An Unnecessary Woman (13 page)

The rumors and false stories that circulated in those two weeks were astoundingly vivid, all attempts at explanations. She was a spy, she worked for a bank and was carrying large amounts of cash, she was sporting a flashy diamond necklace, she didn’t see a checkpoint until it was too late. All untrue, all drawn with soft pencil, easily erasable, all attempts to explain the unexplainable.

It turned out she was simply unlucky. A stray bullet killed her.

We needed an explanation because we couldn’t deal with the fact that it could have been any one of us. Assuming causation—she was killed because she couldn’t hear anything since the radio was too loud—lets us believe that it can’t happen to us because we wouldn’t do such a thing. We are different. They are the other.

None of us knows how to deal with the aleatory nature of pain.

I was lucky. I knew that what happened to the woman upstairs couldn’t happen to me because I never had a car. I walked or used public transportation.

I wasn’t like her.

That’s my theory anyway. I’m sure more erudite minds have dealt with this. Sartre I’m not, but then neither am I ponderous and portentous. One reason we desire explanations is that they separate us and make us feel safe.

In a silly essay on
Crime and Punishment,
a critic suggests that Raskolnikov is the epitome of the Russian soul, that to understand him is to understand Russia. Tfeh! Not that the proposition isn’t true; it may or may not be. I’ve yet to meet Russia’s soul. What the reviewer is doing is distancing himself from the idea that he too is capable of killing a pawnbroker. We’re supposed to infer that only someone with a Russian soul could.

If you think that Marcello of
The Conformist
becomes a porcine fascist because he killed lizards when he was a boy, then you assure yourself that you can never be so. If you think Madame Bovary commits adultery because she’s trying to escape the banality of Pleistocene morals, then her betrayals are not yours. If you read about hunger in Ethiopia or violence in Kazakhstan, it isn’t about you.

We all try to explain away the Holocaust, Abu Ghraib, or the Sabra Massacre by denying that we could ever do anything so horrible. The committers of those crimes are evil, other, bad apples; something in the German or American psyche makes their people susceptible to following orders, drinking the grape Kool-Aid, killing indiscriminately. You believe that you’re the one person who wouldn’t have delivered the electric shocks in the Milgram experiment because those who did must have been emotionally abused by their parents, or had domineering fathers, or were dumped by their spouses. Anything that makes them different from you.

When I read a book, I try my best, not always successfully, to let the wall crumble just a bit, the barricade that separates me from the book. I try to be involved.

I am Raskolnikov. I am K. I am Humbert and Lolita.

I am you.

If you read these pages and think I’m the way I am because I lived through a civil war, you can’t feel my pain. If you believe you’re not like me because one woman, and only one, Hannah, chose to be my friend, then you’re unable to empathize.

Like the bullet, I too stray.

Forgive me.

I stray but not too far. I circle the streets around the building, avoiding home, but go no farther than a prescribed distance that I instinctively cling to, like a pigeon flying above its coop.

Next to the street that parallels mine is a small plot of land that is still undeveloped and used as a car park. Toward the northwest corner, where cars can’t reach, tiny red carnations miraculously flourish in a small patch of earth. When I saw them a week ago I assumed they were confused red poppies—Lebanon’s flower, and Proust’s, the wondrous wildflower with its color-saturated tissue-paper petals. I’d never seen carnations blossom naturally in the city before, and certainly hadn’t expected them to last until winter.

The winter air smells metallic, of bronze. In fading tawny light, the city glimmers, except for one large box of a building, concrete hued, that absorbs and swallows surrounding color. It has a name; in human-sized letters it calls itself
THE GARDEN CENTER
, yet not a sprig of green can be found anywhere in its vicinity.

I am a blob in a photorealistic painter’s cityscape canvas. I stay out until evening, until my bladder begins to scream.

Before the final turn to my home, I see one of the neighborhood’s teenage boys holding court, leaning against a wall that already needs a coat of paint even though it received one in spring. Two beer cans—one squashed, the other only dimpled—loiter at his feet. I often notice this fifteen-year-old around this grand realm of his when school is out. He disappeared for a few weeks this summer after his mother chased him about the neighborhood with a rattan, but he seems to have returned to his full form and splendor. His mother must have woken him from an afternoon nap and kicked him out of the house before he had a chance to comb his haystack hair. His court, three younger boys, probably eleven or twelve, throw respectful—no, worshipful—eyes at him while desperately pretending nonchalance. Slim, wired, and cocky, he must have practiced his how-to-smoke pose before many a mirror. He appears the celebrated philosopher enduring the intellectual infirmities of his inferiors, an appearance that belies preening and nervous self-consciousness—in other words, he looks like a typical Beiruti teenager.

“First you wet the filter with your spit,” I hear him say as I approach. He sticks out his long, overly moist tongue and impresses the end of the cigarette onto it. “Then you inhale deeply, which you can’t do until you’re old enough to know how to smoke without coughing, and the filter will darken to show an alphabet. See?”

The court of boys oohs and aahs as he continues. “That will be the first letter of the name of the next girl who’ll sleep with you. It always works that way.”

“It’s a
T,
” says one of the boys.

“I see an
M
,” says another.

I don’t slow down, but I hear myself say, “It’s a
C
for
Cancer
.”

What words are these have fallen from me?

Have I just channeled Fadia or, worse, my demented mother before she went completely insane? I feel my face flush and my pulse quicken.

But the court doesn’t seem to have heard me, doesn’t catch my small, disembodied retort. The boys and their world persist without me.

“It’s an
S
, of course,” the kinglet now says. “Can’t you tell that it’s an
S
?”

On the way home, a scarf veiling my blue-tinted hair, I remain invisible.

Allow me to stray once more—briefly, I assure you.

Raskolnikov was the catalyst for my obsessive translating.
Crime and Punishment,
the vehicle, was one of the first books I picked up at the bookstore—well,
Crime et Châtiment,
because at the time my French was more seasoned than my English. I loved the novel. (I’m not sure I still do, but that’s another subject. I promised you I wouldn’t stray too far.) I remember it as the first adult novel I read, or the first with a fully developed theme. Dostoyevsky’s St. Petersburg burst into such splendor around me that it became more real than my life, which I found more incomprehensible with every passing day. I belonged in his book, not mine.

So thoroughly impressed by the novel, I read the English translation, and was less so. It was the Constance Garnett translation, and it would be years before I came across the controversies surrounding her work. At the time I hadn’t even heard of Nabokov, let alone his vitriolic rants against her. It was so long ago that I’m not certain he’d even published
Lolita
yet.

The Garnett version was by no means awful. Had I not encountered the French one first, I would have considered it a spectacular book. Only in comparison did I find it lacking. I thought the Garnett version was less charming, more matter-of-fact. I didn’t know which version was the more accurate one, more Dostoyevskian. I thought that if I translated the book into Arabic, I could combine both. I did.

Constance Garnett taught herself to translate. She began with small steps, with Tolstoy’s
The Kingdom of God Is Within You
. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky began with the most difficult Russian bear of all,
The Brothers Karamazov
. I began with
Crime
, the right novel for me. Call me Goldilocks.

I still admire Garnett, once aptly described as a woman of Victorian energies and Edwardian prose. I do appreciate all the criticisms leveled against her and her poor translations. As Joseph Brodsky said, “The reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that they aren’t reading the prose of either one. They’re reading Constance Garnett.”

Who reads translations anymore? Mr. Brodsky misdirected his Russian anger. Instead of attacking Garnett, he should have bashed people who don’t read Russian authors, or German, or Arabic, or Chinese, but choose Westernized imitations instead.

Before she began her missionary work, only the rare English speaker who knew Russian could read those writers. She introduced so many of us, those who can read English but not the original language, to Heaven’s passions. So Joseph and Vladimir can rant, and they do, ever so elegantly and eloquently, but Constance’s zeal has been a blessing.

I can’t tell you how good my translations are since I can’t look at them dispassionately. I am intimately involved. Mine are translations of translations, which by definition means that they are less faithful to the original. Like Constance, I try my best. However, unlike her, I don’t skip over words I don’t know, nor do I cut long passages short. I didn’t and don’t have the intention of translating an entire canon—my ambitions are neither expansive nor comprehensive. I translate for the pleasure it engenders, and I certainly don’t possess Victorian energies. I am an Arab, after all.

Garnett wasn’t the most prolific translator by any means. The Renaissance Venetian Lodovico Dolce translated more than 350 books (Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Castiglione, to name a few), and I’m not sure he was the most prolific either. Earnestness is a common trait among translators.

If you ask me, though, Garnett’s biggest problem was that she was of her time and place. Her work is a reflection of that; it appealed to the English of her generation, which is as it should be—completely understandable. Unfortunately for everyone, her time and place were maddeningly dull. Old chap and cheap port, that sort of thing.

Using Edwardian prose for Dostoyevsky is like adding milk to good tea. Tfeh! The English like that sort of thing.

She also wasn’t a genius. Now, you know, Marguerite Yourcenar did much worse things when she translated Cavafy’s poems into French. She didn’t simply skip over words she didn’t understand, she invented words. She didn’t speak the language, and used Greek speakers to help her. She changed the poems completely, made them French, made them hers. Brodsky would have said that you weren’t reading Cavafy, you were reading Yourcenar, and he would have been absolutely right. Except that Yourcenar’s translations are interesting on their own. She did a disservice to Cavafy, but I can forgive her. Her poems became something different and new, like champagne.

My translations aren’t champagne, and they’re not milky tea either.

I’m thinking arak.

But wait. Walter Benjamin has something to say about all this. In “The Task of the Translator” he wrote: “No translation would be possible if in its ultimate essence it strove for likeness to the original. For in its afterlife—which could not be called that if it were not a transformation and renewal of something living—the original undergoes a change.”

In his own confounding style, Benjamin is saying that if you translate a work of art by sticking close to the original, you can show the surface content of the original and explain the information contained within, but you miss the ineffable essence of the work. In other words, you’re dealing with inessentials.

Take that, Mr. Brodsky and Mr. Nabokov. A right hook and a sucker punch from good old Mr. Benjamin. Had Constance translated Russian works more faithfully, she would have missed the essential.

All right, all right, Constance may have missed both the essential and the inessential, but we should applaud her effort.

Yourcenar also translated Virginia Woolf’s
The Waves
. I can’t bring myself to read her translation, though. In Woolf’s case, unlike Cavafy’s, Yourcenar could read the language. Proust couldn’t read anything but French, and before he wrote his masterpiece he translated the apostle of the aesthetic John Ruskin, an incomparable stylist. Read Ruskin, then read Proust, and compare the influence—compare the incomparable stylists.

Walter Benjamin translated Proust into German. In one of his letters, Benjamin wrote that he refused to read more Proust than was absolutely necessary to finish the translation because he was terrified that the translatee’s exquisitely delicate style would forever seep into the translator’s.