Just as their feet make their way up and down so many twisting staircases, the denizens of this novel are forced to spiral around truths closed to (or enclosed inside) themselves by trauma, obfuscation, or denial.
In this sense, Captives is a spiraling dance of sealed-off subjectivities. Although a dark bildungsroman can be dug out of Captives, the novel is actually organized as a chaconne, and indeed Handel’s Chaconne is Captives’ signature piece of music. When the narrator and Monica Smântănescu meet for the first time (on a boat or in a train), music pours from a portable radio, and Monica announces her presence by saying, “Handel’s Chaconne in G Major.” A dance in moderate triple meter form, the chaconne is based on the continuous variation of a series of chords. The musical definition describes the novel very well. Organized as a set of multifarious and evolving variations on a theme, Captives is composed of three chapters — “She,” “You,” and “I” — and follows a series of thematic modifications that includes (but isn’t limited to) its narrator’s resignation, differing versions of the narrator’s encounter with Monica Smântănescu, ruminations on the narrator’s obsessive relationship with Captain Zubcu’s daughter, as well as his preoccupation with both his own childhood loss of his sisters and his decision to save Sebastian Caba, the defendant at the show trial who becomes his boss. The She of these variations is, of course, Monica Smântănescu. You is the Captain’s daughter as a revenant of the narrator’s lost sister, Dona. I is the narrator. As for sealed-off subjectivities: to qualify as a main character in Captives, you must have your “I”/ego hermitically locked away, and this is not just a matter of a sensation felt on climbing stairs or comparing oneself to a jar in a novel by Thomas Mann. For the translator, the most striking feature of Manea’s three characters is signaled by their frequent lack of subject pronouns.
While sparing subject pronouns in general, Captives is especially chary of the words she, you, and I. It should be said here that a lack of subject pronouns is both easier to accomplish and much less jarring to read in Romanian than it is in English because Romanian is a highly inflected language. Whereas English present tense verbs, for example, tend to inflect only in the third person singular (I go, you go, he/she/it goes, we go, you go, they go), Romanian verbs feature personal endings. The Romanian for the present tense of the verb “to go” (Eu merg, tu mergi, el/ea merge, noi mergem, voi mergeti, ei/ele merg) has five forms for six “persons.” This means, in practice, that, thanks to the signal value of the verb endings, standard Romanian can be spoken without too many pronouns, and it can be written without them as well.
The absence of pronouns ordinarily presents no special challenge for the translator. When translating standard Romanian into standard English, the translator simply supplies pronouns when necessary. Captives, however, presents a particular challenge. Manea’s narrator tends to reserve the subject pronouns she, you, and I for climactic moments when identity is an issue. At other times he takes advantage of Romanian’s ability to do without subject pronouns or finds objective correlatives like “the professor of French and piano” or “the wandering son of earth” to substitute for the mysterious subjectivity condensed into an asserted she or I. In a similar way, the narrator tends to slip into the third person and to use objective correlatives — “the visitor,” “the orphan girl,” “that girl” — to avoid words like I and you.
In this translation I have tried to cope with the author’s use and avoidance of pronouns on a case-by-case basis. In a few instances phrases have been rearranged to avoid awkwardness. A Romanian sentence that reads “In vain had [she] arranged her class schedule in order to avoid this insufferable courtyard motorcade,” has become “It was a matter of vainly having arranged her class schedule in order to avoid this insufferable courtyard motorcade.” In one case I followed the pronounless Romanian telegraphese to emphasize the narrator’s frenzied madness:
Let him rattle for a moment or two. The visitor evidently feared a trap. What fun to watch him deal with Madam Professor’s husband! Farces leapt to mind: all equally good. It was hard to choose.
— My sister told me about you, the madman finally remarked. Personally, I don’t live here.
— Mhm. She didn’t write anything about having a brother.
Should have seen that one coming. The end of the letter had been clear.
— Make yourself comfortable. Perhaps you’d like to wait. Have a seat.
Proceeded to pick a pile of the chair. Miscellaneous trash. Couldn’t find a place for it. Threw it on the bed.
There is no way to write the English second person without using the word you, however, and I have simply used it when the narrator’s prose apostrophizes Captain Zubcu’s daughter.
Readers not preoccupied with the blood and guts of translation and the differences between languages may see these final notes as technical details, and that’s as it should be. For any translator, what really matters is bringing the spirit of the writing into the new language. In this case, the language is swirling and mysterious, for Captives does not aspire to be a traditional novel. It expresses the dementia induced by the captive state. Part novel (verging on roman-fleuve), part musically inspired composition, Captives leads the translator to grapple with the text as fluid, polyphonic writing, for it includes many kinds of speech, nearly all of them unstable.
JEAN HARRIS
AUGUST 2014