Читать книгу Revenge of the Translator - Brice Matthieussent - Страница 15

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* Hide-behind. In French: le Se-cache-derrière. The author, whom I questioned about this neologism, immediately responded to me by email that he discovered this bizarre term in the The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero, in the chapter entitled “Fauna of the United States.” I quote: “The Hide-behind is always hiding behind something. Whichever way a man turns, it’s always behind him, which is why nobody has ever satisfactorily described one, though it has killed and eaten many a lumberjack.”

That the author is comparing his hero David Grey, American translator of French novels,† to a Hide-behind, a furtive and voracious assassin, serves as proof of the nebulousness of his prose. I, for example, have never killed or devoured even one lumberjack, no character or any author of the numerous American novels that I’ve translated into French. One could nevertheless make the claim that I have masticated their texts, but discreetly, on the sly: not only the delicious flesh, the choice and daring cuts, the tasty tendons and crunchy passages, but also the bones, the cartilage, the tough nerves, the descriptive tunnels, the clogged arteries, the indigestible joints, the nails, the repugnant hairs, the contrived dialogues, the misplaced voices, the twisted prose … All of that cannibalized, digested, absorbed, then vomited back up in my own language. Sometimes you have to have good teeth and a solid stomach.

This Hide-behind, invisible because he is always hidden behind the back of another, makes me think of the Courbet painting La Source. In a pastoral setting, we see, in fact we devour with our eyes, a young nude woman with sumptuous curves, depicted from behind. Nonchalantly resting on a large rock, she is absorbed in the contemplation of a little spring into which she has plunged her hand. Standing before this painting and behind that engrossing beauty in which I, without her knowing, admire her large hips, her fine waist, her shapely back, her languid posture, I am Borges’s Hide-behind. Ready to jump on my prey. Like a good translator. Not seen, not caught, but carnivorous.

Little by little, I climb. (Trickster’s Nook)

† There are so many passages, even entire pages, that I have redacted in my translation that I have to give a bit of explanation of the novel’s plot.