Captives

TRANSLATOR’S AFTERWORD

THE LANGUAGE OF Norman Manea’s Captives can’t be discussed without an excursion into history. History animates Captives’ unhinged voices. Time after time, we hear the untrustworthy speech of people cut lose from their moorings, who try to make “anything” of themselves, anything at all demanded by the moment, just to stay afloat. Having come through the Second World War and living through its communist aftermath, many speak in hypocritical or self-serving terms.

Captives is tacitly Stalinist Romania (1947–1965), and accommodate or flounder is the unspoken motto. Party membership is the key to success, and many are ready to hide or lie about “class enemy” antecedents.

Those unable to join the Party seek to be on good terms with it: in the novel, two high school teachers — a fascist ex-legionnaire and a former priest (e.g. a representative of the old order) — grovelingly hide their true natures in order to blend into the new order. Those in relative favor with the Party rationalize their attempts to take advantage of their position. And those who fail to adapt end up drifting: the narrator’s sister, born as a replacement for the children lost during the Holocaust, emblematically changes her appearance and goals at the drop of a hat and feverishly quotes Rimbaud’s “Drunken Boat.” Her identification with the poem tags her as an unmoored vessel, a person born in denial of her family’s natural identity or trajectory. Like Captives’ narrator, she is unsettling, not out of malice but as a result of her own instability.

The characters’ chameleon-like self-invention and apparent lack of inner solidity comes of their having lived through the novel’s implicit backstory. Like Captives’ first readers, the people in this novel live in the knowledge that having been scorned by the Allies, Romania joined the Axis Powers and fought on the fascist side until August 23, 1944, when Romania’s young King Michael staged a coup that overthrew Marshal Antonescu, the fascist-allied leader. Disaster (and, for some, opportunity) came on the heels of heroism. The communists quickly ousted King Michael.

Long before the endgame politics of the mid-forties, though, in alliance with Hitler, the Antonescu regime deported Jews and Romani from the northeast of the country to concentration camps in Transnistria, which stretches from the Dniester River in Moldavia to Moldavia’s border with present day Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands of people died there, most of them Jews. While the (better known) captives in the Nazi camps ultimately fell victim to the Final Solution, those in Transnistria were left to perish of hunger, disease, and the random brutality of the guards. The survivors were liberated by the Red Army, Captives’ author and his parents among them.

The unmoored mentality of Manea’s literary captives is partly self-willed. One sees it in the language they use to think about the past. A quick trip through the text turns up many statements like these, each from a different character:

“It was necessary to gather memories, to rummage through them, to understand them so they could be forgotten, and then the amnesia would have to be checked again and again, for it would have to cover everything so there’d be no need to cheat or engage in the farce of little, passing deceptions.”

“We have to forget in order to start anew.”

“Forget it, banish it, erase it all. .”

Thinking about the past leads to self-induced amnesia, which is comparable to coma, as we are repeatedly reminded. Here’s a key passage from a philosophy book to which the narrator frequently recurs:

Time has an objective reality, even when objective sensation is weakened or eradicated because time “presses on,” because it “flows.” It remains a problem for professional logicians to know if a hermetically sealed can sitting on a shelf is outside time or not. But we know too well that time accomplishes its work even on one who sleeps. A certain doctor mentions the case of a little girl, aged twelve, who fell asleep one day and continued to sleep for thirteen years. In this interval, though, she did not remain a little girl but rather woke up a young woman, for she had grown in the meantime.

The narrator/protagonist considers that he himself has spent a large portion of his late adolescent and adult life in a hermetically sealed coma. He describes the effect of hermetically sealed reading:

I used to gather the paperback, clothbound, and hardcover books. The stacks would grow taller than my head. . I needed to conserve myself, hermetically sealed on my shelf. Lacking air, the books rotted inside me. With all its games and noises, summer wasn’t getting close to the shelf where I’d perched. Everything stood stock still around me. There was no movement and therefore no time.

The narrator’s preoccupation with hermetic sealing derives explicitly from a passage in The Magic Mountain, and expresses a deep concern with the relationship between trauma and forgetting, which have severed these characters from what would have been their normal course of development. What results both in their direct and in their reported inner speech is a trajectory toward stasis: the denial or refusal of personal growth. Communist Romania, Captives implies, isn’t just a hermetically sealed can inhabited by the comatose because of its citizens’ inability to leave the country. It is a self-made psychological vacuum.

Operating in this psychological vacuum, Captives itself exhibits a mentality that is unstabilized, unmoored. The book is ostensibly the semi-therapeutic writing of a madman who suffers from attempts to disconnect himself from his past. The result is language that continuously tries to make “anything” — to use the narrator’s word — of the world around the narrator/protagonist in his doomed effort to keep psychologically afloat. Consider the following passage, which spans two subsections of Captives’ final chapter:

A day has gone by, a week. Am still a somnolent high-school student. No, only a day, a week, a Saturday has gone by, and talk of confusion would be justified. Machines for typing and checking and intercepting and photographing and following and reproducing: their monotonous patter is here, and myself. . fugitive, lost, stalked from every corner, unable to sleep.

“You walk, you walk forever, you have lost time and it has lost you. . a terrain, sprinkled with seaweed and tiny shells; hearing thrilled by that unbridled wind that freely roves. . we

watch the tongues of sea foam stretch to lick our feet.”

Under the waves, under the stroking foam, the sea roars in the great castle of water.

• • •

The sea boomed. The thick castle walls kept out the noise of waves, but other sounds collided and crossed paths in the great hall: the release of bolts, metallic clanks, keys turning in locks, latches, heavy springs. Between them, odd, erratic breaks. One, pause. Two-three, pause. Four-five-six, pause. One, pause, two-three, then four-five-six, pause. Over and again, perpetual clanking, a continuous murmur from the right. To the left, short breaks; to the right, the crowded taps of many fingers, hammering.

Raised my eyes. Found myself on a chair placed to the right of a medium-sized table.

Here, the narrator allows himself to flow through several states that include almost simultaneously recalling events from high school and from his working life, while also entering a hallucinatory state or a timeless dream of walking forever by the sea, only to find himself back in his office, seated on a chair. Talk of confusion would indeed be justified.

In this way, as if it were science fiction (which it certainly is not), Captives exists as a world in which versions of reality melt into each other in a continuous series of visions and revisions. Entering Captives’ first section, “She,” for the first time, the reader will be surprised to find the narrator/protagonist going upstairs to the apartment of Monica Smântănescu, Professor of French and Music. He makes two approaches, and each time the apartment is different. On the first try, his visit goes like this:

. . The building’s staircase: step, riser, step, riser — chunks of ice. The final threshold, the wooden door covered in arabesques, angels sculpted from edge to edge on its wide margins. The door opens toward books heaped on heavy iron shelves, vases with slender flowers, a narrow table, a tall chair, a piano raising its oblique tail, the ceiling painted with pastel squares, the slippery parquet: everything accumulated with the serenity of a fairy tale, until chaos imposes itself, until the path from the street corner must be taken again, killing reveries, reestablishing the brutality of things, dispelling mystifications, until the street reasserts its filth. .

On the second attempt, better anchored in reality, the apartment turns out to be a pigsty. Similarly, there are to two versions of the narrator’s initial meeting with Ms. Smântănescu: they meet on a train — or is it a boat? By the third section, “I,” the reader will have to decide if a woman known only as Captain Zubcu’s daughter is either (a) a mystical avatar of the narrator’s sister Dona, long dead in Transnistria, or (b) an office girl he seduces and abandons, though given the novel’s deeper themes there’s no reason why she can’t be both.

Captives is remarkable for saying everything and nothing: there is no historical backstory. We never hear that the action takes place in Romania — the country is not named. We are not told that the protagonist’s family is Jewish. Joseph Stalin’s name is not mentioned once, although he is referenced in the subtle details: the narrator’s show trial is Stalinist; the narrator stumbles into a political meeting where we are given to understand that the attendees chant Sta-lin, Sta-lin; and the narrator attends a mass outdoor commemoration in honor of the Beloved Leader at the time of his death.

This language of omission obviously owes something to the climate of censorship in which Captives first appeared. It’s also a safe bet that Captives’ omissions wouldn’t have pulled the wool over anyone’s eyes, which more than suggests that the language of omission is a strategic, literary act.

Even though Captives was written to appear in communist Romania, even though its characters are Romanian, and even though it passed through Romanian censorship, still, Captives is not only (or primarily) a novel about Romania, or the Holocaust, or communist dictatorships. It is these things, of course, but freed of the explicit by omission, Captives creates its own world and can be read on its own terms. It demands that we experience life in a world of things unsaid, which makes silence one of the “loudest” voices in the book. Deafened by silence, we experience captivity, and silence becomes the gadfly of protest.

If silence is maddening, so are the implied and the tacit. They play games of “I dare you” and “now you see it, now you don’t.” At the level of conversation, Captives’ language is quicksand.

The office spy, Misha (who is presumably in the pay of the Securitate), plagues our protagonist with seemingly inoffensive remarks. At one point they engage in the following non-dialogue:

— I’ve been thinking, everything they’re saying about Kennedy is a bunch of shit. Robert, the brother, is hiding the photographs of the autopsy, and saying they’ll only be revealed in ’71 because they’re

horrible

?

Unobtrusive voice, fixed gaze, astonished.

— What exactly can be so horrible? If it was Oswald who shot him or the other guy, who cares? What’s so horrible?

He asks and answers, poses and resolves dilemmas meant to provoke his interlocutor.

— It’s clear that Johnson shot him. Otherwise, there’d be nothing horrible at all.

What does the informer want his interlocutor to say? Something about the Kremlin’s responsibility for the Kennedy assassination? Whatever Misha says is untrustworthy, not least because it’s incomprehensible. It’s impossible to find the core of his remarks. Silence is the only safe response.

At another point, the weakened, self-doubting narrator attempts to resign from his office job. His boss, Caba, meets this crisis with apparent cordiality, but Caba’s cordiality seems entirely suspect: “The old games of cordiality would have to be maintained at any price, along with the well-known lines of attack, defense, and encirclement. He knew how to engage the old laws of cordiality.” The most the protagonist can expect of Caba is the entrapping, famously “wooden” language of communist rhetoric: “This formerly eminent colleague should have been the light of his generation. Through what evil, unsupervised game have all those hopes and promising signs come to naught?” To answer these questions with their tacit threat of political risk (and possible prison) would amount to walking deliberately through a minefield. The only answer: silence or flight. Our narrator chooses flight. There’s more than that, though. The unwieldy, wooden question, which the narrator attributes to Caba in the first section of this novel, circumnavigates its true answer, which only becomes clear to the reader in Captives’ third section. The narrator has betrayed his potential to rise inside the system by damaging himself in the course of an initial game of rhetorical circumlocution at the show trial. His rhetorical swoops and dives rescue Caba and result in the destruction of his own mental stability, but the core of the two characters’ relationship remains painfully locked away from discussion. It hovers between them as a closed center around which they revolve.

Ordinary communications aren’t what they seem either. A bedtime story submitted to a (then real) radio program for children holds fanciful and deliberately idiotic disguised messages about disappointed love. A love letter written in connection with an ad placed in the personal columns is a tissue of lies. Our protagonist’s parents’ communication with their son about a name for his new sister are implicit denials of the Transnistrian past — they insist that the boy cannot remember his murdered sister, whom he remembers perfectly well. The real center of each discussion and interaction is seen and unseen, shut away, so that all talk and action revolve around these “closed centers.” I use this term advisedly. It comes from the novel, and it belongs to a key figure: the trope of the spiral staircase. Romanian cities abound in winding staircases, and Captives’ natives ascend and descend them constantly. Here is the narrator going up stairs:

The high iron gate strikes its latch; the narrow, serpentine, spiral staircase devours itself. Hand on the cold metal balustrade, the climber coils within himself. One flight up. Again, the steps rotate uniformly again in the shape of a fan: a point flowing at an even rate along the radius of a circle. Rotating evenly, slowly around the circumference, dizzied by the curved trajectories, the climber’s body turns in on itself toward a painfully closed center.

Just as their feet make their way up and down so many twisting staircases, the denizens of this novel are forced to spiral around truths closed to (or enclosed inside) themselves by trauma, obfuscation, or denial.

In this sense, Captives is a spiraling dance of sealed-off subjectivities. Although a dark bildungsroman can be dug out of Captives, the novel is actually organized as a chaconne, and indeed Handel’s Chaconne is Captives’ signature piece of music. When the narrator and Monica Smântănescu meet for the first time (on a boat or in a train), music pours from a portable radio, and Monica announces her presence by saying, “Handel’s Chaconne in G Major.” A dance in moderate triple meter form, the chaconne is based on the continuous variation of a series of chords. The musical definition describes the novel very well. Organized as a set of multifarious and evolving variations on a theme, Captives is composed of three chapters — “She,” “You,” and “I” — and follows a series of thematic modifications that includes (but isn’t limited to) its narrator’s resignation, differing versions of the narrator’s encounter with Monica Smântănescu, ruminations on the narrator’s obsessive relationship with Captain Zubcu’s daughter, as well as his preoccupation with both his own childhood loss of his sisters and his decision to save Sebastian Caba, the defendant at the show trial who becomes his boss. The She of these variations is, of course, Monica Smântănescu. You is the Captain’s daughter as a revenant of the narrator’s lost sister, Dona. I is the narrator. As for sealed-off subjectivities: to qualify as a main character in Captives, you must have your “I”/ego hermitically locked away, and this is not just a matter of a sensation felt on climbing stairs or comparing oneself to a jar in a novel by Thomas Mann. For the translator, the most striking feature of Manea’s three characters is signaled by their frequent lack of subject pronouns.

While sparing subject pronouns in general, Captives is especially chary of the words she, you, and I. It should be said here that a lack of subject pronouns is both easier to accomplish and much less jarring to read in Romanian than it is in English because Romanian is a highly inflected language. Whereas English present tense verbs, for example, tend to inflect only in the third person singular (I go, you go, he/she/it goes, we go, you go, they go), Romanian verbs feature personal endings. The Romanian for the present tense of the verb “to go” (Eu merg, tu mergi, el/ea merge, noi mergem, voi mergeti, ei/ele merg) has five forms for six “persons.” This means, in practice, that, thanks to the signal value of the verb endings, standard Romanian can be spoken without too many pronouns, and it can be written without them as well.

The absence of pronouns ordinarily presents no special challenge for the translator. When translating standard Romanian into standard English, the translator simply supplies pronouns when necessary. Captives, however, presents a particular challenge. Manea’s narrator tends to reserve the subject pronouns she, you, and I for climactic moments when identity is an issue. At other times he takes advantage of Romanian’s ability to do without subject pronouns or finds objective correlatives like “the professor of French and piano” or “the wandering son of earth” to substitute for the mysterious subjectivity condensed into an asserted she or I. In a similar way, the narrator tends to slip into the third person and to use objective correlatives — “the visitor,” “the orphan girl,” “that girl” — to avoid words like I and you.

In this translation I have tried to cope with the author’s use and avoidance of pronouns on a case-by-case basis. In a few instances phrases have been rearranged to avoid awkwardness. A Romanian sentence that reads “In vain had [she] arranged her class schedule in order to avoid this insufferable courtyard motorcade,” has become “It was a matter of vainly having arranged her class schedule in order to avoid this insufferable courtyard motorcade.” In one case I followed the pronounless Romanian telegraphese to emphasize the narrator’s frenzied madness:

Let him rattle for a moment or two. The visitor evidently feared a trap. What fun to watch him deal with Madam Professor’s husband! Farces leapt to mind: all equally good. It was hard to choose.

— My sister told me about you, the madman finally remarked. Personally, I don’t live here.

— Mhm. She didn’t write anything about having a brother.

Should have seen that one coming. The end of the letter had been clear.

— Make yourself comfortable. Perhaps you’d like to wait. Have a seat.

Proceeded to pick a pile of the chair. Miscellaneous trash. Couldn’t find a place for it. Threw it on the bed.

There is no way to write the English second person without using the word you, however, and I have simply used it when the narrator’s prose apostrophizes Captain Zubcu’s daughter.

Readers not preoccupied with the blood and guts of translation and the differences between languages may see these final notes as technical details, and that’s as it should be. For any translator, what really matters is bringing the spirit of the writing into the new language. In this case, the language is swirling and mysterious, for Captives does not aspire to be a traditional novel. It expresses the dementia induced by the captive state. Part novel (verging on roman-fleuve), part musically inspired composition, Captives leads the translator to grapple with the text as fluid, polyphonic writing, for it includes many kinds of speech, nearly all of them unstable.

JEAN HARRIS

AUGUST 2014