exhausting, those hours of vigilance, attentiveness, and care. She sighs. There's nothing more to be done. Kobayashi is probably reading it right now. It's only a matter of time before he signs off and the book is published. She sighs again. She's in that amorphous in-between time, in between major projects. Yes, she wanted to write her own drama, but her original vision isn't right. Maybe a walk will stir up a new story.

Hanne grabs her heavy coat and a scarf. Outside, she's assaulted by noise—screeches, horns, engines, sirens—and people and taxis and cars and more people. Forms whiz by. All morning she's been in an isolation tank with scant sensory stimulation—and now a barrage. Suddenly a loud, prolonged sound of the emergency warning system test for earthquakes charges the air—which means it is Tuesday noon.