nostalgia or enthusiasm, enacting the roles created by another for the enjoyment of the audience.
The aerial attack born from David Grey’s overexcited imagination suffers nevertheless from a major handicap: despite his passion for flying machines, the American translator doesn’t have the slightest idea how to fly a plane. (Flight of the Bumblebee)
*
* So David chose another angle of attack, another weapon: the computer virus, signaled in a relatively clear message signed “Z” on Prote’s computer screen. An ersatz for the dreamed aerial attack, an economical consolation prize: rather than concentrating his efforts on the immensity of the sky and taking flying lesson, to carry out his heinous crime like other notorious evildoers, David makes do with that rigid plastic box swarming with 0s and 1s, clumped together in morphing constellations, in mathematical throngs organized with all the geometric precision of the nocturnal summer sky. Like an interplanetary probe with precise movements and programmed noxiousness, the frisky virus of a numerical galaxy with clusters of neighboring bytes, rigorously tearing through entire sections, extinguishing gigantic swaths of binary material, in a single vengeful flap of the wing annihilating planets, rings, asteroids and satellites, entire solar systems, white dwarfs and supernovas, plunging stellar memory into an unknown chaos, a new night.
“The damage is done. The virus works its way through the machine, like a rat. Z.” At first Prote took these few words for a stupid joke, the mere provocation of an intruder after breaking and entering the Normandy cottage where Prote has his office. The crowbar abandoned near the white door testifies to the presence of a criminal. The cottage had a visitor … But given the lack of any vandalism or any immediately identifiable theft, Prote quickly forgets the incident, puts the door back in place, sits at his desk, lights a Lucky Strike, and, already absorbed in the new chapter of his novel-in-progress, starts tapping away on his keyboard. Soon, however, the French writer is in the grips of doubt, skepticism, then consternation, finally anger: his words, his lines, dialogues, paragraphs, chapters, are inexorably eroded, sometimes a few characters, sometimes several syllables, or entire phrases, disappear without explanation, in an entirely random and incomprehensible manner, sucked up by the chasm of the screen like the stars of the universe in a powerful black hole, each destruction accompanied by a little melodious and exasperating pfuiit.
What to do? What defense to mount? Who to suspect? Who benefits from this crime? Do I have a mortal enemy, wonders Prote, who, rather than directly attacking my person or my published books, chose to lash out at my work in progress? Could I possibly suspect my little Doris, so devoted? Ah, I can’t stand these mocking pfuiits! It’s like the muted detonation of a pistol equipped with a silencer, whose every bullet destroys a few thousand characters of my novel. No, Doris is too loyal, too loving and helpful. It could be anyone, but not my dear Doris. Perhaps she has already received my letter in America. Perhaps she is writing back to me at this very moment … It’s more likely my concierge, the postman, my grouchy neighbor, the bad-tempered butcher, one of my former mistresses or wives, my cleaning lady bribed by a prankster, or it could even be my American translator with the drab name, Grey, that’s it, David Grey. But no, I can’t really imagine them slowly shooting my computer’s memory full of holes, inflicting an electronic Alzheimer’s. My Hungarian translator perhaps, Stefan Esterházy? Impossible: we hardly know each other. It could be that seductive Italian, Pietro Listo, who Doris found rather charming and cajoling, but whom I deemed effeminate and hardly straightforward, perhaps an opportunist prepared to do anything to translate my next book? No, that’s not realistic. But then who? First things first, let’s shut down this nasty ruse.
So, from Prote’s inferior point of view, the book is a can of worms, a haystack in which he has lost the precious needle of his text. It is now riddled with a virus of unknown origin. For the moment, Prote remains in the dark with his anger and speculations. (Tamperer’s Night)
*
* My author digresses, I follow his lead. We might consider Scattered Figments, my American author’s second novel, to be the first draft of Translator’s Revenge, a kind of groping version of the book that I am translating, modifying, correcting, amputating, augmenting, subverting, hijacking, doctoring. The French version, Fragments épars, I’ve said it before, is more like a shooting game than the complex art of the invisible presence, of magical possession, at once sovereign and delicate (like the act of love), which is translation.
Trotting about at my rhythm, I come to my point: the Prote of Scattered Figments was nothing, I dare say, but a clumsy prototype of the brilliant French writer that appears here. Moreover, this ruined novel should have been retranslated before even being printed by the pitiful Éditions du Marais: 238 copies sold in ten years (including those sent to the media) …The rest of the books were pulped, so much so that the book is a rarity today.
Where was I? Yes: despite its faults, Scattered Figments contains many keys to understanding Translator’s Revenge …Thus the obsession with the revealing detail, the glimpse of fleeting and marginal apparitions, evoked here by the first Prote (in my translation):
“Nearly all that is presented to me in the spotlight, centered in a frame, proudly positioned in the middle of a space or in the middle of the page, posing confidently beneath the light of the projectors, bores me. I don’t believe it for an instant, I am suspicious of it. It is very often impossible for me to accord the least confidence to such pretention, impossible to appreciate or even agree with these images that are offered up without suggesting the mysteries of their creation. No vacillating would be able to disturb those images, nor those texts so sure of themselves, of their prerogatives, of their blowhard progress fully exposed. I don’t care for luminosity except in radiant women, in the resplendent brilliance of their complexion, their gaze, their pearly white skin. But for the rest, no. I can immediately discern the insipid posturing, the overripe prose, the conceited ostentation, the assertiveness—at once authoritarian and ridiculous—of what quickly reveals itself as a weak cliché, a stereotype, a contemptible desire for glory.
“On the contrary, I like apparitions that are ephemeral, unexpected, risky. For example, the Nabokovian nymphs on roller skates, weaving at high speed from shadow to light and from light to shadow, defying gaze and desire, moving through the shaded landscape as though on a chessboard where a piece crazier than a madman, more menacing than a rider, zigzags from one square to another, pushed on only by the desire to escape a scrutinizing view or long-lasting examination thanks to a sharp and fast game of hide and seek, rendering prolonged observation impossible: the black square of the trunk of a tree, the white square of a puddle of light, then nothing, then there they are again altogether in the shadows, a violet form drawing the eye before disappearing again. I like these will-o’-the-wisps, these constantly changing images, imprecise, intangible, intermittently occupying the periphery of the field of vision, creating a fluttering of the senses, of conscience and desire, black white, then nothing, black white, a turmoil that does not grow but remains elusive, jagged, like the jerky flashing of these scrambling images, wet, striped with meteorites, that provoked the fascinated stupefaction of the first moviegoers.
“Happily renouncing any kind of global expanse, I like the fragment, the remedy to continuity, the ruin of the monument, the part that replaces the whole, that suggests without pretention, level with the ground, among the couch grass, the creeping insects, the debris, the scum and the reptiles, right next to the sole of the foot that serves as the lower margin and the forgotten root of my flights of fancy.”
Thus, when the first Prote, the one in Scattered Figments, recalls a woman, it’s the pink and translucent flesh of a perfectly curled ear that comes back to his memory; recalling another person, the shimmering reflections of a precious stone
