Читать книгу Revenge of the Translator - Brice Matthieussent - Страница 41

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* The term Kiwi was used during WWI to designate the soldiers in the US Air Force who didn’t fly. This word corresponds more or less with what French pilots call the rampants. David Grey thinks of William Faulkner, known for his juvenile passion for flying and the brazen lies concerning his supposed exploits as a WWI pilot: contrary to his bragging, the author of Soldiers’ Pay never piloted a single military plane and remained a Kiwi.

A brief aeronautic commentary: the image of the plane tracing its graceful arabesques through the serene sky seems to obsess David. I suspect the American translator envisages a low-altitude machine-gunning of Prote or a proper bombardment of his posts. When I furnished Grey with a few additional arms, I forgot to include in my panoply those fatal Easter eggs and metallic hailstones that fall from the sky without warning, accompanied, a fraction of a second after impact, by a terrifying howl of engines launched at full speed when—memory of reels of news bulletins from WWII—the German Stukas or the Japanese Zeros burst forth from the sun and head straight for the parade of unlucky refugees who immediately dive toward the side of the road. Grey, who loves the cinema and aviation, lets himself be invaded by these images in a daze. Replacing Prote, not only in relation to Doris, but also on the page, visibly tempts him. Tired of being the mere prosthesis of his French author, he would like to feel the powerful sensations of flight or acrobatic eroticism, to chase Prote from his cockpit, wrest the control stick, the pen, and the beautiful brunette from his hands at the same time. Yielding to the confusion of his effervescent spirit, he imagines assaulting his author in an air attack.

For David Grey, my kindred spirit, my brother, finds himself as irritated as me by this hierarchical division of space: above the horizon line, the impervious page is an empty sky, tarnished by a mosquito or a fly that soon comes to life; Grey and I remain pitifully nailed to the ground, vulgar Kiwis deprived of flight, while my author and his author—my mosquito, his fly—buzz freely up above in graceful whirls while evoking oh!s and ah!s from the crowd of delighted spectators. But they don’t suspect, those naïve men, those ignoramuses, those space cases, those naïve compatriots, that it’s me (or Grey) who is flying the plane, who is making the spectacle happen. He and I who pedal in sync at the back of the cabin smeared with oil and grease, spinning the propeller and keeping the old crate in the air! He and I who, hidden among the sheet metal and the clouds, work the controls with our tense arms, crippled with painful cramps, in order to maneuver that winged puppet! For a moment, it was as if there was no pilot on the plane other than me, or him … For a moment, we believed … But of course it’s a deceptive illusion, we are nothing more than servile copilots, subordinates obedient to the orders from the control tower, to the directives of the conductor, faithfully playing the score, following his instructions to the letter, performing with ardor or reserve, nostalgia or enthusiasm, enacting the roles created by another for the enjoyment of the audience.

The aerial attack born from David Grey’s overexcited imagination suffers nevertheless from a major handicap: despite his passion for flying machines, the American translator doesn’t have the slightest idea how to fly a plane. (Flight of the Bumblebee)