The Translator by John Crowley Read Free Book Online Page A

that country, to which a long time ago she had been able to go so easily, where rain was as exquisite as sun, where pain and even boredom could have the same golden weight and worth as joy or triumph.
    “Anyway,” she said, ceasing, embarrassed and abashed. “Sort of like that. There’s more, but.”
    Falin was looking at her, leaning somewhat forward over the table toward her. She would later think that he seemed often to listen by looking as much as by hearing. He said: “This is an English word, ‘rainy’?”
    “Sure,” Kit said. “Sure. A rainy day.”
    He lifted his head as though remembering that yes, he knew this locution. “Rainii,” he said softly.
    No one else was willing to speak, and Falin spread his great hands on the table.
    “Very well,” he said. “In exchange for yours, here is one.”
    He began to speak in Russian, in a voice entirely different from the one in which he had spoken before, sounds that don’t exist in English, complex fluid vowels and strange soft consonants drawn out impossibly: it was as though he sculpted the poem in the middle of the air with broad steady strokes of rhythm and rhyme. Kit didn’t know whether she wanted to laugh aloud or to moan in amazement.
    He finished, seeming to settle again, a hawk that had just roused and beat its wings. “This,” he said in his usual—or was it his American?—voice, “is quite famous poem in Russian, poem of Pushkin, known to everyone who reads, as perhaps some poems you have repeated are known to everyone here.” The students were still, and did not look at one another. “I cannot tell you what it says, not at all exactly, because meaning so much resides in Russian words; this problem we will talk much of. I will tell you though something of what it is about.”

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    He looked within, as though marshaling again before him the lines he had spoken.
    “He says—Pushkin—that the poet, until he is summoned by the god Apollo to sacrifice to him, is afraid, confused, immersed in the world and its troubles; his lyre—poet’s instrument—is still muffled, his soul is wrapped in sleep. And of all the world’s worthless children, he is most worthless.
    “Until he sings.”
    He let them think about this, or anyway said no more for a long moment.
    “Well, I will tell you something of myself,” he said at length.
    “Because it may be that some of you have come chiefly to have look at me, someone who has come from so far away and from somewhere so—strange to you.
    “Okay.
    “My name is Innokenti Isayevich Falin. I was born and grew up in the city of Leningrad, at that time Petrograd, before that St. Petersburg.
    My father was an engineer, I his only child.”
    He picked up and put down again his cigarettes; took his fountain pen from his pocket, and put it back.
    “When very young I liked poetry, nursery rhymes as you say; I was very intent on these, and I like them still today. But for a long time I showed no further interest in poetry. When I went to school I wished to be engineer like my father; but this was not possible. I became instead a drawer; not an artist but a drawer of plans, for machines . . .”
    “A draftsman,” somebody said.
    “A draftsman,” said Falin, tasting the word like a gourmet tasting an exotic morsel. “After that a soldier, trying not to die; after that a maker of furniture, that is worker in a prison camp where furniture was made; after that, draftsman again, and poet too. Then no job. Then exile.
    Then here.”
    He opened his hands: here.
    “My name you may have heard, from newspapers, but probably not 42

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    read any of my poems. For a long time none have been printed or published in the language I wrote them in, in the country where they were written. Those that were published long ago have mostly disappeared, though they were sometimes typed up or copied out by friends and passed around. Memorized too.” He tapped his brow.
    “Recited, one