One More Thing (30 page)

This?

Then Audetat got his chance to explain who he was and what he had done so far. He sharpened his monologue by the day as
he explained again and again why it was so funny that none of these supposedly sophisticated people could understand something that clearly came naturally to his audience right here at the Café de Flore: that
Don Quixote
stood as apart from the rest of its era as the
Mona Lisa
did from its own now irrelevant contemporaries in that long hallway of the Louvre. There was a spark of the current running through each of those works—so to speak, of course, expanded Audetat; the two works, in fact, had far more in common with each other than with their contemporaries.

Let’s say the
Mona Lisa
is your favorite painting. Okay? So what’s your second-favorite painting? Is it another Italian portrait from 1504? See, the hands that were up are coming down. You’re laughing, but you get what I mean. Okay, so, similarly …

All the tourists would listen, rapt, inspired, flattered. While they never had read any other literature from medieval Spain, they had often been to the Louvre as recently as that day, and they were always happy to learn that it wasn’t their fault that they hadn’t remembered anything in the entire museum other than the
Mona Lisa
.

But while Audetat was getting better and better at talking about the biggest question he faced, when the café closed each night, he found he still wasn’t any closer to answering it.

How does one follow up
Don Quixote
? Even—especially—if you’re just the translator?

He once again ran through and extended the shelf of Spanish-language literature he had been browsing in his mind.

Gabriel García Márquez?

The original translations were still good, relevant, powerful.

Borges?

He loved Borges, but it didn’t feel destined for a major translation. It was, perhaps, too cool to catch fire; it seemed expressly written to be discovered in a lightless nook of a library or basement
or, best, basement library. Plus, Audetat knew, part of the fun of loving Borges was in being one of the few to love Borges and in passionately recommending him to people who you secretly knew probably wouldn’t like him as much as you did.

Neruda?

Pablo Neruda was about as pretty and pure as poetry could get, understandably and deservedly timeless and popular. But anyone who had ever ordered tacos could translate Neruda without much help. Nothing much to do there.

Lorca?

Vargas Llosa?

Eh.

He looked out the café window at the colorful leaves and scarves dotted across the girls of almost-Paris in October and wondered if he would translate anything at all. All that held his true interest right now was this scene in front of him and the desire he had, heightened as it was by living in an age that is supposed to know better, to be a part of it, to disappear into that sentimental idea of the life of the Paris writer that the rational side of him knew had expired long before he had arrived. Sad that he could never live in the Paris he remembered once dreaming of in his youth, he let his mind wander off across life and literature until it settled almost independently on the gnawing notion that perhaps the most true and timeless version of Paris, for everyone, might be a version of this one—the Paris filtered through remembered dreams.

Then he knew what to write next.

Everyone who had ever said that they wanted to read Proust “someday” found that someday had arrived, as Proust shot from deep in the middle of the alphabetized classics sections to the front shelf of top sellers.

It is an inside joke of history that its most exciting adventures inevitably end their careers as homework. Beheadings, rebellions, thousand-year wars, incest on the royal throne, electricity, art, opera, dogs in outer space. By this, the once-pop writings of Proust—like those of Cervantes before—had been quietly serving out an indefinite sentence in homework bins for generations. But now, Proust’s words were back to what they were originally intended to be: once again, kids cheated on their homework so they would have more time to read Proust.

There was no reason, once people thought about it, that an American poet who could translate Spanish, and who lived in Paris, might not be capable of translating a work of French as well. But no one had thought to expect it, and so the surprise revelation that he knew
two
languages well enough to turn their respective masterpieces into modern translations of now-unparalleled quality meant that the work exhilarated not only on its merits but additionally for its audacity. The imagined picture of J. C. Audetat, famed popularizer of
Don Quixote
, casually huddled with his old-fashioned paper and pens in the midst of the beeping and buzzing cafés of modern Paris to bring Proust back into the modern mind, itself became an irresistible image that floated above the new classic like an invisible book jacket and built further, unprecedented anticipation for what was to follow.

Which was … what?

He started writing poetry again, but it didn’t come as easily. It was hard now to get past the self-consciousness—the silliness, really—of being such a well-established adult applying himself, seriously, to such a youthful joy.

A poet? Was that something to call oneself? Was that something to be?

He carried his old notebooks of poetry to the Café de Flore to see what he could learn. For hours, the notebooks sat on the table, and Audetat sat in dread. He wasn’t sure if he was hoping he would find it good, or bad, or which he feared more.

When he finally opened the notebooks, he found that he liked his old poetry. Loved it, even. It was young, unlike Audetat, and it was unafraid to be seen as foolish, unlike Audetat. But he also knew when he saw the poems that he wasn’t a poet anymore.

At least he had been one, once.

Maybe the timing just hadn’t been right. Maybe in the past, it would have been something. Maybe in the future, it would be something.

Now it was now, and now what?

Translator’s block: Does that exist? wondered Audetat.

Audetat left almost-Paris, reasoning that no one there would care too much about the English translator of Proust, and set out on a university tour of the United States. He spoke about the art of translation to full, grand auditoriums everywhere he went, the ones normally reserved only for visiting dignitaries and the most profane comedians of the day.

People didn’t know exactly how many languages Audetat
spoke (his college transcripts revealed Latin, but no other clues) and that mystery had become part of his legend. But the one language that he spoke unquestionably well, in public and in private, was the off-the-cuff vernacular of his day.

“What’s next?” was the most anticipated question at Audetat’s lectures. It was usually the last question, too, as if the rooms somehow always had the collective intelligence to save their best question for the end.

“I have no idea,” Audetat would say. “Any suggestions?” He cupped a hand to his ear, knowing the audience would enjoy getting the last laugh.

“
Anna Karenina
!” “
The Odyssey
!” “Confucius! No—Mao!”

“Some … interesting suggestions,” Audetat would say dryly, to more laughter. “All present some challenges. Anyway. Thank you so much for coming. See you at the bar.”

Afterward, he’d whisper to the student organizers a question he had learned long ago always had exactly one answer per town—“Is there a bar around here where writers hang out?”—and then headed out to Fox Head Tavern in Iowa City or Bukowksi’s in Boston (which Audetat thought sounded too on the nose to be authentic and was right) and ordered a drink where people would be most likely to start a shy, respectful conversation with him and where he could disappear into his two favorite pastimes: the poetry of everyday conversations and the people who thought he was brilliant.

After a while, somehow, this got boring, too.

The new translation of
Anna Karenina
was not a particularly dramatic departure from most major translations that had come before it—and that was part of what made it legendary.

A nearly thousand-page novel, written originally in the plain-spoken Russian of the nineteenth century and translated into English by a poet who had so far only proven his abilities in the relatively related languages of Spanish and French, would understandably tempt the translator to make a “statement” with it, went the unanimous consensus—something at least somewhat equivalent to the extraordinary challenge.

But Audetat’s grandest statement was simply the fact of the work itself: the fact that he was somehow able to do this work, and had chosen these works, and that now, on the bestseller lists and bedside tables alike, one could find
Don Quixote
by Cervantes and
The Search for Lost Time
by Proust and
Anna Karenina
by Tolstoy, one stacked on top of the next, all excellent, all relevant, all because of Audetat.