The Translator’s Tale

The Translator’s Tale Her name was Nionc Tigo. Maybe you’ve heard of her, maybe you haven’t. Tigo was the most accomplished writer of her generation. Only problem is, her generation grew up in Slothin, a country so small it is tucked away between two other countries and most people don’t know it even exists. Nevertheless, Tigo was a prolific chronicler of her place and time. She wrote reams of material: novels, plays, essays, poetry, reviews, presidential speeches, recipes, and advertising copy. A true woman of letters. Most of her work went unpublished. The parts that were published convinced the literary world that she was a talent of enormous significance. When she died, there were calls for publishing her writings. All of it. Many lusted after her collected works, which were, unfortunately, stashed away in her nephew’s attic. He was her sole heir. The nephew, for his part, had no interest in his aunt’s literary endeavors, but reasoned that since there was so much interest on the part of others, he would keep the papers to himself for a few decades to drive up the price and cash in when he retired. Years passed. The papers, filling a dozen good-sized boxes, moldered in the nephew’s attic. Scholars from around the world offered to buy them. The nephew did not budge from his original position, and, seeing all the interest, reasoned that his reasoning was sound. However, he was a reckless young man, given to extreme sports. One bright October morning he got it into his head that he would free dive from the tallest building in Slothin. This was a critical error. Slothin has few tall buildings of any kind, and the one the nephew chose was a mere seven stories tall. Not enough height, really, to allow time for his parachute to deploy properly, but plenty of altitude to kill him, which, when he reached the ground, it did. The nephew left no will. His possessions passed to the state of Slothin. Tigo’s literary estate went into legal limbo. A government official determined that some of Nionc Tigo’s writings were detrimental to the well-being of the state of Slothin. She decreed that the papers be locked away for some time. Perhaps a couple of centuries or so. When that time had elapsed, the then government of Slothin might decide to publish them, or might decide to lock them up for another couple of hundred years. Things remained like this for decades. The few works of Nionc Tigo’s that had been published were reissued in numerous editions with plenty of supporting material in the form of introductions, afterwards, forwards, footnotes, analysis and so on. You could read between the lines of all this ephemera to see how much the literary community lusted after getting their hands on Tigo’s unpublished works. It was about this time that I first heard of Tigo. I acquired one of her books in the original Sloth, the language of Slothin, and used it to learn the language. I decided it would be in my interest to translate the balance of Nionc Tigo’s works. I also decided I would do what needed to be done to get the ones locked away in Slothin. My husband doesn’t understand me. I think about that sometimes when I see him in the late afternoon light, sitting on the couch after a day of labor, the cool air coming off the ocean and filling the house with a kind of frigid presence, like some creature has emerged from the waves and filled the house. At these times he is oblivious to me, my husband is, but that doesn’t bother me. Much. Other times he is attentive enough to make up for it. Husband’s not understanding their wives is nothing new, after all. Does any husband possess that ability to any meaningful degree? I doubt it. I’m a translator. He says my profession caters to lazy people. He says this in a challenging way, but I usually don’t rise to the challenge. It’s one of those husband-wife things that only the participating couple get. People observing the so-called battle of wits when we get into the subject would be baffled by it. In any case, I have to mention that his job caters to lazy people as well. He’s a heavy equipment operator. Moves earth around for a living because if he doesn’t do it, then someone else would have to, and, let’s face it, most people don’t want to put in the work necessary to move earth around all by themselves. Lazy. Really, don’t all jobs cater to lazy people, if one is inclined to think of it in that way? I think so. We josh each other about this all the time, but we don’t go too far. After all, I haven’t killed anyone by practicing my profession. My husband has. Oh, it was a long time ago, but it’s still raw for him. He was working a road project a couple of counties over. It was winter, the ground was wet. His excavator hadn’t been anchored properly and it slid on the slick mud and a fellow worker got trapped under it and was crushed to death. A very grisly demise. My husband, so witnesses said, was completely distraught. He cried to the heavens and pulled at his hair and dragged his fingernails over his face, scraping the skin and drawing blood. I saw the scars, so I knew something happened. The investigation absolved my husband of any guilt. At least legally. The official report said the dead man was at fault. He should have known better than to be standing where he was, given the conditions extant at the time. Blame the dead victim. Always the easiest way to go. Clean and decisive. My husband, though, fell into a long depression. It lasted years and when it finally lifted, he was functional and reasonably intact, but could never shake the guilt. I still see it eating at him. It is only relieved when he talks to the walls. I’ll get to that later. In the meantime, just know he’s a fragile person. Sometimes, in an effort to prove that he isn’t fragile, he likes to kid me about stuff. Usually about my livelihood, as I’ve indicated. I see right through it, but I don’t feel the need to tell him I see right through it. It’s difficult to be constantly vigilant about another person’s feelings, even someone you love. It would be pure joy and freedom to be able to tell him to get over it. But I know that would do him no good. The only reason there’s a call for your skill, he says, referring to my translation abilities, is that people don’t want to put in the work to learn new languages. He has a point, of course, but no one can know every language. That’s why there are people like me, to help everyone understand each other. And even I need some help sometimes. I’m a language expert and there are still languages I don’t understand. Here’s a perfect example: I don’t understand my husband’s language. You would think after thirty years of marriage that we would know each other quite well. We would have the capacity to learn about and understand everything there is to know about the other person. Not so. My husband talks to ghosts. I don’t know what he says or what they say to him. Even with my translation skills, his conversations are a total mystery to me. He laughs when I ask him to teach me the ghost language. He says it isn’t something you can learn. It’s something you have to be born with. This only makes me grit my teeth. All I do is learn. I’m always learning. There is so much knowledge in the world that if you’re not learning all the time, you’re just existing. It’s innate, he says, serenely, happy that he learned that word. My husband has not had much formal eduction. Nothing wrong with that. I’m just letting you know that he believes all he needs to know he’s been born with. Except for heavy equipment operation. He took a three week course to learn that. Beyond high school, that’s all he’s ever learned. I don’t like hearing about innate abilities. If the world was all about innate talent, then learning would be useless. Education would be a waste of time. I’ve tried to learn ghost. I’ve sat with my husband as he talks to the walls and the walls (presumably) talk to him. I haven’t heard them, so I can only take his word for it. What I hear is nonsense syllables coming out of his mouth, then a long pause as he turns his ear to the wall, then more nonsense syllables from him. He goes into a kind of trance. After, I ask him what he was talking about. He says he asks the ghosts about the future. I ask him how they can know anything about the future. He says they’re ghosts, of course they know. And I say why? Why should ghosts know anything more about the future than we do? They’re dead. They may know about the past, since they lived in the past. But the future? Even ghosts live in the now. The future is as much a mystery to them as it is to us. I say this in all seriousness. It seems the most obvious of facts. It almost an axiom, in my mind. A perfectly obvious truth. He looks at me then like I’m some kind of crazy person. They’re ghosts he says again, as though emphasizing the word will make it clearer to me. When he does that, it can either make me mad or make me laugh. Usually I laugh, but not always. So then I ask him what they’re saying about the future and he shrugs. Oh, he says, it’s general stuff. Everything is going to be okay. That’s something he needs to hear. Something he craves because then his killing of his fellow worker will be okay too, in the sense that he can let himself realize it was an accident. I would love for him to see that. But now. Not in some rosy future. Now. I could tell you the same thing, I say. I could tell you the future is going to be okay. Go ahead. The future is going to be okay, I say. There. Well fine, he says. You said it. But they know. It goes around and around like that. I tell him to ask them for the winning lottery numbers and he shakes his head in this tut-tut fashion, like I’m some kind of rube. It doesn’t work that way, he says. Okay, but how does it work? It’s complicated, he says. First thing: I’m not a rube. I’ve been making a living at doing translations of sophisticated documents in German, French, Farsi, Portuguese, Chinook, Italian, Serbo-Croatian, Russian, Hawaiian, Japanese, Spanish, and a few others for some years. I work quickly, too. I take a document in the original language and translate it on the fly, reading it aloud in English, no matter what language it was composed in, and recording my words. I usually get about 98 percent accuracy on my first try. I give the result to any of a dozen or so assistants for final checking. They fix the few mistakes that are there and I look at it one more time for final tweaking, and I’m done. As I say, I rarely make a mistake. I can master a language’s grammar very quickly and acquire a good chunk of vocabulary in not much longer than that. Lots of lazy people pay dearly for my skills. I’ve done classic novels for publishers, training documents for multi-national companies, legal documents for law firms, so many things it’s too much to enumerate here. But the ghost talk, it eludes me. I told my husband I was going to Slothin. Slothin, he said. What’s that? It’s a country. Never heard of it. Hardly anyone has. I hear they have lots of ghosts. Walls, too. Stone walls that criss-cross the country. The people who lived there thousands of years ago are mad for stone walls and they built lots of them. The country is practically a patchwork quilt of them. And why are you telling me this? I want you to go with me. I figure if you can find new ghosts to talk to, you’ll want to. He thought about this for a moment. I wouldn’t mind talking to spirits in stone walls, but why do you want to go? I told him about Nionc Tigo and her unpublished works.