Читать книгу Revenge of the Translator - Brice Matthieussent - Страница 35

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* “Doris again, Doris forever … In your name, I hear or, gold, dors, an order to sleep, Ulysses’s trip to the land of the Lotus Eaters, and also his departure and its groundwork—ho! hiss!—the wind that suddenly blows the sails before the boat has left the port to head for the open sea, adventure, the unknown; or else, the inverse, in one direction and then the other, the return to the mother land, reunion with the mother tongue after a long absence, or else the whalers of Pequod shut tightly in their fragile skiff, preparing their harpoons to stop the white monster, drive their banderillas into its milky skin covered with dreadful crustaceans, sprinkled with asterisks, like a negative of the sky. Doris, I turn to you as a ship reaches a port after a long absence, ailing Ulysses or pitiful Pytheas, reaching the end of a desolate wandering over the sea in the middle of land, from a hazardous arrival to a hasty departure. I had given up hope of ever seeing my motherland again, so afraid was I of losing everything in the liquid plains. But in a remarkable role reversal, you are the one who goes back and forth between Paris and New York, assistant to the devious Abel Prote, you the golden light to my translucent eye, my lucky traveling star, my transporter weaving invisible threads between the ancient and the new worlds, spinning her tapestry of love in the sky where I hope one day to see my person outlined in the interlacing of all those nocturnal flights, among the shimmering stars, above the Atlantic swell.”

I deem David Grey’s romantic temperament compatible with this declaration that I add shamelessly to his diary, which, once again, seems to me lacking in spirit, in lyricism. My timid author is quite the nuisance! (Tender Navigator)