“Here’s how you do it,” he said, when he had the Scotch in his hand. “Remember what they did in Ethiopia, that ceremonial thing?” He slowly upended the drink and emptied it out on my floor, where it puddled on the dining room tile. “In memory of those who are gone. In memory of those down below us.”
It felt like a toast to our former selves. You’re supposed to do it outside, on the ground, not in a building, but I followed along, inverting my beer bottle. The beer gurgled out onto the dining room floor, and I smiled as if something true and actual had happened, this imported ritual, imagining that he would probably be all right after all. Quinn smiled back, triumphant.
Forbearance
Whenever Amelia gazed at the olive trees outside, she could momentarily distract herself from the murderous poetry on the page in front of her.
Esto lavá çaso, metlichose çantolet íbsefelt sed syrt
Int çantolet ya élosete stnyt en, alardóowet arenti myrt.
Getting these lines into English was like trying to paint the sun blue. In several years as a translator, she’d never found another text so unmanageable. The poem was titled “Impossibi
lity,” and that’s what it was. Each time she looked at the words, she felt as if she were having a stroke; she could feel her face getting numb and sagging on one side. Meanwhile, the ironic ticking of the wall clock marked the unproductive seconds as they shuffled past. The clock loved its job, even though the time it told was wildly inaccurate. The owner of this villa, a charming old Italian woman, had informed Amelia that the clock was senile and delusional like everyone else in the village and must never be adjusted. Adjusting it would hurt its feelings.
“That clock thinks it’s on Mars,” the old woman had told Amelia in a conspiratorial whisper. “It tells you what time it is there. And you, an American, want to argue with it?”
The poem in front of Amelia on the desk had been written near the beginning of the nineteenth century, in an obscure Botho-Ugaric dialect combining the language of courtly love with warfare, with an additional admixture of liebestod, called mordmutt in this dialect. The idioms of love and war should have blended together but didn’t. In some not-so-subtle manner, the poet seemed to be threatening his beloved with mayhem if she refused to knuckle under to him. The language of these threats (Int çantolet ya élosete, for example: “I could murder you with longing,” or, more accurately, “My longing longs to murder”), inflated with metaphors and similes of baroque complication, was as gorgeous as an operatic aria sung by a charming baritone addressing a woman who was being flung around onstage and who wasn’t allowed to open her mouth. And it was all untranslatable! You couldn’t heat up soggy English verbs and nouns to a boil the way you could in this dialect, which actually had a word for love bites, muttzemp.
Amelia put down her pen and tapped her fingers. The decorative clock, painted green, was amused by her troubles. There’s a second of your life you’ll never get back! And there: there’s another one! Too bad you’re not on Mars like me. There’s lots of time on Mars. We’ve got nothing but time here! Today is like yesterday! Always was!
With a tiny advance from a publisher and a six-week deadline, she felt like a caged animal hopping on electrified grates for the occasional food pellet. Her professional reputation was at stake: after this volume was published, she would probably be held up to ridicule in The New York Review of Books for her translation of this very poem. She could already see the adverb-adjective clusters: “discouragingly inept,” “sadly inappropriate,” “amusingly tin-eared.” One of the few Americans who had any command of this dialect, she belonged to a tight little society full of backbiters. The other poems hadn’t been terribly hard to translate, but so far this one had defeated her. Let me murder you, the poet demanded, and we’ll descend to the depths together / where darkness enfolds us in—what? — the richest watery silks. / Down, down, to the obscurest nethermost regions, / where sea creatures writhe in amorous clutchings…
Awful. The olive trees didn’t care what she was doing, so she looked at them gratefully. Downstairs, her twenty-year-old son and his girlfriend were making love-noises. Chirps. Impossible! Everything was impossible.
This particular afternoon, in the little Tuscan villa she had rented a month ago, Jack, her son, and Gwyneth, the girlfriend, were cooking up sausage lasagna. They cooed at each other after coaxing the pan into the oven. Over the noise of the clock, Amelia listened to their endearments. Here she was, enjoying the voyeurism of the middle-aged parent. After several minutes, she could hear them washing the ingredients for salad, speaking lovely birdsong Italian to each other. Through the years, Jack had spent so much time over here in boarding school that his Italian was better than his mother’s. He didn’t even have the trace of an American accent that Amelia had. Gwyneth, like Jack, was bilingual (her father was English and had married a local Italian), but she and Jack preferred Italian for their intimacies, as who would not?
The hour: too early for preparing dinner! What did those two scamps think they were up to? Gwyneth, beautiful and bossy in the Italian manner, though she was a blonde, held Amelia’s lovesick son tightly in her grip; she gave orders to him followed by gropes and love-rewards. They had met a mere three weeks ago. Love happened fast in this region, like a door slammed open. Amelia had seen those two trying to prepare dishes together while holding hands. Very touching, but comical.
She glanced at her watch: actually, the day was almost over, and the day’s work was kaput, obliterated. She had struggled all afternoon on those stupidly impossible poetic lines full of masculine posturing, and now she had nothing. She felt word-nausea coming on.
The poet she was translating fancied himself a warrior type — aristocratic, arrogant, and proud. In one tiny corner of the world, mentioning his name — Imyar Sorovinct—would open doors and get you a free meal. But elsewhere, here in Italy and in the States, he was mostly unknown, except for the often-anthologized “I Give It All Up,” his uncharacteristically detached and Zen-like deathbed poem. In midlife he’d presented himself in verse as a man supremely confident of his weapons, arrogantly imploring his beloved to join him in what he called “The Long Night.” The particular line on which she had spent the last two hours contained consonant clusters that sounded like distant nocturnal battlefield explosions.
In real life, however, Sorovinct hadn’t been a military man at all but a humble tailor of army uniforms, a maker of costumes, driven to poetic fantasies about the men who inhabited them. Bent over, he cut and stitched, ruining his eyesight in the bad light. To no one’s surprise, then or now, the poet had been unhappily married. Together, he and his wife had had a child who, as they said in those days, “never grew up.” Cognitively, the son remained a child for all of his twenty-three years before his death, by drowning.
Armored for sorrow, steeling my resolve, I sing/cry/proclaim (to) you our love-glue
In English, the vulgarity was shockingly nonsensical, and it missed the force of the verb in the original and suggested nothing of the poet’s menace. “Love-glue”! Muttplitz in the dialect. What Walt Whitman meant when he used the word “adhesiven