“Ho ho,” said the keeper of the beat

1Q84 by Murakami Haruki, trans. Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel (Knopf, 2011)



The novel is an art of recognition. So said Javier Marías, in conversation with Juan Gabriel Vásquez. As one reads the novel, one recognizes aspects of life that hovered at the back of one's mind and which now the novel served to uncover or awaken.

In the case of Murakami Haruki, ever so reader-friendly in 1Q84, the recognition was not slow in coming. He led the reader by the hand, pointing him to the right ideas.

"George Orwell introduced the dictator Big Brother in his novel 1984, as I'm sure you know. The book was an allegorical treatment of Stalinism, of course. And ever since then, the term 'Big Brother' has functioned as a social icon. That was Orwell's great accomplishment. But now, in the real year 1984, Big Brother is all too famous, and all too obvious. If Big Brother were to appear before us now, we'd point to him and say, 'Watch out! He's Big Brother!' There's no longer any place for a Big Brother in this real world of ours. Instead, these so-called Little People have come on the scene. Interesting verbal contrast, don't you think?"

As I'm sure you know. The speaker of the helpful commentary above defined the grand ambitions of Murakami's project: to supplant Big Brother with newly minted mascots, the Little People who "played some role in the sudden drastic change of Sakigake from an agricultural commune to a religious organization."

In the novel, sentences appeared bold and italicized to set them off and acknowledge their importance. They functioned as markers for the characters', especially Aomame's, increasingly distracted and bifurcating thought process. It was very kind of the novelist to do so, to aid us in recognizing the verbal contrasts and to highlight the sentences. Lest the reader had trouble recognizing what the fine print was saying, he had to be reminded for his own good and for his own sake. It was a safeguard against misreading.

As I'm sure you know.

The novelist relied on repetitions to emphasize his ideas. It also signaled sharp movements in the plot and illustrated the agitations of characters. The way repetitions were handled here, however, was rather lame. Aomame, for example, had to ask herself four or five times why she was so concerned about the rubber plant. Why, of course, it was so important in the whole scheme of things. The plot development demanded that she repeatedly torture herself about her rubber plant because the next scene was quite the turning point in the story, featuring some more damning repetitions in boldface and italics.

(A Heart So White by Javier Marías, now there's a masterful example of repetition, a novel in which love was a totalitarian desire and flirtations with 'totalitarianism' didn't go to waste. In that novel, Marías allowed perfect and natural timing for passages to be repeated. They settled well in the reader's minds. Recognition came unaided and not facilitated. Recognition came from interpretation. In contrast to Murakami's, Marías's repetitions in his novel—incidentally, also a novel dealing with violence against women—were sublime, vouchsafed in various degrees of abstraction: repetition as delusion, as salvation, as an instrument of one's undoing. In 1Q84, repetitions were mere repetitions. The recurrence of passages, consecutive and artificial, was foisted on the reader.)

In describing Ushikawa, Tengo had to resort to an ad hoc survey to prove his point.

Around the borders of the flat, lopsided area of his head clung thick, black, curly hair that had been allowed to grow too long, hanging down shaggily over the man's ears. Ninety-eight people out of a hundred would probably be reminded by it of pubic hair. Tengo had no idea what the other two would think.

Surely the 98% of respondents was large enough to convince the reader of Ushikawa's shaggy hair? This survey had to be conducted with enough samples. 95% alone won't cut it.

In describing Ushikawa's manner of dressing, Tengo was dutifully precise with details, looking at every fiber of his interviewer's clothing. And he had to end not with punch lines but with punches.

The man’s gray suit had countless tiny wrinkles, which made it look like an expanse of earth that had been ground down by a glacier. One flap of his white dress shirt’s collar was sticking out, and the knot of his tie was contorted, as if it had twisted itself from the sheer discomfort of having to exist in that place. The suit, the shirt, and the tie were all slightly the wrong size. The pattern on his tie might have been an inept art student’s impressionistic rendering of a bowl of tangled, soggy noodles. Each piece of clothing looked like something he had bought at a discount store to fill an immediate need. But the longer Tengo studied them, the sorrier he felt for the clothes themselves, for having to be worn by this man. Tengo paid little attention to his own clothing, but he was strangely concerned about the clothing worn by others. If he had to compile a list of the worst dressers he had met in the past ten years, this man would be somewhere near the top. It was not just that he had terrible style: he also gave the impression that he was deliberately desecrating the very idea of wearing clothes.

The last two sentences were like two nails that crucified Ushikawa's fashion sense, after he was kicked and flogged all the way to Calvary. This representative passage—1Q84 was full of it—was poorly executed not because of the subject matter of ugliness, but because of the strained diffusion of poor details. As a stand-in novelist for his creator, Tengo was hardly the promising prose stylist. Murakami here calcified the application of his unrealistic approach to fiction writing, which he disclosed in his 2004 Paris Review interview.

I like details very much. Tolstoy wanted to write the total description; my description is focused on a very small area. When you describe the details of small things, your focus gets closer and closer, and the opposite of Tolstoy happens—it gets more unrealistic. That’s what I want to do.
...
The closer it gets, the less real it gets. That’s my style.

The effect, in this novel, was indeed as unreal as it gets. It was lousy writing. The prose was simply depauperate.

Near the end of his encounter with Ushikawa, Tengo had to sum it up: "Ushikawa's oddities were an unending source of fascination." And the incredulous reader had to take Tengo's word for it. Surveys and worst dressed lists were the ever reliable indicators of the truth of his claims. But if we're not yet convinced, here was Tengo's parting shot to a secretary right after Ushikawa left the premises.

   "I always tell myself not to judge people by their appearance. I've been wrong in the past and had some serious regrets. But the minute I saw this man, I got the feeling he couldn't be trusted. I still feel that way."
   "You're not alone," Tengo said.
   "I'm not alone," she echoed, as if to confirm the grammatical accuracy of Tengo's sentence.
   "That's a beautiful jacket you're wearing," Tengo said, meaning it quite honestly. He wasn't just flattering her. After Ushikawa's crumpled heap of a suit, her stylishly cut linen jacket looked like a lovely piece of fabric that had descended from heaven on a windless afternoon."
   "Thank you," she said.

Like a lovely piece of fabric descended from heaven on a windless afternoon. One had to admit it was nice verbal contrast to Ushikawa's "deliberately desecrating the very idea of wearing clothes." Thank you. Now we're totally convinced. 100%. Cue the Little People.

“Ho ho,” said the keeper of the beat.
“Ho ho,” the others chimed in.

It was a bloody paper moon

1Q84 by Murakami Haruki, trans. Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel (Knopf, 2011)



Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else.
– Nineteen Eighty-Four



Murakami Haruki's extra-long 1Q84 was full of narrative strategies that went against the grain of conventional storytelling. It represented a hardening of his hyper-realistic style and its ambitiousness was patterned after that of George Orwell's dystopia, with the Little People in the novel imagined to have the same iconic stature as Big Brother. This well-intentioned novel, however, was bogged down by its own paper weight.

The story was simple, if a bit long drawn out. It was 1984 when Aomame, a sports fitness trainer and physical therapist, suddenly found herself in a 'strange' new reality where policemen wore a new style of uniform and sported a new weapon. There was more to Aomame than meets the eye. She was also a hired killer for the dowager, an old wealthy woman who targeted powerful men who beat women. Meanwhile, Tengo, a cram school Maths teacher and aspiring novelist, was telling his own reality in parallel alternate chapters. He was 'commissioned' by Komatsu, his editor, to act as ghostwriter of Air Chrysalis, a promising novel by a teenage girl named Fuka-Eri. The novel was entered in a writing competition and Komatsu wanted to polish its prose for it to eventually win. Behind the increasingly intertwining (love) story of Aomame and Tengo was the dark shadow of the religious Sakigake cult, the ultimate source of all the troubles and strangeness of their world.

As with previous works, Murakami built into his fictional system an aspect of the metafictional. As a key text defining the principles that govern the double moon world of '1Q84' (the name Aomame gave this new reality/world), Air Chrysalis could also be seen as a template for the novel 1Q84. It was at least instructive how Tengo approached the work he was rewriting. Even his definition of what constitutes literature was very telling: "If the work succeeds in gaining many people's approval and if they identify with it, then it becomes a literary work with objective value." Hence, for Tengo, and arguably for Murakami, "literary value" was contingent on mass appeal.

Part of the appeal of Murakami's novels was the 'friendly' nature of his novels and stories. They unfolded in strange worlds and yet they were very understandable and relatable, well grounded in reality. They had complexity but were made to appear simple. They were full of life's lessons. And Murakami was all too helpful to explain to the reader the mechanism of his story. It was narrative spoonfeeding, using the pages of the novel as venue for his fiction writing workshop. The narrative principle was given by Komatsu, Tengo's helpful editor.

"In my opinion, you haven't written enough about the two moons. I'd like you to give it more concrete detail. That's my only request."
...
"Your readers have seen the sky with one moon in it any number of times, right? But I doubt they've seen a sky with two moons in it side by side. When you introduce things that most readers have never seen before into a piece of fiction, you have to describe them with as much precision and in as much detail as possible."

And describe the moons Tengo did. By the novel's end, Tengo, and Murakami, not only described them very well but bashed them into the readers' head, over and over, until the reader's head bleeds. After reading, I looked outside the window and my mouth fell open. There were two moons hanging in the sky, this 2Q12 sky, one grey and one green.

The Wild Goose (Mori Ōgai)

The Wild Goose by Mori Ōgai, translated with an introduction by Burton Watson (Center for Japanese Studies - The University of Michigan, 1995)



The events of my story took place some time ago—in 1880, the thirteenth year of the Meiji era, to be exact.


At the start of this short novel, the narrator described his friendship with a handsome student named Okada. Okada often walked the streets of Muenzaka in the evening and one time he happened upon a beautiful young woman living in a house in a silent neighborhood. Through his regular walks he had become acquainted with her, even if "the appearance of the house and the way the woman dressed strongly suggested that she was someone's mistress."


Even in ill health she would have been beautiful, but in fact she was young and healthy, and today her usual good looks had been heightened by careful makeup and grooming. To my eyes she seemed to possess a beauty wholly beyond anything I had noted earlier, and her face shone with a kind of radiance. The effect was dazzling.


The Wild Goose, also known as The Wild Geese, by Mori Ōgai (1862-1922) was a dazzling and iconic Japanese novel about Otama, the woman who agreed to become the mistress of Suezō, a shrewd moneylender, and her acquaintance with Okada, the young student she fell in love with. Through gentle prose, Ōgai presented their interlinked stories while illuminating the attitudes and mores of late nineteenth century Japan, at the cusp of its transition to a modernist society.

It was a time when men of means like Suezō could hire go-betweens to negotiate and procure for them a mistress. The practice was then taboo and mistresses were then, as now, strongly discriminated against. Otama's previous marriage to a policeman turned out to be a sham, leaving her completely discouraged about her future prospects. Her plight was to be poor and her acquiescence to become a rich man's mistress was driven by her need to secure material comforts for herself and her old father.

Part of the charm of the story was the narrator's close observations of Otama, Suezō, and Okada's motives and actions. Like the character of Suezō, the man despised by society for his occupation as moneylender, the narrator had "keen powers of observation", in the way he delineated not only three strong characters but believable secondary characters as well. Suezō's suspicious wife Otsune and Otama's father had their own complexities.

Ōgai's marked evocation of a distinct place and culture and the marginal status of women at the time revealed a "not-quite" vanished age, in the sense that his characters' desires, despair, and anguish were just as transparent as the present. In addition, Ōgai's use of animal symbols (a pair of caged birds, a fierce snake, a flock of geese) and references to classical Chinese and Japanese literature had such cunning and grace that they didn't feel like literary devices at all but the very essence of the story, like fire to the brazier.


        In her mortification there was very little hatred for the world or for people. If one were to ask exactly what in fact she resented, one would have to answer that it was her own fate. Through no fault of her own she was made to suffer persecution, and this was what she found so painful. When she was deceived and abandoned by the police officer, she had felt this mortification, and recently, when she realized that she must become a mistress, she experienced it again. Now she learned that she was not only a mistress but the mistress of a despised moneylender, and her despair, which had been ground smooth between the teeth of time and washed of its color in the waters of resignation, assumed once more in her heart its stark outline.


The unnamed narrator was a voice of kindness. His large sympathy for the fates of Otama and his friend Okada was unmistakable, relating their stories with penetrating understanding, even affecting a degree of respect and love for the two characters. He later revealed his storytelling method as a play on two perspectives: "Just as two images combine in a stereoscope to form a single picture, so the events I observed earlier and those that were described to me later have been fitted together to make this story of mine."

With Natsume Sōseki, Tōson Shimazaki, Shiga Naoya, and Akutagawa Ryunosuke, Ōgai was an exemplary prewar Japanese writer of national stature, and The Wild Goose (Gan), published serially in 1911-13, was his most esteemed work. According to Murakami Haruki (if I remember him correctly), Gan had the same special status in Japan as Sōseki's I Am a Cat, Botchan, and Kokoro; Akutagawa's stories; and Shiga's A Dark Night's Passing.

Translator Burton Watson mentioned in his thorough introduction that the original title Gan could mean both the singular and plural words, hence the two distinct English titles. I have also read the earlier 1959 translation, The Wild Geese, by Kingo Ochiai and Sanford Goldstein, and in fact selected it as one of my favorite reads of 2010. I don't have that copy anymore and so I can't make a general comparison of the translations. But this full translation by Watson contains endorsements from Edwin McClellan and Edward Seidensticker, two powerhouse Japanese translators, so that should count for something. Indeed this version I find quite beautiful.

Gan was adapted into a movie in 1953.


(This book also reviewed in Nihon distractions)

Nowaki (Natsume Sōseki)

Nowaki by Natsume Sōseki, trans. William N. Ridgeway (Center for Japanese Studies – The University of Michigan, 2011)

Nowaki was an early Natsume Sōseki (1867-1916) short novel first published in 1907. It was the story about an aging writer's hard stance on the ethical and moral responsibility of the artist in society. Sōseki dramatized this stance through the ex-middle school teacher Dōya’s philosophy of education.

A teacher who is satisfied in teaching from the textbook and earning his living this way is no different in theory from a tightrope artist who earns his living twirling a baton. Education is different from tightrope crossing and baton twirling. The acquisition of knowledge is just the beginning of education; the true purpose is the building of human character. To size up the large and the small, to weigh the light and the heavy, to distinguish between good and evil, to always know right from wrong, wisdom from folly, truth from falsehood—that is the purpose of learning.

Despite the soundness of his philosophy, the rather didactic delivery of his ideas and his methods led to Dōya being discredited by the school authorities. He was vilified by his students and shunned by the educational establishment for his uncompromising adherence to his principles. The book's propagandistic writing style probably hewed closely to the way Dōya described his frustrations of his "failed" generation and his prescriptions for regeneration by the youth.

A good contrast to Dōya’s worldview were those provided by two young men in the story. Inexperienced and impulsive and yet with strong artistic and literary inclinations, Takayanagi and Nakano were close friends who were newly graduated from the university. Nakano was from a well-off family, while his friend, the sickly Takayanagi, was dirt poor. The stark contrast in their backgrounds provided Sōseki an opportunity to explore the ways in which class status determines the dominant preoccupations of a writer. Nakano was concerned about the "anguish of love", while Takayanagi was bent on surviving the present world he described as "full of cynicism" and "an open competition of cold-heartedness":

   “What I wish to write is not such a dreamy stuff as yours. Mine may not be pretty, but on the contrary it may be painful, stinging to read, yet I shall be satisfied if it should reveal my innermost feelings. Whether it is poetical or not, I do not care. I will have written well if I stab myself hard enough for the pain to make me jump and I am able to convey that pain to the reader, to make him say, ‘That hurt!’ I wish to enlighten the comfortable and complacent to the reality that can find no expression in their deepest dreams. I want to open the eyes of the debauchee to the essence of man, so that he may confess with bowed head that he had never entertained such a thought before but now acknowledges it to be undeniably true.—A different direction entirely from yours [Nakano's].”

The confessions of the characters, full of passion and intensity, were writ large in the book. A lot more of these ‘insights’ of the heart and mind made for a didactic novel, but the ideas must be welcomed for their honesty and the forthcoming way they were blurted out and shared. It was inevitable that, of the two friends, it was Takayanagi (who happened to be one of the students who harassed Dōya while still a teacher) who will be attracted to the singular philosophy of Dōya. His were also the inner conflicts of a person of seeming duality or contradiction which Sōseki was delineating in his other books.

   “There is something strange about your face. The right side in the sunlight looks very ruddy, whereas the left side in the shadows looks unhealthy. Strange. As if your face appears as a conjoining of half a mask of tragedy and half a mask of comedy,” declared Nakano without taking a breath.

The two masks of comedy and tragedy were evident in many scenes, making it hard whether to categorize them as serious or satire. The delicate balance of the two weights always threatened to tilt on one side or the other, a constant juggling that required novelistic skill—proof that this early work was important on its own in the Sōsekian oeuvre. Nowaki was not only an epigrammatic novel, with every other page containing the kind of insane quotes worth underlining, but also a key work closely tethered to the novelist's themes. It explicitly identified and discussed the abstractions that beset the protagonists of later novels. It could be Sōseki's most 'preachy' novel, surprisingly political in parts, and was a definite throwback to the subtle feelings and subdued atmospheres generated by works such as Kokoro and Mon. Nevertheless it illuminated the undercurrent of cynicism running through his mature novels. The unnamed 'disease' of his protagonists in the late novels was here already identified and prefigured: the physical and psychological sickness arising from living a hard and poor life. The characters of Nowaki were likewise bent on attaining a form of salvation even as they wrote or continued living under the shadow of death.

What partly saved the novel from the ruts of sentimentality, and it seemed ever close to doing so, was its writing style, specifically, the unique sensibility of the omniscient point of view and free indirect style. The ubiquitous narrator's intrusion was distracting as it was instructive.

   "What kind of associations?" she asked gently, placing one hand over the other. About two inches above her wrists were exposed, while the rest of her arms were hidden in the soft sleeves. Her kimono was of pink silk with a design of silver rain in intervals of heavy lines and light lines.
   It was pleasant to see the fine fingers of the hand on top, each of which tapered off in a rounded shape to a gleaming nail. To be fine, fingers must be long and slender and yet provided with flesh soft enough to keep their delicate shape. Each finger must differ slightly from another, yet there must be harmony between them as a whole. There are fewer people with beautiful fingers than people with beautiful faces. A person with beautiful fingers must be in want of a precious ornament.
   On a long slender finger the woman wore a brilliant object.

The uncalled-for intrusions and side comments in the text (To be fine, fingers must be long and slender ... There are fewer people with beautiful fingers than people with beautiful faces.) signaled the presence of an intelligent storyteller not answerable to the characters' actions. They also lightened the narrative and questioned its otherwise serious tone. There were indications that the "intrusive" omniscient narrator was pulling the reader's, and the characters', legs, telling more than what the characters needed to or cared to know. The characters were often wholly ignorant of the facts that the intrusive narrator was sharing:

An old haiku says, "One by one thoughts come to mind only to disintegrate like charcoal burned to ash." The wife probably did not know it. She went to the brazier in Dōya's room and began leveling the ashes with the tongs, drawing a circle because the brazier was round in shape.

The wife probably did not know it. But someone did. Elsewhere, Sōseki would sumptuously describe a well-decorated ornate living room visited by Dōya, only to let the reader know that Dōya himself was not a party to its appreciation: "The fireplace was still in disuse, concealed behind a small two-leaf folding screen placed one foot in front of it. Maroon damask curtains clashed with the general color scheme of the decoration, but this fact escaped Dōya's notice. Sensei had never in his life been in such as fine room as this." At one point the narrative contrasted the differences between Dōya's and Takayanagi's worldviews, only to point out the latter's lack of knowledge of these differences: "Such is the difference between one who exists for others [Dōya-sensei] and one who exists for himself [Takayanagi]. Such is the difference between one who leads others and one who relies on others. Such is the difference, even when both are solitary individuals. Takayanagi was not aware of these differences."

The adopted narrative style could get away with it. The seeming offense to the characters' ignorance of their surroundings, circumstances, and merits, only served to highlight their fallibility and humanness. Even with passages that seemed to offer a clue to the writer's credo, a strong hint of the funny could not be divorced from the unusual formulations.

   Host and guest are one. There is no guest without a host and no host without a guest. It is only for the sake of convenience in our lives that we make a distinction between the two. We think of color and form as separate entities, though neither form nor color can exist independently. We think of technique and concept as separate entities, though in fact they are closely correlated. Once we understand this, we have allowed ourselves to enter a maze; and since life is most important to us, we find it more and more difficult to get out of the labyrinth, created for the sake of convenience in our lives, the deeper we proceed into it. Only when one is emancipated from the desires of life can this bewilderment be overcome. Takayanagi was a man who could not liberate himself from this desire. Consequently, he could not conceive of host and guest separately, obstinately attached to the idea that host is host and guest is guest. Whenever he met a superior guest, he felt attacked by invisible swords on every side. At this garden party Takayanagi felt as if he had taken a lone position against enemy troops.

All the blabber about "host and guest" in the first three sentences was too weird to take seriously. And then the following statements (We think of color and form ...) could almost be taken out of context and offered to represent the ideal artist's credo. And then, bang, there goes again the "host and guest" at the tail-end. All of which only emphasized the fact of poor Takayanagi lounging in his destitute clothes and clearly out of place in the party attended by the upper class.

In the translator's afteword, William N. Ridgeway mentioned that, with this latest translation, only Sōseki's novel Gubijinsō remains to be translated. (The Gate, for me his masterpiece so far, will appear in a retranslation from New York Review Books at the end of the year.) Also, according to Ridgeway, the word nowaki referred to the autumn wind blowing between September 1 and September 11, a time of "violent winds and typhoons, and of potential crises." The same wind blew at the culmination of the novel, a tour de force scene where Dōya was set to deliver his lecture to a hostile crowd, a speech which was oddly stirring for all its obtuse demagogic arguments. His speech underlined the crux of his hardline ideas on the necessity for artists and writers to embrace anti-materialism and on the limitations of freedom. For Dōya, and arguably for Sōseki himself, freedom is not a totally free commodity. It is subject to the exercise of morality: "Those born into a society without precedent ought to create their own precedent. Those who enjoy unlimited freedom are already limited by freedom itself. How to make use of this freedom is your responsibility, as well as your privilege. Gentlemen! If you do not maintain high ideals, your freedom is only depravity."

Nowaki contained the usual Sosekian pleasures and nuances. The characters, although sharply drawn, also functioned as abstract concepts or emblems of their self-expressions. More than a novel, it was an "essay on character", the very title of the manuscript Dōya was working on. Ridgeway compared this novel to Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. I think it's not a bad comparison.

The Athenian Murders (José Carlos Somoza)

The Athenian Murders by José Carlos Somoza, trans. Sonia Soto (Abacus, 2002)



Set in ancient Greece in the time of Plato’s Academy, this postmodern, heavily footnoted murder mystery was ostensibly a scholar’s translation of a Greek text, also called The Athenian Murders, written by an anonymous author just after the Peloponnesian War. Like the Quixote, therefore, it was a meta-translation, a text put forward as a translation of a fictional original by a narrator who was conscious of the fact. (But what does that make of the "Pierre Menard" story?) Here, the fictional translator himself gave his comments on the story and his translation in the footnotes. As he worked on the chapters of the text and immersed himself in the cryptic images ‘hidden’ in the story, his copious translator's notes at the bottom of the pages became more and more desperate in tone. The fictional translator (the qualification was necessary, in deference to Spanish-to-English translator Sonia Soto) of the fictional Greek text was starting to cave in, so to speak. Both the original Spanish title of the novel and the purported Greek text were called La caverna de las ideas (2000, The Cave of Ideas).

The Cuban writer José Carlos Somoza (b. 1959) was fond of what-if stories. His other novels translated after this one—The Art of Murder and Zig Zag—were both set in the future, so the speculative and futuristic may be a constant preoccupation with the author.

'Poetry, tragedy, comedy, prose, epics and many other things.... I must make it clear, Plato, that I do not "see" the future: I invent it. I write it and that, for me, is equivalent to inventing it. Simply for pleasure, I conceive worlds that differ from this one, voices that speak from other times, past or future.... On occasion, Apollo has allowed me to deduce what the future might be like ...'

That was the writer Philotextus speaking to Master Plato. For Somoza, the novel was a literal cave of ideas and possibilities. The hermeneutic puzzle was evident from the novel's epigraph, from Plato of course:

There is an argument which holds good against the man who ventures to put anything whatever into writing on questions of this nature; it has often before been stated by me, and it seems suitable for the present occasion.
   For everything that exists there are three instruments by which knowledge of it is necessarily imparted; fourth, there is the knowledge itself, and, as fifth, we must count the thing itself which is known and truly exists. The first is the name, the second the definition, the third the image ...

The fifth instrument, the thing itself, requires that knowledge of the thing must fold in on itself. Plato's theory of ideas cautions against the very danger of steeping oneself in incomplete, unverifiable ideas, and the (Kafkaesque) danger of interpreting everything.

It was notable how in this story of crime solving, the narrative role of the translator was given utmost importance. Translation became the vehicle for solving the crime at the center of the story and for illuminating the unsolved enigmas brought about by Plato's dangerous ideas. "Translator figures" haunt The Athenian Murders, both novel and meta-translation, in various guises, all plausible roles for the translator: detective, philosopher, sculptor, and reader. On top of the fictional translator, the detective Heracles at one point also considered himself a translator: "I haven't translated that part of the text yet, Diagoras. Although I assure you, in all modesty, I'm not a bad translator." The detective was like a translator in the way he read and interpreted the available clues (words) to decipher the solution to the crime (text). Heracles's official title of "Decipherer of Enigmas" was hinted as a kind of definition for what a translator does.

Another definition was given by Menaechmus, the sculptor (the translator of clay into statues?) who was working on a sculpture with a not so subtle name:

It's called The Translator. The man who tries to decipher the mystery of a text written in a foreign language, not realizing that words simply lead to other words, and thoughts to other thoughts, while the Truth remains unattainable.

Everyone was translating foreign ideas into accessible meanings: characters, translators, novelists, readers. My favorite translator figure was the latter. The reader as a godlike and powerful translator, yet an invisible one, or at least invisible to the characters of the story:

'There's a widely held belief in many places far from Athens,' he said, 'that everything we do and say exists as words written in another language on a huge papyrus scroll. And Someone is reading the scroll right now, deciphering our thoughts and actions, and finding hidden keys [eidetic images?] to the texts of our lives. That Someone is known as the Interpreter or Translator … Those who believe in Him think that our lives have an ultimate meaning of which we ourselves are unaware, but which the Translator discovers as he reads us. Eventually, the text comes to an end and we die, knowing no more than before. But the Translator, who has read us, discovers at last the ultimate meaning of our existence.'

Underneath this passage, the fictional translator's accompanying footnote reads:

Though I've searched through all my books, I can't find a single reference to this supposed religion. The author must have invented it. [Translator's Note]

Certainly, the fictional translator was not to know that we are reading about him. He was too engrossed in his task. And he didn't recognize that the religion he was looking for was possibly, quite possibly, literature. 

Translation is more or less. Translation is the idea of the original. It loses words and gains words. It makes painful choices. It makes fitting choices. It is full of doubts and compromises. Translation is a world of decisions. The fictional translator of The Athenian Murders was well aware that the idea of correspondence was enough to bring comfort to the beleaguered. More or less.
 

I want to shout, but I think the Idea of a Shout would provide more relief. [Translator's Note]

Related posts:

Blood and sound ; Reading list: Translators in fiction