As a child Katya swam in backyard pools with grotto landscaping. She knew without anyone saying so that she lived in Fresno’s best neighborhood: the most rose bushes per capita and almost no single-story houses. Beds, in her experience, had footboards and dust ruffles. Trucks and window air conditioners were apart and alien, but in passing merely curious, like a film reel flickering. Her first palpable bewilderment came at a classmate’s house: the house not a house, but an apartment, downtown near offices. The fact of the front door being upstairs was irreconcilable in a way that made her legs brittle. Then the classmate’s mother never alluded to dolls or butterfly nets, but took the girls on errands to waiting rooms and the post office. Katya — disoriented, undervalued — resented her friend’s nonchalance. “Your house is weird,” she struck out at her, the word “weird” a basket in which to catch expectations unmet, the lolling-head boy on the public bus, and fish sticks for lunch. When soon the classmate moved away, Katya felt order restored; in time she used her as a reference point — “That was when Nicole was here, so it was second grade” — without collateral disruption. Ultimately, she lapsed from referring to her, as eventually she also forgot that once she had not just withstood, but burrowed into the suburban.

In Paris as a college student, Katya studied comparative literature. She adulated her female professors with brains like lion’s teeth, their scarves of geometric design the flags of their intellect. These professors lectured on restraint: “not the baggy confessional, but the icicle strike” of an exactly rendered instant. Duras was the general heroine; Katya wrote numerous essays relating lacework, flower painting, and miniatures to Moderato Cantabile. Moreover, speaking French
in France was quotidian; in California, it was glamorous…. like Zeus dispensing with his shepherd’s cloak, she enjoyed her own effect. “Duras’s jagged subjectivities, repulsive and magnetic, are the modern symbolic equivalent of Maria van Oosterwyck’s insects.” The microscope became her ideal. Often, reading a thin French book, she imagined her own eyes and mind as lenses in correspondence. Professors praised her specificity but alluded to limitations of arc and range: “Your strength is at the word level. You have a high, close perimeter.” She took this more as an assessment of talent, than of deficit. The perimeter was irrelevant, when within its walls, there was so much of such resonance, as to be inexhaustible. She began translating the novels of Duras’s disciple Yolande Brun, still alive and typing in her ancestral hôtel, subsisting as far as Katya could tell on campari and sponge fingers. Yolande’s books constantly reprised fracture and icicle strike. Her ballerinas and society wives were surfaces sufficiently complex for Katya’s microscope.

Of necessity, Katya returned to the States. The market for her Brun translations was naturally not Paris, but Berkeley and Cambridge. She needed to be close to foundation officers and her university press. Moreover, speaking French in France was quotidian; in California, it was glamorous. She rode the bus and grocery shopped disguised as a young woman her own age, who possibly worked in publishing or possibly at a nonprofit; but her accented ordering of quiche lorraine revealed her radiance, and like Zeus dispensing with his shepherd’s cloak, she enjoyed her own effect.

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.

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.”

The Eichler fellows reacted with either defensiveness or contempt. Those who sometimes lamented their could-have-been UN pensions, this time rallied to literature’s defense: “Stories are the midwives of empathy! A thousand tracts on poorhouses did less than one copy of Oliver Twist.” The more satirical translators raised a boisterous toast, “To us, the IMF.” But whereas her colleagues let themselves be provoked, or made a fuss of not taking the bait, Katya discounted the insult. The man’s metaphors were messy; his concerns were full of bycatch. She recommended that students like him drop her graduate class. So while the others at her table drew their outrage out, Katya used the minutes to think of the most resonant English approximate for Brun’s “les soi-limites.”

A saga translator won the jury prize. She made a very few remarks about the fatalism of Ragnar Lodbrok’s death song.

The man’s metaphors were messy; his concerns were full of bycatch. She recommended that students like him drop her graduate class.

The next day, after a short preface sketching her theory of Translator as Microscope, Katya read the fulcrum chapter, which ricocheted dizzyingly between the girl, the man, and the unembodied, but suggestedly female narrator. The crowd was thinner than she might have wished, due to her loss of the jury prize, but nonetheless the first comment in the Q&A was an accolade for being “the American amanuensis of such an original elucidator of the individual consciousness.”

The second comment came from the abdicator of the New Voice in Translation Prize, who was sitting in the middle of a row of girls and boys, all of whom had haircuts like reckless potted plants. He said, “I’d like to know your thoughts on the work of Yannick Ibrahim, please.”

She replied equably that she did not know Ibrahim’s work.

“I see. Then please tell me your opinion of Miriam Djannou.”

“I’m afraid I don’t know her work either.”

“Astonishing. You don’t know the work of Ibrahim and Djannou, when all of France is riveted, and repeats their rhymes, and blazons their couplets in subway tunnels? But you do know the work of some grande bourgeoise who eats plums out of season and bilks her gardener?”

Katya had never, in fact, seen Yolande eat any kind of fruit.

“Next question, please,” said the moderator.

A female companion of the non-New Voice piped up. She waved the French edition. “I have to take issue with your translation of the word ‘farouche’ as ‘shy,’ referring to the protagonist. You must be aware that farouche has a second register, ‘savage,’ which opens depths and sows danger in the original French text, and which was the locus of a provocative critique of the book in France. Since you’ve spoken about your scrupulous attention to word choice, ‘shy’ can’t be an accident. So my question is, why did you block this avenue of criticism?”

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.

There was the van Oosterwyck; the Marienbad couple; a framed broadside of her lecture at the University of Chicago. For once, they did not appease her as she hurried to her bedroom, where she tried to intercept sleep before her thoughts carried her out of sleep’s range. But finally she sat up, and complying with an impulse, took down the French text of the first book of Brun’s she had ever read, which was also the only one someone else had translated. She had never read the book again, yet named it in interviews as the origin of her interest in translating Brun. Now she felt it as a lapse that the characters weren’t an artist’s model and a mechanic, as she’d remembered them, but a ballerina dancing “The Sleeping Beauty” and an Indochina War veteran. In the past, she must have been oblivious to the succinct ability of such markers of identity to “sow danger” and “open depths.” Tonight, reliving the poised critique of the woman at the conference, she could not catch sight of the characters’ inner lives through the thicket of their ramifications.

Now dead rose canes were
the headstones of the working class. The building they entered was multistory concrete with the remnants of yellow paint.

She fell asleep near daybreak, and awoke to a social worker knocking at her apartment.

“I understand you’re a translator,” the social worker said, jamming his clipboard through the door as soon as she opened it. His wide stance and sturdy neck gave him an aspect of readiness. On his clipboard she saw a printout from a volunteer database.

She let pass the moment when she would have said, “Literary. French.” Her microscope was discredited. She said, “I’ve never interpreted.”

He said, “Here’s your chance for experience.”

They took the bus to a neighborhood that was slapdash fifty years ago, built in haste to house factory workers during World War II. Now dead rose canes were the headstones of the working class. The building they entered was multistory concrete with the remnants of yellow paint. The corridor had neither carpet nor linoleum, but a relief topography of carpet glue. Thus Katya was baffled when the apartment door opened and she stepped from the disintegrating hall, into an intact, tranquil space. “Take your shoes off,” said the social worker.

His client wore a Dallas Cowboys shirt and a flowing flowered skirt. She was young, and with her shoulders thrust back, looked alert and durable. Two girls flanked her, keeping close to the circle of her skirt. Behind them was a polished coffee table and a sofa with a rose print: furniture not new, but sufficient.

The woman, Patience, offered them the couch, then sat opposite in a folding chair. The two girls settled on their knees on the floor, but Patience nudged the less little girl and said something not in English or French. The girl answered in the same language and went to the kitchen.

“Voulez-vous une tisane?” asked Patience.

The social worker began his preamble, explaining that where the refugee agency left off, there city and state aid began; Katya stabbed at interpreting “food stamps” and “job training.” She wavered between impersonating him — repeating his very words — and transposing his first-person statements into the third person. She tried the first and was effaced by it: interpreter as dictaphone. She said, “I need to confirm your personal data and get information on your skill set.” When the girl returned with herbal tea, Katya silently accepted it.

“What’s your first language?” said the social worker, and Katya echoed him.

“Grebo,” said Patience.

“But you learned some French.”

“Yes, enough, as a refugee in Côte d’Ivoire. I went to school there when I was nine and ten, and again when I was sixteen. The Ivorian government did not like Liberians in their schools, but some nuns enrolled me. I was unusual there. A Liberian who had studied French. Most others my age had never gone to school. Some older people had gone to school back in Liberia, but that was in English, not in French. They were at a disadvantage. Of course, now that we have been resettled in the United States, they turn out to be lucky. I am still unusual, but no longer fortunate.”

Katya relayed this. In this reverse conversational direction, she also used the first person.

“Please tell me what was your place of birth?” the social worker said.

Alarmingly, it was rather Katya who clattered her saucer and cup. Like a book-of-the-month-club reader feeling personally addressed, Katya remembered her own early dislocation…

“I know from hearing my parents’ regrets that I was born on a farm in Grand Gedeh, Liberia. My grandparents, parents, and aunts cultivated peppers and sweet potatoes. I cannot remember the farm. Then one year Charles Taylor’s men came through, killing and setting fires. My family walked with thousands of others, all of us trusting a rumor that one day we would reach Côte d’Ivoire. My grandmother and littlest aunt died on the journey. I was too young to remember them. Finally we got to safety, but there were too many of us. We waited for the peace that would come with one side winning the civil war, but while we waited many people starved. My father decided that we should go to the city, Abidjan. He worked picking trash for a boss who had a scrap metal stand. What the boss didn’t want, my father used to build our family’s house. My mother spent each day waiting in line to siphon water off the water main. I tended to my grandfather.”

Patience’s inflection was as flat as a prepared statement. Her hands cupping the little girls’ shoulders were her lone sign of disturbance. Alarmingly, it was rather Katya who clattered her saucer and cup. Like a book-of-the-month-club reader feeling personally addressed, Katya remembered her own early dislocation at her classmate Nicole’s apartment. The uninvited memory of her scorn and resentment, contrasted with Patience’s unrancorous matter-of-factness, interjected a silence into the interview. Finally the social worker prompted, “Could you translate what she said?” and Katya, without debating it, switched to the third person.

“What is your maximum level of education?”

“As I said, for a while the nuns helped me go to school. But then the government said it was sick of Liberians and expelled us from Ivorian schools. I worked selling soft drinks for several years, until the government changed its mind. Then I went to third and fourth grade. I was seventeen and in fourth grade when I married my husband. This little girl is his sister. The other girl is our daughter. In 2002 the Ivorian army conscripted my husband, and we never saw him again. At that time Côte d’Ivoire had big problems. They blamed the Liberians. After soldiers burned down our neighborhood, we lived in a UN shelter. My parents did not survive the transition. It was also the end of my education. For a while in the shelter I taught the small children French. Eventually we were approved for resettlement. We have been in the U.S. for a month. In America, no one is prejudiced against Liberians. In Abidjan I wanted to be a secretary in an office building, with a lot of glass to watch people passing on the street, but I could not be. In America, I will go to secretarial school and become a secretary.”

This time, Katya did not translate. Instead, she protested, “A secretary! But you yourself said you are unusual. You must learn what’s possible.” She could see the Grebo epic, on the order of Sundiata, that Patience would never translate if she went to secretarial school. “Patience, your story can open doors! Listen, I’m not a city interpreter. I’m a literary translator. My students at the university are foreigners like you. Their English is also a work in progress, yet they’re in graduate school…”

To the social worker, Katya said, “It’s unjust, ridiculous. Her ambition is to be a secretary.”

She thought again of Brun asking her to declaw farouche. It was a cold afternoon in the walled garden, Brun sipping campari. An aisle of pruned mulberry trees looked like a hospital postcard.

But the social worker wore a chain mail suit of competence and no illusions. Before Katya could promise to bring Patience’s case to the dean of admissions, he preempted her intentions. “That’s a fine ambition, but not an immediate one. She’s got a fourth grade education, and even that was interrupted. She’ll need to take English at the adult school for a year or eighteen months. After that, we can revisit the question of secretarial school. What I’d like to know now is, did she braid the girls’ hair? I know a salon that’s hiring.”

Katya did not relay this. She thought again of Brun asking her to declaw farouche. It was a cold afternoon in the walled garden, Brun sipping campari. An aisle of pruned mulberry trees looked like a hospital postcard. The gardener Nguyen earlier had disrupted an ant colony; and as Brun talked, a file of ants mounted the table leg, encroaching on Brun’s sponge fingers and Katya’s manuscript. After stating that current events never entered her work, Brun leaned in towards Katya. “The cost of others to the self is my sole topic.” Gathering Katya’s sleeve in her hand, the writer said confidentially, “I realize the cost of others is also your subject. Which is why I know I can count on you to do my books justice.”

The sister-in-law brought a tea refill, and Katya drank it agitatedly. In place of fracture and icicle strike, revulsion and tongue burning.