Читать книгу Revenge of the Translator - Brice Matthieussent - Страница 18

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* I notice with stupefaction that I, the humble goods elevator, the pass-through, the rotating tray, etc., have succeeded in sliding, insinuating myself into the bottom of each of the novel’s pages thus far. A bit unusual, isn’t it, a bit audacious, for the translator is ordinarily a discreet, self-effacing being who knows how to behave himself. But why shouldn’t I? In any case, what’s the point of burying my head in the sand? This novel is utter nonsense and the author a scoundrel. In my opinion, I should never have agreed to translate this book … I should delete these sentences, the publisher will not allow them. Then again, no, I’ll leave them. Like the driver stretching his legs when he finally reaches the rest stop on the highway, I feel better and better: I no longer have pins and needles in my limbs, my aches are fading, my cramps dispersing. When translating nonstop, one gets stiff, atrophies, fades. And I notice that this escapade is oxygenating my blood, that this improvised stop is doing me a great deal of good.

Where was I? Oh yes, this novel is utter nonsense. Imagine, dear reader, that the hero of Translator’s Revenge, the young and sympathetic David Grey, a professional translator (from French to English), a native New Yorker, whom you don’t know very well yet, sometimes mistakes himself for Zorro, the masked avenger dressed all in black who always appears without warning, where no one expects him. In fact, a bit like me, I’m suddenly realizing … Sometimes, Grey also disguises himself as the enigmatic character you find on the labels of certain bottles of port: a man dressed in a long cape and a big hat that plunges his face into darkness. All of this is of course ridiculous, for as soon as a translator feels even the slightest desire for vengeance, his work suffers for it: his head is elsewhere, he becomes absentminded, or worse, dishonest. As for David Grey’s absorption of the man in black on the bottle of Sandeman port, it’s teeming with perfidious double entendres: is the translator drinking? Is he plotting against the creator of the book? Is he an assassin? A mercenary ready to sell his services to the highest bidder? A saboteur secretly slipping grains of sand into the well-oiled machinery of the novel to make it skid out of control or even flip over, bringing a full halt to the mechanism? Or else a coward, a shameful, timid man who constantly hides his face and shows only his back? And so returns the specter of the Hide-behind …

Instead of accumulating humiliating images and insidious allusions, the author would do better to restore the profession’s coat of arms, one that should depict a chameleon. (Translator’s No)