On the shuttle from Fiumicino Airport to Termini, I start feeling small and anxious. After a brief email exchange, the Swiss author whose novel I’m currently translating has invited me to come and spend six days and five nights with her in Rome, where she is in residence for 10 months – so here I am. I project various possible worst case scenarios, including her disappointment in me and/or the translation, misunderstandings, awkward silences, and ultimate rejection resulting in evenings spent eating alone in my room (wherever this will be, I haven’t asked a lot of questions) onto the passing view of apartment blocks.
I spot her wearing a bright red jacket where we had agreed to meet, between two gilded Christmas trees, and I warm my face up to smile so I can give a positive first impression without it coming across as false. I don’t want her to take one look at me and think: I see a few brooding, self-conscious days before me. I apologise that she has been expecting me for nearly an hour already because I hadn’t made the earlier train and she gives a little shrug and a smile and says that it was no trouble at all. This tiny gesture dissolves all my circular predictions. A more relaxing and familiar passing of time together comes into focus in my mind’s eye.
After a short walk through the already darkening streets flooding with the rush of the end of the working day, we arrive at what looks like a Beverley Hills mansion or an amusement park ride or an immersive installation. A palatial house, surrounded by a high stone wall. Through the automatic gates I can see a manmade, arched faux-rock grotto, which shelters three pools of coy carp. The house seems to float above and slightly back from this rocky cliff-esque creation. It has a very large, mesmerising, magical purple neon sign that reads
M I R A C L E
on the front of it, which is splashing the palm trees around it with violet light. I imagine a mysterious song starting to play in the distance. Later I’ll learn that hidden speakers play birdsong to scare off the green parakeets here in the grounds of the house. This sign couldn’t be more fitting for this moment, I think to myself.
Almost a year to the day before standing in the driveway of the Istituto Svizzero in Rome, I was at a writing salon in Zurich while writer in residence in the city, telling the assembled writers in the warm flat that I was reading a book I felt a strong connection with, a book that was like a waking dream or nightmare that I couldn’t get off of my mind. It was Michelle Steinbeck’s ‹Mein Vater war ein Mann an Land und im Wasser ein Walfisch› (‹My Father was a Man on Land and a Whale in the Water›, a surreal story of a young woman who accidently murders a child and goes on an adventure to bring it to her father in a suitcase, is one way of describing it) and now, through a strange series of events (being entranced by the cover, being given the book by a friend, a chance tip off),
I was translating it, and it had brought me to Rome.
After I had been confirmed to translate her book, I learned from Michelle that the year previous to my six week stay in the little attic room in Zurich, she had sat at the same desk in the same room writing this book, our book, while between flats. We had both written our books in the same place. I had brought her book with me and it had been on the bedside table during my time there.
* * *
We nonchalantly create a routine for ourselves. We meet on the landing at 9/9.30/10 (neither of us is a morning person) and trot down the stairs, me trailing her, to go and have a coffee and a croissant-like pastry, due cappuccini e due cornetti. Or un cornetto – from one morning to the next Michelle wants or doesn’t want one depending on how she feels in the decisive moment, or on how the pastries look.
Then we go back and print a chapter of my translation in the beautiful, underused, partially subterranean library, with lemons and oranges hanging outside the window, and then go all the way up to Michelle’s atelier in the roof with a pot of green tea for her and black tea for me. The room has three porthole windows, and a ridiculously oversized wooden desk.
We go through the opening chapter first, which had sealed the deal for me to be the translator, along with my apparent enthusiasm.
Enthusiasm as part of a translation practice.
Working together is relaxed, easy, intense, serious, jokey, meticulous. We discuss words, word orders, single sentences, for hours.
The subsequent chapters we dissect are not final drafts – they include the multiple word and line choices I keep until I do my second draft. I want to see what choices Michelle would make in English, though I get the final say, she confirms:
a barrage of abuse / a wave of insults
steam roller / lawn roller
survey one another / look each other up and down
you’re a damn liar / you’re a lying so-and-so /
you’re lying left, right and centre
happy are the little children / ignorance is bliss
fashioned / constructed / pieced together /
thrown together / assembled
kid/child (and should we consider Kid with a capital K?
Because it’s not wholly a kid, it’s also both dead and undead, but not a zombie, but also a metaphor, but also a child, and in German you can just have «das Kind» that has that archetypal power you lose in the English, but then would it just become a metaphor, an archetype?)
Mastiffs/Great Danes (and can you really claim a
Great Dane is the size of a calf? I’ll check… Image: «Baby Calf Rescued From Slaughterhouse Thinks He’s A D…: What they didn’t expect to happen, was that their Great Dane had actually taken up the role of the calf’s mother! The Dane’s name is Leonidas, and together…»)
Google Image Searching «Great Dane and Calf» as translation research.
She especially loved the word peculiar.
Anything funny, weird or strange we come across during our time in Rome we declare peculiar.
Though we only work in the morning/early afternoon, and one evening, the book remains mapped onto my experience of Rome. I see the suitcase (carrying the Kid) on the pavement, I see the whole fish (that the Father’s pregnant wife loves to eat pickled) lying in the street, my window with palms thrashing about in a storm (like the view where the strange Artists live at sea) distracts and transports me.
* * *
On Sunday and Tuesday morning we don’t work.
We spend a few hours on Sunday walking around a market. My feet are like ice, and browsing means squeezing through tiny paths between the stalls. I had forgotten that no matter what tat there is at a market, the fun and the thrill is the treasure you might find.
At the very first stall we both try on the same creamy mohair coat, and I eventually buy it. It’s like nothing I would usually wear, and maybe seeing Michelle wear it first imbued it with something that made me want it. Walking around Rome with Michelle feels like I’m inhabiting her and her voice, I feel like I’m in her world.
Wearing the coat feels like dressing up, like I’m someone completely different, which is partly how I feel when I’m out of the country and away from people who know me anyway. I can act differently, be confident, outlandish, even coquettish, because no one will call me out for being a fraud: someone seeing me in the street is none the wiser about who I am, that is, what the process was that resulted in the version of me I am at this point. Out of context, I can experiment a little.
Playing dress up as experimental translation of self.
On Tuesday, my last morning in Rome, Michelle books us a viewing slot at an exquisite art museum, Galleria Borghese, in the nearby park.
I had already walked around the park on Saturday afternoon on my own. In the Pincian Gardens, where the view overlooking Rome and Vatican City is, there are 228 busts depicting famous Italian thinkers, scientists, writers and artists, and only three are women. Of its time, we might say. It made me feel like I was trespassing, which made smirking at them slightly more enjoyable. What must it feel like to be a young girl walking around here? There are a lot of young couples making out on the benches in the incredible light.
The museum gives me a sore neck from looking up at the adorned and painted ceilings. Every look in any direction is too much to take in, my eyes focus on tiny, often whimsical details as a defence mechanism against the onslaught of seeing so much. Cherubs blowing bubbles, a badly painted baby. Room after room of marble sculptures and paintings and hand-painted wallpapers and tiled fireplaces and a whole room of Popes. How is 2 hours enough?
I enter one of the larger rooms. I remain near the doorway. Sigh. Roll my eyes. I wasn’t expecting to see it here.
The central piece is a version of the same sculpture I’ve seen many times before at the Victoria and Albert Museum
in London. The one before me, like much of what is in this museum, is by Bernini. While writing this piece, I find out that the other, poorer quality sculpture in London is possibly by an artist called de’ Rossi, but is more likely by an artist called Peri.
The sculpture before me has the title «Ratto di Proserpina», and though I don’t speak Italian, I remember what the title of the sculpture is in London – «The Rape of Proserpina». I remember my double take – this white marble sculpture of a man gracefully heaving a women into the air is called «The Rape»…? The English translation given underneath the Italian title in Rome – and, I discover online, the new given title of the sculpture at the V&A – is just «Pluto & Proserpina».
Translation as half-arsed substitute for not worshipping the depiction of violence against women, imaginary or otherwise.
Yes, it meant something different then, «to be carried off» as in «thieved» as in «stolen from one man by another/lowered in value for exchange» as much as the simpler meaning we still have today. While researching this, I find there’s a term and accompanying body of work for this kind of unsettling depiction: «heroic rape», where the act of violence is romanticised, sanitised.
«Hit by Cupid’s arrow/not responsible for his natural urges, Pluto/Hades falls in love/kidnaps/takes by force/assaults Proserpina/Persephone and takes her to the underworld/and does who knows what else», is how the myth goes.
Myths from every age and era dictate our contemporary expectations of ourselves and others.
«Ancient myths» is another term for «present frameworks of reality».
The text accompanying the sculpture is leading, to say the least:
«portraying a woman trying to escape from a lover»
«succumbing to the god’s strength»
«represents an admirable contrast between
tenderness and cruelty»
«today we are still amazed by the rendering of Proserpina’s soft flesh, into which Pluto’s hands are thrust»
An accompanying sculpture in the next room shows the same subject-matter, this time of Daphne and Apollo. It shows Daphne trying to escape, just as Proserpina does. Daphne is transforming into a laurel in the process. The accompanying text casually reads: «Daphne had prayed to be dissolved or transformed, and her prayer was answered». That is: she would rather no longer exist than be raped. Both Daphne and Proserpina have tranquil, sleepy, almost expressionless faces that divulge barely any emotion at all.
* * *
Just before leaving to head to the airport, Michelle takes me up to the roof of the institute. It has the second highest viewpoint in the whole of Rome. «If I lived here and had this view whenever I wanted» I say, looking out across the sepia buildings and infinite cloudy sky, «I would feel so motivated to write».
«If I didn’t know that we would still be in contact over the next few weeks, I would find it very strange now you’re going,» she says at the train station.