The Centre(3)

Anyway, that’s just the beginning. There’s also, crucially, the placement of the aujourd’hui, “today.” Most if not all translators put the today at the end, but Bloom suggests, ingeniously, “Today, Maman died.” It’s subtle, but there is a difference between “Maman died today,” and “Today, Maman died.” The latter offers a soft emphasis on the today and, for Bloom, hints at the narrator’s tendency to be in the moment. I think it also points to a certain missing-of-the-point on the narrator’s part, an emotional distancing from the death of his mother. Also, crucially, the emphasis on the “today” reinforces the absurdity of the second sentence: “Ou peut-être hier, je ne sais pas”—“Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know”—thereby foregrounding the strangeness of the stranger and the strangeness of ourselves. The truth is, in this wholly unembellished text, each word hangs ferociously on to the previous. One mistranslation and the whole thing unravels, and in my copy, there were numerous mistranslations.

And what if I were translating this passage into Urdu? What would I do, for instance, with the died? The literal equivalent of “Maman died” in Urdu—“Ammi mar gayeen”—sounds super harsh. It feels a bit like “Mama kicked the bucket.” And so, even though a certain hardness is required in that opening sentence, I’d probably opt for a translation closer to “Mother passed away.” I felt a kind of buzz as I considered the possibilities. What a joy and a struggle it would be to translate this novel into Urdu. It would, I imagined, be quite the intimate experience.

It’s not that translation is a subjective process, exactly. In fact, in a way, it’s highly mathematical. It’s about retaining the feeling, the thing underneath. It’s as if you go underground, and there are all these shapes and colors, and there you see that, oh, died in this language is closest in color and shape, consistency and texture, to passed away in this other language. And it feels like a personal accomplishment when you make the match and haul the pair back up to the surface. And somehow, I was able to make those matches. I could just feel them. But the problem was that this feeling didn’t translate into any kind of significant action, and for reasons I couldn’t grasp, I was unable to get to that place I longed to reach. Whatever that gap was between editor and writer, print-copier and painter, midwife and mother, well, I’d spent my whole life trying to leap over that gap and had consistently fallen into the abyss. The truth is, whenever I saw a beautiful painting, or read a great novel, I felt joy, of course, but something in me would also seethe. Jealousy is an ugly thing. Even ambition, particularly in a woman, can be undesirable. But this other feeling—this feeling of a life not fully lived—that was worse, practically unbearable. I felt constantly thwarted, and I didn’t even know by what.

Still, I was lucky that at least the leap was conceivable to me. If you could recognize it, I reasoned, if something in you vibrated in attunement to good work, then surely you also contained the capacity to create that kind of work. And on a good day, I even felt like I’d been working toward it, no matter how haphazardly—the leap over the abyss. I had some proximity, after all, to my desired career. I was tuned into my own curiosity and following it, more or less. And so, I reasoned, I needed to keep myself close to what moved me until something emerged. And to this day, despite the horror that was to come, I maintain the importance of following one’s curiosity. One’s desire. It is the only way.

And so it was via this somewhat stumbling tracking of my vague desires that I ended up, later that week, at the translation studies conference where I was to meet Adam. Senate House is one of those old, imposing buildings that I used to be so impressed by when I first came to this country. I still remember the white phallic columns that ushered me into the UCL main campus, where I’d done my undergrad. They stood there as if announcing, “You are part of a great and noble history now.” I even remember the dean telling us with great solemnity during orientation how well we were setting ourselves up for success just by being there, welcoming us into a future so bright and white and very well trodden. The glow of this prospect of anything-can-happen warmed me for a little bit in this freezing cold country, but not for very long. Soon, I realized that the seemingly gracious welcomes weren’t that different from, for instance, the warden in my residence hall saying to me, “I know people like you like to keep the windows shut, but leave it open sometimes because it can get moldy.” “People like you.” Did she really say that? And “moldy”? I’m pretty sure it was something like that … my point is, although they can seem so different—the gracious welcomes and the hostile otherings—the effect is the same when they land in the body. Both translate to the same thing. Both are saying, “Don’t forget your place.” Both are saying, “You are lucky to be here.” Still, I settled in and made good friends. It was at UCL that I met Naima, who was redoing her first year, having secretly transferred from medicine to English lit, a move her parents didn’t find out about until graduation day.

And now, years later, there I was again. Just around the corner from UCL. Senate House, Seminar Room 402, on another cold January day. I walked into the warmth of the lecture hall, found a seat, and took off my coat, hat, and gloves. The panel was on translation versus adaptation, and a woman was speaking at the podium about performing Shakespeare in Portuguese.