I clearly recall the day I first became truly aware of myself, I mean of myself as something that everything else was not. As a boy I liked best those dead intervals of the year when one season had ended and the next had not yet begun, and all was grey and hushed and still, and out of the stillness and the hush something would seem to approach me, some small, soft, tentative thing, and offer itself to my attention. This day of which I speak I was walking along the main street of the town. It was November, or March, not cold, but neutral. From a lowering sky fine rain was falling, so fine as to be hardly felt. It was morning, and the housewives were out, with their shopping bags and headscarves. A questing dog trotted busily past me looking neither to right nor left, following a straight line drawn invisibly on the pavement. There was a smell of smoke and butcher’s meat, and a brackish smell of the sea, and, as always in the town in those days, the faint sweet stench of pig-swill. The open doorway of a hardware shop breathed brownly at me as I went past. Taking in all this, I experienced something to which the only name I could give was happiness, although it was not happiness, it was more and less than happiness. What had occurred? What in that commonplace scene before me, the ordinary sights and sounds and smells of the town, had made this unexpected thing, whatever it was, burgeon suddenly inside me like the possibility of an answer to all the nameless yearnings of my life? Everything was the same now as it had been before, the housewives, that busy dog, the same, and yet in some way transfigured. Along with the happiness went a feeling of anxiety. It was as if I were carrying some frail vessel that it was my task to protect, like the boy in the story told to us in religious class who carried the Host through the licentious streets of ancient Rome hidden inside his tunic; in my case, however, it seemed I was myself the precious vessel. Yes, that was it, it was I that was happening here. I did not know exactly what this meant, but surely, I told myself, surely it must mean something. And so I went on, in happy puzzlement, under the small rain, bearing the mystery of myself in my heart.
Was it that same phial of precious ichor, still inside me, that spilled in the cinema that afternoon, and that I carry in me yet, and that yet will overflow at the slightest movement, the slightest misbeat of my heart?
Ik herinner me levendig de dag waarop ik voor het eerst echt bewust van mezelf werd, als iets dat al het andere niet was, bedoel ik. Als kleine jongen hield ik het meest van de levenloze periodes in een jaar, wanneer het ene seizoen geëindigd was en het volgende nog niet begonnen, en alles grijs, gedempt en kalm was; uit de stilte en rust leek zich iets los te maken, een klein, zacht en voorzichtig iets, en mijn aandacht naar zich toe te trekken. Op de dag waarover ik het heb, wandelde ik over de hoofdstraat van de stad. Het was november of maart, niet koud, maar neutraal. Uit een dreigende wolkenhemel viel zachte regen, zo zacht dat hij nauwelijks voelbaar was. Het was ochtend, en de huisvrouwen waren onderweg met hun winkeltassen en hoofddoeken. Een rondsnuffelende hond trippelde haastig langs me, keek niet naar links of rechts, maar volgde trouw een rechte lijn die onzichtbaar op de stoep getekend was. Er hing een geur van rook en slagersvlees, een brakke zeegeur en, zoals altijd in de stad in die dagen, de lichte, zoete stank van spoeling. De deuropening van een hardwarewinkel ademde een bruine braaklucht naar me uit toen ik erlangs liep. Terwijl ik alles in me opnam, werd ik vervuld van iets waaraan ik enkel de naam geluk kon geven, hoewel het geen geluk was, het was zowel meer als minder dan geluk. Wat was er gebeurd? Welk element in de alledaagse scène voor me, de doodgewone beelden, geluiden en geuren van de stad, had dit onverwachte iets, wat het ook mocht zijn, zo plots in me laten ontpoppen, als een mogelijk antwoord op alle naamloze verlangens van mijn leven? Alles was hetzelfde als het enkele ogenblikken voordien geweest was, de huisvrouwen, de gretig snuffelende hond, volledig hetzelfde, en toch was alles op een of andere manier van gedaante veranderd. Bij het gevoel van geluk kwam een gevoel van ongerustheid. Het was alsof ik een kwetsbaar schip bestuurde dat ik moest beschermen, zoals de jongen in het verhaal dat ons in de godsdienstles verteld werd, die de heilige hostie door de losbandige straten van het oude Rome droeg, verborgen in zijn tunica; in mijn geval leek het echter alsof ik zelf het kostbare schip was. Ja, dat was het, ik was het die hier gebeurde. Ik wist niet exact wat dit betekende, maar zonder twijfel, zei ik tegen mezelf, zonder twijfel moet dit iets betekenen. En zo ging ik verder, in gelukzalige verwondering, onder de zachte regen, en droeg het mysterie van mezelf in mijn hart.
Was het datzelfde fiooltje van kostelijk godenbloed, nog steeds binnenin me, waaruit gemorst werd in de bioscoop die namiddag, en dat ik met me mee blijf dragen, maar dat overloopt bij de geringste beweging, de minste afwijkende hartslag?
In general, it can be remarked that Banville’s style is quite elaborate, and it was especially the length of most of his sentences in the passage from Eclipse that posed problems to the translation. In the second sentence (“As a boy I liked best … offer itself to my attention”, Eclipse 32) I felt forced to cut the sentence in half and link the two parts together with a semicolon, as a literal translation would probably not work in Dutch – apart from the length itself, there is also the problem of inversion, which does not apply to the original English version, and which is now (hopefully satisfactorily) dealt with. In other instances I have mostly respected the original typography, and tried to formulate long sentences in a way that they remain fluent enough.
Word play is another difficulty to translations. In the passage from Eclipse I have, to my knowledge, not encountered any examples of clear ambiguity, but there were instead examples of stylistic word choice, most notably in the sentence “The open doorway of a hardware shop breathed brownly at me as I went past” (Eclipse 32; my emphasis). Apart from the ‘open doorway’ – the Dutch translation “deuropening” for “doorway” already encompasses the meaning of openness, making the adjective redundant – and its personification, it is the alliteration of the synaesthesia that challenges the translation. I have attempted to keep both, with the translation “bruine braaklucht”, even though Banville did not describe the smell as coming from “braaksel” (vomit). I think, however, that this translation enhances the representation of the smell and makes it more vivid, and that, in this case, retaining the alliteration is to be preferred to a literal translation.
In Dr. Copernicus, on the other hand, preserving the alliteration proves more challenging. In the sentence “On windy days it danced, demented, waving wild arms, or in the silence of the evening drowsed and dreamed (…)” (Dr. Copernicus, p.3) one can find no less than three different pairs of alliteration – d, w, dr – and the Dutch translation consequently faces a choice between form and meaning. In my translation, I opted for the inclusion of the word “dol”, so as to preserve the alliteration of the ‘d’ while reinforcing the other adjective, together with another minor change: “zwaaiend”, the literal translation of “waving”, became “waaiend”, which retains the ‘w’-alliteration and is also acceptable, if not more suitable, in the context of the sentence. I found no way to retain the ‘dr’-alliteration, but matched a ‘d’-word with a ‘dr’-word. The result is, in my opinion, also quite melodious, as “waaiend” and “avond” resemble one another in terms of sound.
The most difficult task was the translation of the two songs that were sung by the young boy in Dr. Copernicus, especially the first song, because the rhyme needed to be retained. Translating the name of the apostle John as “Johannes” did not match up with a translation of the second line (preferably “Zegen het bed waar ik op lig”), nor did a change of sequence in the names of the four gospel writers offer a solution. Therefore, I opted for “Liefste vier evangelisten” (“Dear four gospel writers”) and a reference to Christianity in order to preserve the rhyme; the drawback, of course, is that the second and fourth line of the Dutch translation become longer in comparison to the original version, but I think this is only a minor problem. The second song was easier, as I could match the name of the invented character in the first line with the already established rhyme of “stro” (“straw”).
John Banville