Once again, I find myself longing for an anthology of translator’s introductions, a collection that focuses on this incredible literary form that gets sidelined and ignored, despite its eloquence.
Take, for example, the translator's introduction to Antonio di Benedetto's Zama, where Esther Allen gives us the 28-year old Dostoyevsky, standing before the firing squad only to be spared execution at the last minute. “Just as the shots were about to be fired, an aide de-camp arrived at a gallop, bearing a stay of execution from the tsar,” writes Allen, drawing a parallel to Di Benedetto's own experience during Argentina’s Dirty War, where, “for eighteen months . . . he was imprisoned, tortured, and, on four occasions, taken from his cell and placed before a firing squad.” Allen tells us that Di Benedetto didn’t face the executioner until twenty years “after writing Zama... which in its growing and inexorable dread, its sense that the present results not only from the past but also from the future, seems uncannily imbued with what its author would live through twenty years later.”
Time is one of the subjects treated in Zama.
And Time is always a story about death, or our relationship to it as human beings, a species of animal that knows it will die.
In Zama, the author refuses to locate us within a particular time. This refusal is a power that writers share with the gods and creators of the human condition. Allen’s translation presents a di Benedetto who writes from an imagined future, and creates from the space of the not-yet. She ties up her introduction by quoting Beckett's Molloy, which she describes “as an epigraph to the translation” — a beautiful practice, I think — : “The most you can hope is to be a little less, in the end, the creature you were in the beginning, and the middle.”
According to his biographer, Henri Troyat, “the memory of this false execution remained alive in Dostoyevsky's writing.” A false death here becomes a phantom located inside a life.
Aristodemus told Plato (or Socrates) that Pausanias of Athens’ lover, Agathon, offered him a state in which he could “become one with what will never fade.” The urge for eternity strikes the reader as well as the lover.
“…and so this phrase, which we’d passed over unthinkingly every day and which had held itself in reserve, and which, solely by the power of its beauty, had become invisible and remained unknown, comes to us last of all. But it will also be the last one we leave.”
— Marcel Proust, In the Shadow of Girls in Blossom (tr. Charlotte Mandell)