Exchange Place

According to Strange

With the accordion music of the Maigret theme still in my head, I opened another of the books that had come to me that morning, Jean Cocteau’s Tour du monde en 80 jours (Mon premier voyage). I had read no more than a few pages when it seemed to me as if I was reading a different book to that called Round the World Again in 80 Days (Mon Premier Voyage), translated by Stuart Gilbert. So it proved. I took the Gilbert from the shelf and compared it to the Cocteau. The format and typographical conventions of each were, of course, different, but so was the sense.

Cocteau: ‘ — <<Trente milles banknotes pour vous, Capitaine, si nous arrivons avant une heure à Liverpool.>> Ce cri de Philéas Fogg reste pour moi l’appel de la mer et jamais ocean veritable n’aura le prestige à mes yeux d’une toile verte que les machinistes agitaient avec le dos, pendant que Philéas et Passepartout, accrochés à une épave, regardaient s’allumer au loin les lumières de Liverpool.’

Gilbert: ‘ “Sixty thousand dollars for you, Captain, if your ship makes Liverpool before one o’clock.” In Phileas Fogg’s appeal I still hear the call of the sea. Never for me will any real ocean have the glamour of that sheet of green canvas, heaved on the back of the Châtelet stage-hands crawling like caterpillars beneath it, while Phileas and Passepartout from the dismantled hull watch the lights of Liverpool twinkling in the distance.’

There are no caterpillars in Cocteau’s French. And the end of the sentence, should, I think, read something like ‘while Phileas and Passepartout, hanging on to a wreck, watch the lights of Liverpool coming on in the distance.’ Nevertheless I had been beguiled by Gilbert’s translation when I first read it on the Dublin train. The caterpillars are a stroke of wayward genius. As I look at it now, I am especially taken by his translation of prestige as ‘glamour’. According to the OED, the primary meaning of the English word prestige (French from Latin praestigium illusion, as in prestidigitation) is ‘a conjuring trick; a deception; an imposture’; the sense of ‘influence, reputation, or popular esteem’ comes later. ‘Glamour’, in modern English, is a shade different to ‘prestige’; but its primary meaning is ‘magic, enchantment’. It is a variant of ‘grammar’, harking back to a time when the study of language, in its incantation of declension, was seen as a magical art. A kind of hocus-pocus. For Cocteau, as he voyages across the globe, everything is glamour and theatre, or an opium dream. In Hong Kong, the streets recall the wings of a stage set; the shops and open windows might be dressing rooms in which consummate actors are putting on greasepaint before coming down to play their parts under the red and green limelight of the streetlamps. And as Cocteau leaves Hong Kong, Charlie Chaplin comes on board, bound for Hollywood. Chaplin has no French, Cocteau no English, but they converse effortlessly through mime, la plus vivante des langues, ‘the liveliest of tongues’. Words become gesture.

Translation is the ‘removal or conveyance from one person, place, time, or condition to another; the removal of the remains of a famous person, esp. a saint, to another place; the movement of a body or form of energy from one point of space to another; the action or process of expressing the sense of a word, passage etc., in a different language; the expression or rendering of something in another medium, mode, or form of expression.’ And it occurred to me that reading is itself a form of translation, for every reader must interpret what he or she reads, visualizing the action or the scene described in his or her own way. The text is a series of stage directions, and we furnish the crime scene — the locked library room in a murder mystery, say — with the props of memory and genre, memories of real libraries we have been in and memories of other libraries in other murder mysteries. Each of us enters the room in the book in our own way. Each listener hears a different music, just as each of us is not only who we think we are, but the person seen and thought into being by others. Eyes staring at one’s back. Meeting of glances. We are others in the eyes of others. I am many John Kilfeathers. I could feel the dope talking, so I looked it up, dope from Dutch doop, sauce, from doopen, dip, mix, adulterate. I thought of Dutch painting, colours mixed on a palette, scumbled into one another to become another, and the smell of oil paint entering the brain through the nostrils, down the neural pathways, reconfiguring the dendrite fractals in a fugue of variant and deviation.

Fugue is also ‘a flight from or loss of the awareness of one’s identity, sometimes involving wandering away from home’. I recalled the once celebrated case of Charles Burns of Belfast, County Antrim, a funeral director and a lay preacher. To all appearances he was a happily married man with a large and devoted family. On 17 January 1887, the day after his fiftieth birthday, Burns withdrew his life’s savings from the local bank, and disappeared without so much as a word to anyone who knew him. After some weeks of ineffective police investigation, his family hired a private detective, John Strange, to look deeper into the matter; some six months later, Strange found him in Westport, County Mayo, working under the name of Cathal O’Byrne as the proprietor of a lodging house. However, when confronted with photographic evidence of his real identity, Burns refused to acknowledge it, saying he had always been Cathal O’Byrne and that the photograph bore no relation to his features. He immediately took the photograph from my hand, said Strange, and went over to the dining-room mirror. Looking alternately at mirror and photograph, he said over and over, How can you say this is me? I am not that man, I am this man that you see before you; and as he did so, said Strange, his eyes met mine in the mirror. There was an uncanny light in them, as if someone else was looking out through those eyes. It sent quite a chill through me, said Strange. According to Strange, Burns expressed a horror of his alleged existence as a funeral director, saying that he was perfectly happy catering to the living; indeed, he was a popular figure in Westport, and all who knew Cathal O’Byrne testified to his good character, and the grace and civility with which he conducted his affairs. Strange sought the advice of the local constabulary, who, after consultation with their colleagues in Belfast, corroborated that this was indeed Charles Burns, late of Belfast. The good news was telegraphed to the family. It was decided for his safety to confine Burns to a room of his own lodging house until the family came to reclaim him. Alas, when they arrived, and the door of the room was unlocked, they found him dead. The body bore no marks of violence, self-inflicted or otherwise; he appeared to have passed away from heart failure in his sleep. It was, speculated Strange in his summing up of the case, as if Cathal O’Byrne, unable to countenance that he was indeed Charles Burns, had willed Burns to die. To sleep, perchance to dream. There were, he concluded, more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.