Free The Translator by John Crowley

poem said only I will write about my neighbor.”
    “Why would they translate it that way then?”
    “Because the translator was clever enough to know that in my country now, if we say someone has written about someone else, we mean the person has supplied to authorities information or just speculation, enough perhaps to have him investigated, even arrested. We say of someone, I don’t trust her—I think she writes. So the poem may be read in that way, and that is why the translator chose this word denounce.
    But to write, in Russian, is still also to—to just write. Write letters, poetry.”
    She had never tried to translate poetry in any way except literally, as though cracking a code in which it was hidden, a chest or safe more beautiful than what was kept in it.
    She said: “I don’t see why it couldn’t be translated more accurately.”
    “Perhaps it could.” He moved the papers and things before him square with one another, his cigarettes and box of matches, notebook, 58

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    a small book bound in pale green linen. “But it would then be different poem in English. Still not mine.”
    She thought this was too chaste, or too abnegating. It was too sad to think of too. She knew there were poets everybody said were impossible to translate (Horace, Pushkin) and others that weren’t (Shake-speare), but she didn’t know why they said that, or what made the difference.
    “Now in your poem of May,” he said, and she felt a small sensation in her breast. “Could it, do you think, be translated so that every line would end as yours do, with a certain consonant?”
    “I don’t know,” she said. “If I were a translator, I’d try.”
    He laughed in delight at this, and she thought she hadn’t seen him laugh before; still his eyes went on taking her in, her and everything.
    “Do you think,” she said, “you’ll ever write in English?”
    “It would be hard choice to make,” he said, as though he pondered it often.
    “But why would it be a choice?” she asked. “Couldn’t you write in both?”
    “I don’t know,” he said. “It may be that languages are like lovers.
    You can have more than one at a time. But perhaps it is possible to love only one at a time.”
    She knew as little of lovers as of languages. She thought of a piece she’d read in National Geographic about an old Indian, the last of his tribe able to speak its language: it had never been recorded, and there was no one else left who understood it. You couldn’t be more alone than that.
    He had begun to gather up his things and put them in his funny case. He said: “May I ask you. In your poem. Was it, the soldier, a person now alive?”
    “Well yes.”
    “It seemed when I read,” he said, “perhaps not. Perhaps this poem told of a boy who every May returns. But who can come no closer.”
    “Oh no,” she said. She saw that it could be taken so, she hadn’t seen it but now she could, and always would. “No.”

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    “Well.” He stood, as though unfolding his long body. “Now. You must come to class next week.”
    “Oh yes, yes,” she said ardently. “I mean that was just so not like me.
    Falling asleep.”
    “Since you have no doctor’s excuse,” he said, “you can now not get perfect grade. So you must come always.”
    He smiled at her, shrugging on his great enveloping coat; his smile, this amazing open secret. She didn’t know whether to laugh because what he said was a joke, or look grave because it wasn’t. She had understood all that he had said, with no way of knowing what he meant. It was as though he himself existed here in this town in this state in translation, ambiguous, slightly wrong, too highly colored or wrongly nuanced. Within him was the original, which no one could read.
    He looked back, at the door, and she waved a small farewell.
    She pushed away her cup, feeling both privileged and besmirched: anyway as she had not felt ever before. On the table was