A Reader on Reading

(The Brazilian Nélida Piñón in Cuba, the decadent Oscar Wilde in Russia, Native American chroniclers in the United States and Canada, the French enfant terrible Georges Bataille in Franco’s Spain have all been published in truncated versions. And in spite of all my good intentions, could not my version of Yourcenar be considered censorious?) Often, authors whose politics might be read uncomfortably are simply not translated and authors with a difficult style are either passed over in favor of others more easily accessible or condemned to weak or clumsy versions of their work.

Not all translation, however, is corruption and deceit. Sometimes cultures can be rescued through translation, and translators become justified in their laborious and menial pursuits. In January 1976, the American lexicographer Robert Laughlin sank to his knees in front of the chief magistrate of the town of Zinacantán in southern Mexico and held up a book that had taken Laughlin fourteen years to compile: the great Tzotzil dictionary that rendered into English the Mayan language of 120,000 natives of Chiapas, known also as the “People of the Bat.” Offering the dictionary to the Tzotzil elder, Laughlin said, in the language he had so painstakingly recorded, “If any foreigner comes and says that you are stupid, foolish Indians, please show him this book, show him the 30,000 words of your knowledge, your reasoning.”

It should, it must, suffice.

The Secret Sharer

“You might make a joke on that,” said the little voice close to her ear: “something about ‘you would if you could,’ you know.”

“Don’t tease so,” said Alice, looking about in vain to see where the voice came from. “If you’re so anxious to have a joke made, why don’t you make one yourself?”

Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter 3

IN 1969, TIMOTHY FINDLEY traveled to New York to work with his American editor on the galleys of his second novel, The Butterfly Plague. Canadian publishers were still not impressed by the efforts of this actor-turned-writer, but the illustrious American publishing company Viking had expressed interest in this budding author. The editor assigned to Findley’s book was Cor-lies M. Smith, known as “Cork,” who was also the editor of the letters of James Joyce. Smith read The Butterfly Plague, the chronicle of a declining Hollywood family set against the background of Nazi Germany, and although he liked the book very much, he wasn’t satisfied with one aspect of it: he wanted to know the “meaning” of the butterflies in the story and strongly advised Findley to make it clear. Findley was young, inexperienced, and afraid to upset the publisher he so much wanted, and bowed to Smith’s suggestion. He reworked the book in order to explain the butterflies, and the novel duly appeared under the Viking imprint.

The extraordinary point of this anecdote is that most North American readers would not see it as extraordinary. Even the most inexperienced writers of fiction know that if they are to be published at all, their manuscripts must pass through the hands of professionals known as “editors,” employed by publishing companies to read the books under consideration and recommend changes they think appropriate. (This paragraph you are now reading will not be the paragraph I originally wrote, since it will have to undergo the inquisition of an editor; in fact, when an earlier version of this essay was published in Saturday Night magazine, this sentence was cut out completely.)

Writers, notoriously wary about their craft, are reluctant to speak about this obligatory help except in general terms or off the record. Contemporary literature abounds in examples of both malpractice and redemption, but writers prefer to keep these interventions secret — and rightly so. In the end a work of fiction is the writer’s own, and should be seen as such. Writers (and their editors agree) need not make public the seams and patches of their collaboration. Writers want to be sole begetters.

However, underlying this coyness is a paradox. The writer who knows himself to be the single author of a text, wondering a little at its very existence and puzzled more than a little by the mysteries it contains, also knows that before the text is published it will be professionally questioned, and that answers will have to be provided or suggestions accepted; he thereby relinquishes, at least in part, the writer’s single-handed authorship. Before going out into the world, every writer of fiction in North America (and most of the British Commonwealth) acquires, as it were, a literary back-seat driver.