Katya hesitated. The woman’s question, though clearly a proxy for the same guerilla theatre, was sufficiently grounded in the text that she ought to answer it. It was true she’d deliberately streamlined farouche. At her meeting with Brun in the walled garden before the final English proofs, Brun had confided, “They think they can lure me into making retrograde political statements, on the premise that art does not exist apart from economics. It’s their opinion farouche is code for Clichy-sous-Bois and Algerians: a signal to others of my same estate that our privilege is under threat. Being world-bound themselves, they can’t comprehend how irrelevant this year’s headlines are to my process.”

“I took that register out,” said Katya, “because Yolande Brun asked me to.” She knew as soon as she said it that it sounded like a mistake, especially from the theorist of translation as microscope.

She knew as soon as she said it that it sounded like a mistake, especially from the theorist of translation as microscope.

“What are you, her ghostwriter?” the non-New Voice assailed, but Katya’s questioner maintained sobriety and the forms of respect, asking if Katya thought it not important to interrogate the writer’s motivations, as well as to translate the text.

Katya had answered this question dozens of times in the past. She said, “No. The translator’s duty is fidelity to the text.” This time, however, her questioner looked like a trout had leaped into her lap. She didn’t ask another follow-up.

The remainder of the Q & A was forgettable; but the woman’s questions and to a lesser extent, the non-New Voice’s derisiveness, persisted in Katya’s thoughts on the flight home from the conference. The woman’s competence with the text and her insistent civility were the more treacherous, covering as they did for a radicalism that ought to have been broad and strident. Captive in her window seat, Katya engaged in an unpleasant fantasy: in an interview, Yolande Brun disclosed, “Katya often mistranslated. You see, I speak quite fluent English and could have translated my own books, if translation was what I wanted. I accepted Katya as a translator, not because she had talent, but because we are sympathists. Our subject is the costs of other people to the integrity of the self.”

As usual, she had to trick her mailbox into opening. A padded envelope from her publisher was crammed into the box: extra copies of Purple for display in her university department. Suddenly, under the fluorescent lights, she was enervated by the thought of having to carry more books upstairs, as well as those in her conference tote. She hurriedly tricked the mailbox shut without emptying it.