Stairway at 48 rue de Lille, Paris, 1906
(Oil on panel, 33 x 23.5 cm)
BY Edward Hopper
Whitney Museum of American Art

One place her reputation did not precede her was to her apartment building. In the fluorescent entryway, she felt vulnerable, fussing with her mailbox lock: generic and accostable, with little opportunity to speak French words and thus distinguish herself. One time, a young woman recommended a novel about ancient druids; on another occasion, a fellow faculty member, a professor of social work, knowing Katya was a translator, urged her to donate her services to a city agency. “They’re looking for translators all the time. Volunteers like you are a lifeline.” She peeped at Katya’s mailbox to get her apartment number.

Katya was always grateful to get to her door without a similar encounter. Inside her apartment, the piles of books, her van Oosterwyck, and the poster for Last Year at Marienbad attested to her discernment. She heated a boxed soup, dropped into her chair, and addressed herself to Brun’s new manuscript:

The aunts were purple ringmasters. Purple hats, purple cheeks. Knowledge was empurplement. Purply they willed her off the divan to be bruised in the dance. The dancing people bent and bumped. The aunts had not taught her to dance. Why allow her to jump off the haymow, if what she needed was to know how to dance? All her past had prepared her only for more childhood. She reviled her own goldenness in her pale dress. The dancers closed ranks on her ignorance. We know you put flour in a pillowcase. We know you made mudcakes.

He sat so close to her, he pinched the loose flesh on her thigh. She felt the pinch purpling. The aunts dispersed to guard the doorways and prevent her exiting. But she was pinned under his heavy leg. Thus a stuck moth reviews in its moth-mind the flowers along the path, the stars like unreachable street lights, its own peak altitude. She noticed six buttons on the front of his shirt. She smelled his hair tonic. The pain in her thigh was excruciating. He said, —You want experience.

Katya was invited to be a featured Saturday speaker at the Society of Translators conference, reading from and taking questions about Purple, which was just published. She was also up for the jury prize for the year’s best translation.

The awards ceremony was the Friday night before her reading. All the conference attendees assembled for dinner and toasting in the hotel ballroom. Katya and others from the Eichler house colonized a large round table, bringing extra chairs and setting places on laps so that none of them was exiled. There were many remarks and minor awards before the two big prize announcements. Finally the Society President rose to announce the winner of the New Voice in Translation Prize, which had launched the careers of half the Eichler fellows, Katya included. Katya didn’t hear the winner’s name in the roar that superseded its announcement.

There were many remarks and minor awards before the two big prize announcements. Finally the Society President rose to announce the winner…

“What?!” said the tanka expert, “they gave it to that gutter punk?”

“Is this a marketing stunt to get the free weeklies to cover the conference?”

The New Voice achieved the podium. He was more slogan button than shirt. He waited for quiet, as no New Voice had needed to in the history of the award.

At last he spoke. “As a translator of the ephemeral media of protest in the so-called ‘developing’ world, I come here tonight to deliver a message to the Society of Translators from the activists on the Narmada Dam, from the campesinos in Chiapas, from the kids in the banlieues! Listen to the message: translation is justice work! We must translate and disseminate corporate memos on worker worth. We must translate and disseminate classified war briefs. We must translate the penal code of the prison industrial complex.

But we must decline to translate works that reify the consumerist police state. And we must decline to take money for our services. This is the message from Rio, from Lagos, from Mexico City: if you make your living off translation, you are the IMF. You are the British Empire. You are the World Bank.”

He turned to the Society President. “I decline to accept this award.”