Newspaper and Fruit Dish, 1916
(Oil on canvas, 96.4 × 64.1 × 4.4 cm)
BY Juan Gris
Yale University Art Gallery

Also like an Olympian, she had a rarefied domain: an Eichler house-turned-translation-center where she had a fellowship. The other young women on the 18 bus hardly knew there was such a place, where low-glare lights made everyone look like an Ingres portrait, and each conversation was a Venn diagram of categories and discourses. Every evening in the atrium, the younger fellows resumed a debate between those who saw themselves as translating authors with authorial intents and those who rather emphasized the transfer of cultural, historical, and linguistic contexts.

“Then, to draw your argument to its only possible conclusion, you hold that Anna Karenina and ‘The Tale of Baba Yaga’ should be indistinguishable?”

“It’s worth observing that all of you espousing author intention, work on a dominant literature.”

Yet as divisive as these discussions could be, both camps were alike relieved not to need to preface things, as they needed to among non-translators, who assumed “translator” meant “interpreter” and swiftly formed a picture of them in courtrooms and at treaty signings. In lighter moods the young translators discussed how and whether to correct these mistakes. A translator of Elsa Morante never said explicitly, but allowed people to think she worked for Benetton. A tanka expert consented to be a technology journalist’s source, leaking news of a Japanese prototype for an in-shoe propulsion device. On the other hand, none of them let anybody think they worked for the government. They had all met social services interpreters who, earnest like firefighters, bordered on maudlin.

The dissenters at the Eichler house were the older translators. In a fret about their work’s usefulness, they wanted their younger colleagues to learn from their mistakes. “For many years I cared chiefly about cadence and idiom,” said one or another of them. “I would sooner have let my children starve than go to work at the UN. But now I look around: my books are out of print, and the poets who seemed to speak for me then, now seem frivolous. At least if I’d done some court translation, I could say I’d participated.” The younger translators, hearing them, thought but did not express that their mistake was not their choice of career but their dreary and dated subjects.

Usually Katya impressed on strangers her literary credentials. As soon as she ordered the quiche lorraine, she next flaunted the nouveau roman, like a rare and exclusive garment to her bystanders’ ready-mades.

Usually Katya impressed on strangers her literary credentials. As soon as she ordered the quiche lorraine, she next flaunted the nouveau roman, like a rare and exclusive garment to her bystanders’ ready-mades. An exception: in a taxi whose African driver had distended francophone vowels, she adopted the late-Okie accent of her Fresno childhood. It was impossible, in such company, to pretend that her knowledge of French imbued her with uniqueness. Yet if she and the cabbie knew the same vocabulary words, still, all that the words signified must be so different for each of them — her lit, for instance, a particular bed with an embroidered coverlet in Paris; his lit perhaps his parents’ bed in a bloc in Libreville; her aller to stroll without time constraints, or else take a high-speed train; his aller perhaps to leap in the door of a moving mini-bus — that his French, although contiguous to hers, must be out of bounds nevertheless.

She adjunct-taught a graduate class, “Translator as Microscope,” backing out a dictum from her own method: Translate Each Word Profoundly, and You Profoundly Translate the Book. While her colleagues in comparative literature grumbled about eating the English department’s crumbs, Katya was relieved not to have to teach the legions of story-lovers, for whom every book was a springboard to associative experience. “IWC!” she wrote on student drafts, for “imprecise word choice.” In her department and at the Eichler house, she acquired a reputation as a theorist whose absolutism gained credence because she applied it first to herself.