Christa Malone didn’t believe that she had ever been eternity’s hostage, captive in time; she had not been among the unacknowledged legislators of the world. She had proffered no laws; she had not in her poems told truth to power, or spoken to the greater angels of the nations, and she would not. She thought that if the time when a poet could carry a nation’s soul with him was passing in Russia, it had passed long ago in America.
No, she had only mourned her dead, to lighten her own heart; she had succeeded in that sometimes and sometimes not. But she knew this: when we grieve in our lives, we grieve for just the one person, friend, brother, son; but when we grieve for our own in poems, we grieve for all, for every one. It was all she had done, if she had done anything.
She had wept once for Falin, but she couldn’t grieve for him. Because of him she had been given, or given back, everything: her own being, all that she had lost and done and suffered. Through him she had recovered a way to speak; a home in her own heart; maybe even a world to live in, undestroyed. She would never learn what bargain he had made, or what the powers or principalities were that he had made it with; but she knew that Innokenti Isayevich had tricked them in the end. Like the boy in the story, he kept what he had given away.
A slanting light was on the mirror-stone of names. She had been gone a long time, she thought, and there was a lot to do; a book of poems to see through the press, and maybe now another poem to make, one beginning to form itself, too far off as yet to be heard: an elegy too, she thought. And a real poem, perhaps, if she was faithful. She whispered to herself okay, let’s go, in that motherly or fatherly way we forever speak to ourselves, so that we will do what we should or must. And yet for a while longer she didn’t stand and start for home.
Author’s Note
The author wishes to acknowledge the generous help of Julia Titus and, in particular, Professor Tatyana Buzina, who read this work in manuscript and answered my many queries. (All remaining errors, mistranscriptions, and cranberries are my own.) I learned about the lives of the besprizornye from “And Now my Soul is Hardened:” Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia, 1918–1930 by Alan M. Ball (University of California Press, 1994). The opinions about Pushkin expressed by my character I.I. Falin are derived in part from Abram Tertz (Andrei Sinyavsky), Strolls with Pushkin (Yale University Press, 1995).
About the Author
JOHN CROWLEY lives in the hills above the Connecticut River in northern Massachusetts with his wife and twin daughters. He is the author of Dæmonomania; Love & Sleep; Ægypt; Little, Big; and, most recently, The Translator.
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Praise for John Crowley’s The Translator
“Thrilling…. [Crowley] succeeds with what no prudent novel ought to attempt.”
—New York Times
“[The Translator] gives us a world so suffused with beauty that its inhabitants manage to speak in fragments of poetry….
Crowley’s subject matter is grand and serious, involving nothing less than the souls of nations and the transforming power of language.”
—New York Times Book Review
“A rarity: a love story with a core of intelligence and insight.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“A novel that affirms and celebrates language…[and] masterfully renders a moment in history.”
—Book magazine
“One of the finest writers working today…. Crowley’s exquisitely subtle writing transports readers through the shadow lands between childhood and adulthood, through cultural differences between Russia and the United States, and through the filtered lens of poetry and the harsher reality of the evening news.”
—Pittsburgh Tribune
“Wonderfully sensual…. Layered and rich, The Translator is a remarkable novel.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Effortless.”
—Christian Science Monitor
“Nothing short of magical.”
—Time Out New York
ALSO BY JOHN CROWLEY
THREE NOVELS
Beasts
The Deep
Engine Summer
LITTLE, BIG
ÆGYPT
LOVE & SLEEP
DÆMONOMANIA
Copyright
THE TRANSLATOR. Copyright © 2007 by John Crowley. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
EPub Edition © OCTOBER 2007 ISBN: 9780061852886
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