Norman Manea - Captives

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.