Let’s say the Mona Lisa is your favorite painting. Okay? So what’s your second-favorite painting? Is it another Italian portrait from 1504? See, the hands that were up are coming down. You’re laughing, but you get what I mean. Okay, so, similarly …
All the tourists would listen, rapt, inspired, flattered. While they never had read any other literature from medieval Spain, they had often been to the Louvre as recently as that day, and they were always happy to learn that it wasn’t their fault that they hadn’t remembered anything in the entire museum other than the Mona Lisa.
But while Audetat was getting better and better at talking about the biggest question he faced, when the café closed each night, he found he still wasn’t any closer to answering it.
How does one follow up Don Quixote? Even—especially—if you’re just the translator?
He once again ran through and extended the shelf of Spanish-language literature he had been browsing in his mind.
Gabriel García Márquez?
The original translations were still good, relevant, powerful.
Borges?
He loved Borges, but it didn’t feel destined for a major translation. It was, perhaps, too cool to catch fire; it seemed expressly written to be discovered in a lightless nook of a library or basement or, best, basement library. Plus, Audetat knew, part of the fun of loving Borges was in being one of the few to love Borges and in passionately recommending him to people who you secretly knew probably wouldn’t like him as much as you did.
Neruda?
Pablo Neruda was about as pretty and pure as poetry could get, understandably and deservedly timeless and popular. But anyone who had ever ordered tacos could translate Neruda without much help. Nothing much to do there.
Lorca?
Vargas Llosa?
Eh.
He looked out the café window at the colorful leaves and scarves dotted across the girls of almost-Paris in October and wondered if he would translate anything at all. All that held his true interest right now was this scene in front of him and the desire he had, heightened as it was by living in an age that is supposed to know better, to be a part of it, to disappear into that sentimental idea of the life of the Paris writer that the rational side of him knew had expired long before he had arrived. Sad that he could never live in the Paris he remembered once dreaming of in his youth, he let his mind wander off across life and literature until it settled almost independently on the gnawing notion that perhaps the most true and timeless version of Paris, for everyone, might be a version of this one—the Paris filtered through remembered dreams.
Then he knew what to write next.
“No sooner had the warm liquid mixed with the crumbs that touched my palate than a shudder ran through me and I stopped, intent upon the extraordinary thing that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had invaded my senses, something isolated, detached, with no suggestion of its origin. And at once the vicissitudes of life had become indifferent to me, its disasters innocuous, its brevity illusory—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling me with a precious essence; or rather this essence was not in me, it was me … Whence did it come? What did it mean? How could I seize and apprehend it? … And suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before mass), when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of tea or tisane. The sight of the little madeleine had recalled nothing to my mind before I tasted it. And all from my cup of tea.”
— REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST, MARCEL PROUST, TRANS. C. K. SCOTT MONCRIEFF
“In the instant that this crumble-soaked softness touched my tongue, everything stopped, and the entirety of the world became this feeling that was happening to me. An exquisite pleasure had encircled and then invaded my senses. A feeling isolated, detached, with no hint or suggestion of its origin. And at once, the million misdirections of life had become irrelevant to me, its disasters innocuous to me, its brevity illusory to me—this new sensation having had on me the effect which love has of filling one with a priceless essence. Except that this essence was not in me—it was me … Where did it come from? What did it mean? How could I steal it and keep it? … Just as suddenly the memory revealed itself. The taste was that of the little piece of madeleine which my aunt Léonie used to give me when I went to say good morning to her in her bedroom, on Sunday mornings at Combray, dipping it first in her own cup of tea. (On those mornings, I didn’t go out before mass.) The sight of that little madeleine had brought up nothing to me before I tasted it. And then, all—and all from my cup of tea.”
— THE SEARCH FOR LOST TIME, MARCEL PROUST, TRANS. J. C. AUDETAT