Читать книгу Revenge of the Translator - Brice Matthieussent - Страница 10

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* I reside here below this thin black bar. This is my place, my living room, my den. The walls are painted white and covered with several lines of thin black characters, like an uneven frieze, a changing wallpaper. Welcome to you, dear reader, who has crossed the threshold of my lair. It’s not as spacious as that of my upstairs neighbor, but in his absence I welcome his visitors who have been rerouted by his inexplicable desertion. I know it’s him that you came to see, and you’ve stumbled upon me instead. You will have to make do. I rub elbows in this modest space. I pile up these lines to keep my cave from becoming a coffin, my bunker from becoming a tomb.

Make yourself at home, relax, and, please, check at the door your flattery and formulaic smiles typical of visitors to the proprietor, the seigneur and master, who lives and receives guests on the floor above. I hope that you will not feel too out of place, even if I have a few surprises in store for you. Just be careful not to hit your head on the ceiling. As you’ll see, the height changes from one room to the next. Know also that in my home all the spaces are adjoined, like the maids’ rooms that are sometimes lumped in a row alongside each other on the top floor of a building: each leads into the next and you must cross all of them to reach the last. It’s not very practical, but there’s no way around it.

Normally, I don’t host anyone, I remain invisible and silent, allocated to my cramped residence, relegated beneath the earth.

There, above, in the open air, above the bar, that airtight, insurmountable lid, I am certainly omnipresent, but in a way that even I don’t really understand, in a bizarre form, ectoplasmic and constrained. I maneuver around incognito, disembodied, an obedient and faithful phantom like a shadow fastened to a body, since the beginning of time existing in the mold of the other, of my noisy neighbor who struts in the spotlight, that tall beanpole you came to visit, but who has suddenly disappeared without leaving a forwarding address.

This is not a life; it’s barely existing. My notes? Apparitions as fleeting as those of a ferret or a mole, of a shooting star or a green flash: the servile explications of the exegete fear-stricken by faith. (Translator’s Night)