The Translator's Silence

Warsaw in November is the colour of a headache. Grey sky, grey buildings, grey pigeons on grey ledges. Marta did not mind. She had lived here for fifty-one years and had stopped seeing the grey the way fish stop seeing water. It was just the medium in which things happened. She was translating a novel from Swedish, which she did not enjoy. Not the translating. The novel. It was about a man who sails alone across the Atlantic and discovers things about himself, and Marta had translated enough novels about men discovering things about themselves to fill a shelf she would not want in her apartment. The Swedish was beautiful. The insights were not. Her editor, Paweł, called at eleven. "How's the sailing book?" "He's reached the Azores. He's thinking about his father." "They always think about their father." "This one also thinks about the sea as a metaphor for something. I haven't determined what yet. Possibly himself." Paweł laughed. He was a good editor, which in Marta's experience meant he returned calls, paid on time, and did not suggest that she make the translation "more accessible," a phrase she had learned to treat the way a doctor treats a symptom — not the disease itself, but an indicator of something worse underneath. She worked until two, then walked to the bakery on Chmielna Street for a pączek and a coffee. The bakery was run by a woman named Bożena who had been running it since before Marta started coming, and who greeted regular customers by handing them what they always ordered before they could ask. This was either excellent service or a commentary on the predictability of human behaviour. Marta chose not to decide. The pączek was good. The coffee was adequate. She sat by the window and watched the street and thought about the problem she had been avoiding all morning. Page 147. The sailor, alone on his boat in the middle of the Atlantic, speaks to a gannet that has landed on his deck. He speaks to it in Swedish. The passage is strange and tender and, for the first time in the novel, genuinely good. He tells the bird about his daughter, whom he left in Gothenburg, who was seven when he sailed and who will be seven when he comes back, because the trip is only three months but it feels like the kind of three months that changes the length of things. The problem was that the passage worked in Swedish because of a quality the language has — a way of being intimate without being sentimental, of saying private things in a voice that sounds like a public one. Polish did not do this. Polish was a language that went either all the way in or all the way out. It did not stand in the doorway. Marta had been translating for thirty years. She had translated from Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, German, and once, disastrously, from Finnish, a language she had overestimated her competence in and which had punished her for it. She knew what every translator eventually learns: that the job is not converting words but relocating feelings, and that some feelings do not survive the move. She finished her coffee. She walked home through the grey, which was darkening now toward the early dusk of November. In her apartment, she sat at her desk and read page 147 again. The gannet. The daughter. The Atlantic between them, which was also the Atlantic between the Swedish and the Polish, between what the man said and what Marta could make him say. She tried a version. Too formal. She tried another. Too soft. She tried a third that was closer, that had some of the original's strange tenderness, but it wasn't right. The doorway was missing. The Polish wanted to go all the way in, and the passage needed to stay at the threshold. She deleted the third version and sat for a while. Then she wrote it again, differently. She gave the sailor a pause before he spoke to the bird. A pause that wasn't in the Swedish. In the pause, he looks at the water, and the water is grey — a different grey from Warsaw, but grey — and in that pause, the reader understands that he is going to say something private, and that the saying of it is difficult, and that the bird will not judge him for it. The pause was hers. It was not in the original. It was the kind of liberty that some translators take and others refuse, and Marta had spent her career refusing and was now, at sixty-three, sitting in her apartment in November, allowing herself the smallest possible addition: a silence before a confession. She read it back. It worked. Not the same way the Swedish worked, but in its own way, in Polish, which was a language that did not stand in doorways but which could, if you were careful, leave one open.