A Ghost of a Chance | A Translator’s Note in Memory of Paul Auster
Essays
By Alex Andriesse
I can’t say I’ve been influenced by Paul Auster so much as my life has been invented by my reading of his books. I am writing these words, just by way of example, in a pocket-sized Portuguese notebook of a kind I started buying long ago because it features in his novel Oracle Night; I have carted, from one continent to another, an Olympia typewriter given to me by my wife, who knows the depth of my affection for Auster and all his appurtenances; I have since quit smoking, but there was one summer twenty years ago when I wandered around Prospect Park inhaling Schimmelpennincks, the little Dutch cigars that Auster favored, the ones that inspired “Auggie Wren’s Christmas Story”—the basis for the movie Smoke.
I don’t think I’ve ever tried to inhabit anybody else’s skin to quite this degree. It’s a little embarrassing, to be honest. But I first started reading Auster when I was nineteen years old, my father was well on his way to losing his mind, and my mother and I had fetched up at my grandmother’s house, where I slept on the foldout couch and worked at a pizza parlor. That likely goes a long way toward explaining Auster’s importance to me. His books, then, were a kind of refuge. I’d go to the local library and take them out one or two at a time. When I finally went off to college six months later, I’d read and reread pretty much every word he’d ever published between covers.
What attracted me to Auster’s work in the first place, I can’t remember. No doubt the titles had something to do with it. The Invention of Solitude, City of Glass, In the Country of Last Things, Moon Palace. They’re grand but at the same inviting, sly, slightly surreal. To a nineteen-year-old, they promised soul-searching, sophistication, mystery, adventure—and they delivered. I fell hard for the noir atmospherics of the New York Trilogy, The Music of Chance, Oracle Night. I thrilled at Marco Stanley Fogg’s escapades in the 1960s of Moon Palace and Walt’s rise and fall in the 1930s of Mr. Vertigo. I even loved Timbuktu—a short novel about the dog Mr. Bones, whose destitute, mentally ill owner, Willy G. Christmas, determines that if he’s going to save his beloved pet’s life, he needs to get him from Brooklyn to Baltimore. (At the time I was trying to go in the reverse direction.) More than anything, though, I was enraptured by the way that all of Auster’s books seemed to be in conversation with one another. As I read them, a whole universe of connections took shape in my brain until I almost felt I was living in it. Sometimes, in point of fact, I still do.
No Auster novel has had a more measurable effect on my life than The Book of Illusions. It was the first one I read, and I was spellbound from the start. The novel is narrated by David Zimmer, a college professor whose wife and children have died in a plane crash. (Zimmer, by the way, first appears in Moon Palace as Marco Fogg’s good friend, putting him up after Marco almost loses his mind—Zimmer, who has the same name as the man who, Auster tells us in The Invention of Solitude, gave Friedrich Hölderlin a place to live after Hölderlin went mad. Such are the connections the Auster universe contains.) After wallowing in a grief-stricken alcoholic fog for months, Zimmer finds his way back to something like life by researching and writing The Silent World of Hector Mann, a study of a fictitious silent comedy star who disappeared into the ether of the 1920s. He then turns his hand to translating the memoirs of the French writer and politician François-René de Chateaubriand (who, the first time I read The Book of Illusions, I assumed was as fictional as Hector Mann). For the length of a winter, Zimmer writes,
I . . . thought only about Chateaubriand, burying myself in the massive chronicle of a life that had nothing to do with my life. That was what appealed to me most about the job: the distance, the sheer distance between myself and what I was doing. It had been good to camp out for a year in 1920s America; it was even better to spend my days in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France. The snow fell on my little mountain in Vermont, but I scarcely paid any attention. I was in Saint-Malo and Paris, in Ohio and Florida, in England, Rome, and Berlin. Much of the work was mechanical, and because I was the servant of the text and not its creator, it demanded a different kind of energy from the one I had put into writing The Silent World. Translation is a bit like shoveling coal. You scoop it up and toss it into the furnace. Each lump is a word, and each shovelful is another sentence, and if your back is strong enough and you have the stamina to keep at it for eight or ten hours at a stretch, you can keep the fire hot. With close to a million words in front of me, I was prepared to work as long and as hard as necessary, even if it meant burning down the house.
I’m not surprised that all this coal shoveling sounded appealing to me at nineteen, stretched out on a bony Castro convertible mattress, with half my clothes stained with marinara. But time passes, fascinations fade, and I’m still surprised anything came of it. Once in a while I peeked at the Memoirs, admiring the music of Chateaubriand’s prose, and on my first visit to Paris I bought an abridged Swiss edition on the quais. The bouquiniste told me I’d made a good choice, and when I smiled politely, he said, in a very urgently serious French way, “No, no, truly, it’s a marvelous book.” He was right, of course, but it wasn’t until the fall of 2012, with a year to burn (thanks to a fellowship for a dissertation I’d already completed), that I walked into a bookshop in Northampton, Massachusetts, and spotted the two-volume Pléiade edition of the Mémoires d’outre-tombe gathering dust on a back shelf. I hauled it home, thinking I’d probably never get around to reading it. But there I was, working on a novel again, and as so often when I’m working on a novel, it was going nowhere. I stared out at the many-colored hills and thought: Why not snap myself out of it by trying to translate the Memoirs, like Zimmer in The Book of Illusions? I wasn’t in anything like his state of grief, but I found myself moved by Chateaubriand’s monument to loss and, very much like Zimmer, grateful for the immense distance between the Memoirs and me. I shoveled the coal, and fall turned into winter. At the time, it didn’t occur to me that Zimmer works on his translation in southern Vermont—a short drive from where I was working on mine, in Colrain, Massachusetts—or that the man who commissions his translation is named Alex. Qu’importe? as the French say.
Many falls and winters later, I’ve finished my translation; the first two volumes have been published, and the other two will appear in the years to come. I live a long way from Baltimore, Brooklyn, and Colrain now—in a small town in the east of the Netherlands whose history I know next to nothing about. Until recently, for instance, I had no idea that it used to be a center for cigar production, a place where hundreds of people used to work in factories rolling the things for export all around the world. I learned this in a curious way. The other day I was cycling back from the hardware store, taking a route home I’d never taken. Auster had died only a week or so before, and, obviously, he’d been on my mind. It seemed fitting—seemed in keeping with the spirit of the Auster universe—that I should look over to my left and see a big building, an old factory converted into apartments, with huge letters on the front spelling out a familiar name: SCHIMMELPENNINCK. It is nice to be reminded that, as Auster once wrote, “the world I live in will go on escaping me forever.”
Alex Andriesse is a writer whose work has appeared in Granta, Conjunctions, and the Review of Contemporary Fiction. He has translated, among other books, Cristina Campo’s The Unforgivable and François-René de Chateaubriand’s Memoirs from Beyond the Grave. He is an associate editor at NYRB Classics.
Illustration: Alvaro Tapia Hidalgo.
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