Читать книгу Revenge of the Translator - Brice Matthieussent - Страница 36

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* David Grey is translating Prote’s novel (N.d.T.), a rather dry title lacking in panache. This N.d.T. stinks of DDT … I will not give my opinion on this novel within a novel. The reader can make his or her own judgment. But I will take advantage of my subordinate position, of my liberty, and of David’s melancholic stroll on the deserted Long Island shore after Doris’s departure (“Air France Flight 875 to Paris-Charles de Gaulle, immediate boarding at gate 34,” announces the robotic female voice) to add this new seaside scene to the text:

“Beneath a white sky specked with a motionless helicopter, the waves slowly move away from the thin black horizon line, they approach, accelerate, reach the shore, and unfurl there, immediately replaced by other waves that come to crash on the pebble beach endlessly, filling that large strip as my lines succeed each other at the bottom of the page.”

A bit farther on, I insert:

“The sand is littered with debris in varying states of decomposition: pieces of colored glass, bits of plastic that are impossible to identify, shells of crabs in the shape of horseshoes, large spiral shells that are rarely intact, whitish drooping jellyfish, as if dead, heaps of brown or beige shredded kelp, flat pebbles, tempting to throw like spinning tops toward the surface of the ocean so that they bounce and ricochet more and more rapidly before sinking abruptly. David Grey goes down toward the part of the beach covered by the low tide. He stops suddenly and kneels down in front of the little hills made up of fine and supple strands of sand intertwined like tiny rigging. In the shallows, the razor clams await the rising tide. David remembers an ingenious strategy for catching them: all you have to do is leave a pinch of salt on the hole beneath the hill and the mollusk, lured by that crystalline asterisk and that suddenly salty water, will wrongly conclude that the tide has already risen, that it should come out of its hiding place to poke its nose above the sand, and then you simply snatch it up. But Grey has no salt on him: the razor clams can wait in peace for the real rise of the tide. In the same way, couldn’t a cheating weight lifter, with a large magnet hidden above him in the rafters … ? (Trickster’s Net)