The Translator by John Crowley Read Free Book Online

we should come to know one another. We might begin now to introduce ourselves, in this way: I will ask you each to say a poem that has meant something to you.”
    He looked around at them, maybe the faintest curl of a smile to his mobile mouth, his hands laid one over the other now and unmoving: 38

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    Kit had noticed before how large they were, long strong fingers and jut-ting wrist bones. They were all silent, maybe trying to decide if he actually meant what he said, or if maybe he meant only that they should name a poem, or a poet, they had liked or read; knowing he hadn’t, though, and that they would have to recite poetry, if they could, before their fellows and this personage.
    “We will perhaps start on my left,” Falin said.
    “Okay,” said the student on his left after a moment. She was a pretty moon-faced blue-eyed girl of a kind there seemed to Kit to be a lot of in the world, cookie-cut, but sometimes very different inside, she knew. “I like this one:
    “I’m nobody! Who are you?
    Are you nobody, too?
    Then there’s a pair of us—don’t tell!
    They’d banish us, you know.”
    “It’s Emily Dickinson,” she said. “There’s more I don’t remember.”
    Falin nodded, regarding her or what she had said in a kind of plain wonder, then turning his gaze to the boy next to her, who passed the glance along with a shrug to the one next to him. This one said: “All I can think of is one by Swinburne,” and he began it: “When the hounds of spring are on winter’s traces The mother of months in meadow or plain Fills the shadows and windy places With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain . . .”
    He was a small guy with a red crewcut growing out raggedly and a spray of childlike greenish freckles across his nose; one button of his button-down shirt was undone and his glasses a little askew.
    “And the brown bright nightingale amorous Is half assuaged for Itylus

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    For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces The tongueless vigil, and all the pain.”
    Kit thought of him reading these lines so often that they had lodged in his memory, and found herself liking him. He began on another stanza before running out or growing embarrassed; seeming to shake free of a little trance.
    The baton was passed, or refused mostly with shrugs or giggles, which seemed to interest Falin as much as the poems or bits of poems recited. Kit wondered if the other kids felt like what they seemed to her, prisoners summoned out of dungeons and ordered to speak, who had almost forgotten human speech. A beaked storky guy with a bob-bing Adam’s apple recited in a weird basso: “The moving finger writes, and, having writ, Moves on: nor all your piety nor wit Shall lure it back to cancel half a line, Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.”
    Many nodded when another girl began, “Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,” and though she didn’t seem to be one who had gone down many less-traveled roads, you couldn’t know that, which was maybe what this exercise was for. Then it was Kit’s turn, whose mind was empty, there were no poems in her except her own, the one she had given him: it stood in the way of all the others she knew. Falin waited.
    “Je suis comme le roi d’un pays pluvieux,” she said. “That’s . . . well, it’s what I remember right now. It’s Baudelaire, and it means I am like the king of a rainy country.” The line had appeared on her French placement exam, this glowing sentence among the ordinary requests for directions and statements of fact, opening like a casement. She’d had a hard time moving past it. “The next lines are, I think, like this: Riche, mais impuissant; jeune, et portant très vieux. Rich but power-less; young and yet very old.” She stopped, for she found her eyes had 40

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    filled with tears and her throat trembled: because of the poem, and because she had remembered it, but for more than that. She seemed to see