John Crowley’s The Translator is a beautiful and deceptively simple novel, with surprisingly little of the fantastic in comparison to Crowley’s other books. The novel is set during the Kennedy presidency, in the early 1960s; it concerns the relationship between I. I. Falin, a middle-aged, exiled Russian poet, and Kit Malone, an undergraduate woman at an unnamed Midwestern university where Falin teaches, and who helps him render his (unpublished in Russia) poems into English.
It’s hard to say whether almost nothing happens in the course of the book, or whether almost everything does. This is because the novel’s style is clear and crisp, and seemingly naturalistic; and yet everything important is elided, not by authorial whim, but because what is most important is what somehow cannot be said, cannot be recognized, cannot be narrated.
For instance, Kit and Falin are certainly in love in some sort of way, but it is never clear whether they ever have sex – years later, Kit sincerely cannot remember. When finally, toward the end of the book, they spend a night together, “It seemed to her that they spent a very long time there together: not hours but days, years even, the whole course of a long deep love affair… And yet she couldn’t actually remember it, long afterward, remembered nothing of what really happened.”
The Translator is about many things: about the trickiness of language and the impossibility of translation; about the nature of poetry, always trying to say the nothing that cannot be said, and of inspiration, that is as real as it is transient, and that can be passed on to another, but not really possessed by oneself; about the deepest passions, not those that dominate our every waking moment, but those that creep upon us when we are asleep, as it were in spite of our wills, those that make us demand things impossible and impalpable, the mysterious otherness of the person we love, rather than his or her simple, self-evident presence; and also how the personal relates to the political, to the inescapability of history, of society, of the sinister forces that rule us.
For the novel takes place during the Cold War, with all its creepiness, paranoia, and repression. (In fact, it is one of the best portraits I have read of the anxiety of that period, and of its pressures of conformism and groupthink. Kit is free neither from social censoriousness, nor from the spying of the FBI). As for Falin, exiled from the Soviet Union (instead of being sent to prison), he finds himself in an America where he is still under surveillance, still under suspicion, still able to live only under the sufferance of powers who are, themselves, accountable to no one. And the book culminates during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962; Crowley’s conceit is that, in some inexplicable way, Falin must sacrifice himself (relinquishing both his life and his poetry) in order to avert the ultimate catastrophe of all-out nuclear war.
The Translator is mysterious, exactly to the extent that it is utterly lucid. Reading it is a haunting experience, because everything is right there on the surface, both the naturalistic descriptions and the metaphors and themes; and yet this supreme lucidity points to something that is intrinsically ungraspable, so that, after I had finished reading the book, only then did I start to be possessed by all the details that I had read through or read over without any difficulty, but that in retrospect turned out to be dense and labyrinthine, as if it were only in the clear light of unambiguous evidence that we could stumble upon what is truly enigmatic.
The Translator
John Crowley’s The Translator is a beautiful and deceptively simple novel, with surprisingly little of the fantastic in comparison to Crowley’s other books. The novel is set during the Kennedy presidency, in the early 1960s; it concerns the relationship between I. I. Falin, a middle-aged, exiled Russian poet, and Kit Malone, an undergraduate woman at an unnamed Midwestern university where Falin teaches, and who helps him render his (unpublished in Russia) poems into English.
It’s hard to say whether almost nothing happens in the course of the book, or whether almost everything does. This is because the novel’s style is clear and crisp, and seemingly naturalistic; and yet everything important is elided, not by authorial whim, but because what is most important is what somehow cannot be said, cannot be recognized, cannot be narrated.
For instance, Kit and Falin are certainly in love in some sort of way, but it is never clear whether they ever have sex – years later, Kit sincerely cannot remember. When finally, toward the end of the book, they spend a night together, “It seemed to her that they spent a very long time there together: not hours but days, years even, the whole course of a long deep love affair… And yet she couldn’t actually remember it, long afterward, remembered nothing of what really happened.”
The Translator is about many things: about the trickiness of language and the impossibility of translation; about the nature of poetry, always trying to say the nothing that cannot be said, and of inspiration, that is as real as it is transient, and that can be passed on to another, but not really possessed by oneself; about the deepest passions, not those that dominate our every waking moment, but those that creep upon us when we are asleep, as it were in spite of our wills, those that make us demand things impossible and impalpable, the mysterious otherness of the person we love, rather than his or her simple, self-evident presence; and also how the personal relates to the political, to the inescapability of history, of society, of the sinister forces that rule us.
For the novel takes place during the Cold War, with all its creepiness, paranoia, and repression. (In fact, it is one of the best portraits I have read of the anxiety of that period, and of its pressures of conformism and groupthink. Kit is free neither from social censoriousness, nor from the spying of the FBI). As for Falin, exiled from the Soviet Union (instead of being sent to prison), he finds himself in an America where he is still under surveillance, still under suspicion, still able to live only under the sufferance of powers who are, themselves, accountable to no one. And the book culminates during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962; Crowley’s conceit is that, in some inexplicable way, Falin must sacrifice himself (relinquishing both his life and his poetry) in order to avert the ultimate catastrophe of all-out nuclear war.
The Translator is mysterious, exactly to the extent that it is utterly lucid. Reading it is a haunting experience, because everything is right there on the surface, both the naturalistic descriptions and the metaphors and themes; and yet this supreme lucidity points to something that is intrinsically ungraspable, so that, after I had finished reading the book, only then did I start to be possessed by all the details that I had read through or read over without any difficulty, but that in retrospect turned out to be dense and labyrinthine, as if it were only in the clear light of unambiguous evidence that we could stumble upon what is truly enigmatic.