English I

For eleven years Miriam had translated everything Halvard Sjaastad wrote, and for eleven years she had never once met him. He preferred it that way. The contracts came through an agent in Oslo, the manuscripts arrived as photocopies that smelled faintly of pipe smoke, and the cheques, when they came, were signed in an editor's hand. She had built a career on the inside of another person's sentences without ever hearing his voice, and she had come to think of this as a kind of intimacy purer than any conversation. The last manuscript reached her the week after his funeral. There was no note. The novel was slender, barely a hundred and forty pages, and concerned a woman who translated legal documents in a provincial town and who, over the course of one long winter, came to believe that a single clause she had rendered years before had sent an innocent man to prison. Miriam read it twice before she began: once for the story and once for the music, which was her habit. It was on the third reading, the working one, that she found the line. Near the centre of the book the translator-heroine remembers a proverb her mother used to say, and Sjaastad gives it first in the old dialect before glossing it into standard Norwegian. The gloss was wrong. Not carelessly wrong; Miriam had caught and quietly mended a thousand careless errors over the years. It was wrong with intention, the way a key is turned the wrong way to lock rather than to open. The dialect said, plainly, that the river remembers its old course. The character's gloss said that the river forgets where it has been. Miriam sat with this for a long time. A lesser writer might have nodded off mid-sentence and let an opposite slip through. But Sjaastad did not nod off. He had spent a lifetime insisting that a translator's only loyalty was to meaning, and here, in his final pages, he had handed her a heroine who broke that loyalty on purpose, who looked at what her mother had said and chose to write down its reverse, and who was never, in the remaining forty pages, corrected or caught. The obvious thing was to footnote it. Translator's note: the gloss reverses the dialect; the discrepancy is the author's. That was what the profession demanded. It would protect her, since no reviewer could then accuse her of the blunder, and it would protect him, framing the reversal as deliberate art rather than a dying man's slip. But a footnote would also explain the thing, and Miriam understood, with the certainty she had only ever felt about other people's sentences, that to explain it was to undo it. Sjaastad had not wanted his reader to be told. He had wanted the reader to arrive at the wrongness alone, on the third reading, the working one, and to feel the river insist on its old course beneath the character's denial. He had written the book, she saw now, for the one person on earth guaranteed to read it three times. She closed the manuscript and took out a clean sheet. Then she began to translate the first line exactly as he had written it, gloss and error and all, and left the footnote where it belonged: unwritten.