“Some … interesting suggestions,” Audetat would say dryly, to more laughter. “All present some challenges. Anyway. Thank you so much for coming. See you at the bar.”
Afterward, he’d whisper to the student organizers a question he had learned long ago always had exactly one answer per town—“Is there a bar around here where writers hang out?”—and then headed out to Fox Head Tavern in Iowa City or Bukowksi’s in Boston (which Audetat thought sounded too on the nose to be authentic and was right) and ordered a drink where people would be most likely to start a shy, respectful conversation with him and where he could disappear into his two favorite pastimes: the poetry of everyday conversations and the people who thought he was brilliant.
After a while, somehow, this got boring, too.
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
— ANNA KARENINA, LEO TOLSTOY, TRANS. RICHARD PEVEAR AND LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY
“All happy families are alike.
“Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
— ANNA KARENINA, LEO TOLSTOY, TRANS. J. C. AUDETAT
The new translation of Anna Karenina was not a particularly dramatic departure from most major translations that had come before it—and that was part of what made it legendary.
A nearly thousand-page novel, written originally in the plain-spoken Russian of the nineteenth century and translated into English by a poet who had so far only proven his abilities in the relatively related languages of Spanish and French, would understandably tempt the translator to make a “statement” with it, went the unanimous consensus—something at least somewhat equivalent to the extraordinary challenge.
But Audetat’s grandest statement was simply the fact of the work itself: the fact that he was somehow able to do this work, and had chosen these works, and that now, on the bestseller lists and bedside tables alike, one could find Don Quixote by Cervantes and The Search for Lost Time by Proust and Anna Karenina by Tolstoy, one stacked on top of the next, all excellent, all relevant, all because of Audetat.
“Just as Tolstoy had a perfect ear for the language of his day, Audetat has a perfect ear for the language of his.”14
“Anna Karenina has once again become the modern story it had always been meant to be.”15
“Admit it: you started Audetat’s Anna Karenina as a hate-read. You wanted a front-row seat to this overdue literary monster-truck pile-up. Who is this Romance-language proficient American—some friendless kid who opted to take both Spanish and French in eighth grade, fine, good for him—to try to delve into eighteenth-century Russian? Admit it: you were excited for Anna Karenina to be his Interiors, his 1941, his Funny People or (depending on your point of view) This Is 40—basically, the one that finally gives you permission to stop waking up in a panic-sweat of misery in the middle of the night to cross-check his Wikipedia bio against your own life and obsess over exactly what they had accomplished by the age you are now. Well, sorry. This motherf***** is as perfect as ever. Come for the hate, but stay for the love. Just don’t read the last few chapters on the F train, or you might be tempted to jump off it.”16
“The question that must necessarily paralyse the world of writers and readers alike, in the wake of the incomparable artistic and commercial success of J. C. Audetat’s Anna Karenina, is simply: what next? If the past is prologue, we know that one of the greatest books in the history of the world is about to be released and rightfully dominate the planet’s conversation. How can any reader—let alone writer—think of any other question in the meantime?”17
What other languages did he know? What other interests did he have? What other great books were most worthy, or most ready, or most easily mistaken as such?