Lydia Davis - The End of the Story

I can’t stop translating altogether. Recently I tried to figure out how much money I spent each month, how much I had on hand at present, and how much I needed to earn over the next few months to supplement that. Pleased with myself, I went downstairs and explained to Vincent that I seemed to spend about $2,300 per month, and had enough to last for about a year if I translated just a little. But Vincent reminded me that my calculations are often wrong. I often forget what he calls hidden costs. And I forget that I will have to pay taxes on what I earn.

I am not very good at managing my money. One problem is that when I’m paid for my work, the payment always comes in a single lump sum so large it seems limitless. I begin spending it, and each thing I buy seems to be the only thing I will buy, each small sum seems like the only sum. I don’t understand that one sum will be added to the next until the original sum is all gone.

Now and then a day comes when I have almost nothing left, and no prospect of work either. I am afraid. It is not that Vincent would not try to make up the difference if I ran out of money altogether, but if I don’t pay a share of our expenses we can’t maintain what we have. At this point I look at what money is left and at last, because I have no choice, make a budget and try to live within it.

Sometimes, then, the phone rings and I hear the voice of a cheerful person who wants to pay me to translate a book. Because I speak to her in a calm, professional way, she has no idea of the despair that had surrounded me until that moment, there at the other end of the line.

I’m not tired of translating, though I probably should be. Maybe I should also be embarrassed that I’m still translating after all these years. People seem surprised that a woman my age is a translator, as though it is not wrong to translate when you are still a student, or just out of school, but you should have stopped by the time you are older. Or it is fine to translate poetry but not prose. Or it is all right to translate prose if you do it as a pastime or a hobby. One person I know, for instance, does not have to translate anymore, and that is one of the many signs that he is now a successful writer. He will occasionally translate something small, like a poem, but only to oblige an old friend.

Part of it may be that translators are paid by the word, so the more carefully they work on a translation, the less they are paid for their time, which means that if they are very careful they may not earn much. And often, the more interesting or unusual the book, the more painstaking they have to be. For one or two difficult books, I took so long over each page that I earned less than a dollar an hour. But I’m not sure this explains why so many people do not respect translators or would simply prefer not to think about them.

If I am at a party and I say to a man that I’m a translator, he often loses interest immediately and prepares to move on and talk to someone else. But in fact I have done the same thing to other translators at parties, usually other women. At first I talk to the woman with enthusiasm, because there is so much I have wanted to say about translating to a person who understands the work, things I have thought about a great deal and have kept to myself because I don’t often meet another translator. Then my enthusiasm slowly dies, because everything she says to me in reply is a complaint, and I see that she has no joy in translating — no interest in her own work and no interest in me or my work either.

One woman I remember even looked like me, or like what I think I look like until I go and look in the mirror again. She had very long, straight, light brown hair held back from her face by two small barrettes, she wore glasses, she was tall and thin, she had regular features that might have been pleasant if her expression had not been so dull, and she wore neat but drab clothes of no particular style, maybe a colorless sweater and a plain skirt. The main impression she made on me was one of dullness, narrowness, and dissatisfaction. Maybe this is how I appear to others. Maybe I seem too dull and full of complaints, though I think I am too enthusiastic, if anything. But maybe my enthusiasm is worse, because to them it is enthusiasm about dull things.

I complained to another friend about my confusion over this book. He had asked me a direct and clear question, like “How far along are you?” or “How much do you have left to do?” as though I should be able to answer that. He said he always knew exactly how much he had left to do on a book. He said he wrote about a page a day and always knew that he had, say, 100 pages left to write. Only one book of his, he said, was confusing, and for that book he had made elaborate diagrams. But I feel I would lose too much time if I stopped to do that, even though I should know I lose more time by not doing it.

Yesterday, for about an hour, I thought I understood what to do. I thought: Just take out the parts you don’t like. That way, everything that is left will probably be good. But then another voice spoke up. It is a voice that often interrupts me to confuse me. It said I shouldn’t be too quick to eliminate things. Maybe they only needed to be rewritten, it said. Or moved to a different spot. Moving a sentence to a different spot could change everything. And changing just a single word in a bad sentence could make it good. In fact, changing a punctuation mark could do that. So then I thought I would have to keep moving each thing and rewriting it until I was sure it did not belong anywhere and could take it out.

Then again, maybe there is nothing that does not belong in, and this novel is like a puzzle with a difficult solution. If I were clever and patient enough, I could find it. When I do a difficult crossword, I never quite finish it, but I usually don’t remember to look at the solution when it appears. I have been working on this puzzle so long by now that I catch myself thinking it is time to look at the solution, as though I will only have to dig through a pile of papers to find it. I have the same sort of frustration, at times, with a problem in a translation. I ask, Now, what is the answer? — as though it existed somewhere. Maybe the answer is what will occur to me later, when I look back.

Because of the kind of puzzle this is, though, no one else will ever know that a few more things belonged in the novel and were left out because I did not know where to put them.

This is not the only thing I’m afraid of. I’m afraid I may realize after the novel is finished that what actually made me want to write it was something different, and that it should have taken a different direction. But by then I will not be able to go back and change it, so the novel will remain what it is and the other novel, the one that should have been written, will never be written.

* * *

There were five quarrels, I think. The first was in the car after the reading. The second was just after we returned from a trip up the coast together. I can’t remember what that one was about, only that we had not quite made it up when the piano tuner arrived to tune my piano, walking through the fine brown dirt of the driveway carrying his black satchel and whistling a song from a popular Broadway show.

There were two trips up the coast that I can remember, one to a large city where we bought books and one to visit that cousin of mine who took us sailing.

There were two trips out on boats together, one on my cousin’s sailboat and one on a whale-watching boat with an older man who ignored me almost completely. I have not so far included the whale watching, the sailing, or the trip to the city, where we had dinner in a crowded restaurant with our bags of new books by our feet.

I went off on three trips by myself. One was for a weekend. The second was for three weeks in early winter, when my term of teaching was over. We wrote letters to each other and spoke on the phone once or twice. The last trip, and the longest, came at the end of winter. I called him a few times and wrote him one letter that never reached him. That was when I was staying in a borrowed apartment and he was living above the cactus nursery.