STRENUOUS. GRIM. RESOLUTE. BLITHE. Alluring. Cringe. Recoil. Admonish. The words come from a long list scrawled in my handwriting, four or five at a time in different colored pens, on the blank front pages of an Italian book: Smoke Over Birkenau, by Liana Millu. The author, a writer and journalist born in Genoa, spent four months of 1944 imprisoned in Birkenau, the women’s part of Auschwitz. When she went home to Italy after the war—one of 57 people to return out of her transport of 672—she wrote her memoir of daily life in the women’s camp, in the form of six stories which Primo Levi praised in a 1947 review as “human dilemmas in an inhuman world.”
After that first edition in 1947, Smoke Over Birkenau went out of print until 1957, when it was reissued, half-heartedly, it appears, by the prominent Italian publisher, Mondadori, and went the usual way of unpublicized books. In 1979, the author recounts in a letter, she felt something had to be done. “I have no family. I am alone. I realized I couldn’t neglect the future of my book.” With the help of a friend, Daniel Vogelmann, proprietor of a small publishing firm in Florence called La Giuntina, she brought out two editions. In 1986 La Giuntina published a very successful fifth edition, and a sixth in 1991. Since then the book has been translated into German, French, and English.
I spent most of 1990 working on an English translation of Smoke Over Birkenau. When I recently opened the Italian edition I worked from, I found the list of words scrawled in the front, in my handwriting. Not long ago, I must have known how they got there and why, but now they were a mystery. Insouciant. Astounded. Hordes. Routine. Perfunctory. Fervent. Vitality. Interminable.
I did the translation in a kind of dream, or nightmare, mentally living four or five hours a day in the extermination camp I conjured up from words on the page, first the Italian, and then my own English words, which made the camp seem closer and more vivid, seen directly rather than through a screen. I didn’t think much about why I was doing it. First, why was I doing a translation at all, something bound to be strenuous and difficult, especially as my knowledge of Italian was not as thorough as it should be. Even more, why had I chosen a book which would plunge me into so grim a setting—for more months, as it turned out, than the actual author spent in the actual camp? Only lately have I begun to think about how the work intersected with my life and with my own work, which was writing fiction.
In the fall of 1988 I had finished a novel, and for the next six months I didn’t know what to do with myself. The novel was out of my hands, moving through the various stages of getting printed and bound, for which I was no longer necessary. I tried starting another one but couldn’t find any more words. It was as if, in that novel, I had used up all the words I knew, although it was quite short, as novels go. I wrote an unsuccessful story. I was asked to do a few essays and reviews; as always, when writing on demand, I felt I was resolutely completing term papers. I had always wanted to write a musical comedy, so I did the lyrics for several songs which I still keep in a folder and hope to return to some day; they were funny songs but I couldn’t think of a plot in which they might be set.
I wasn’t teaching; there was no place I had to go each day. I would not be missed anywhere since no one expected me. In the morning I would sit down at my desk as a writer should, but that was as far as I got, sitting there and maybe writing a few more blithe verses for my songs. It got so that I would cringe when I woke and opened my eyes to the light, knowing that yet again I’d have to confront my desk. There were times my body actually recoiled from the desk, and no matter how I admonished myself I could not produce any useful words.
It was then that I got the notion of translating. I had done some translation years ago and recalled it as serene, absorbing work, wonderful work. It had all the alluring intricacies of writing, the playing with words and phrases and rhythms, except you didn’t have to make anything up. That was the best part. You felt you were writing and in a way you were, but the part of the mind that made things up could rest, and obviously that was what my imagination needed. Of course writing—real writing—is also translation, that is, transferring something into one’s native tongue, except the language from which one is translating isn’t a verbal, audible language.
An astute friend once told me that when you need any of the basics in life—a job, an apartment, or a mate—the first thing to do is tell everyone you encounter that you’re looking. I did that. I told everyone who crossed my path that I wanted to translate something from Italian. And sure enough, an Italian friend, a professor of American literature at the University of Florence, soon wrote to say that at his urging, the Jewish Publication Society had acquired Smoke Over Birkenau but had not yet settled on a translator.
I was sent a copy of the book—I remember it was in July of 1989—and read it while on vacation in Westhampton. It was a strange routine indeed, passing the days in the insouciant ambience of the Long Island beaches and the evenings reading of the atrocities of the Nazi extermination camps. I found the book enthralling. More important, it was a tangible thing I could do; as I held it in my hands I felt its shape and bulk could release me from the limbo where I was adrift.
I developed a yen to do it, coupled with apprehension. The language was simple and direct, but I knew how inadequate my Italian was. I would have to look up so many words, even words I was pretty sure of, to be absolutely sure. On the other hand, I had an affinity for the language and its rhythms. I understood the inner shapes of the sentences, their movements and their routes. I almost felt as if Italian was my native tongue, except that I lacked the vocabulary. I had its forms in my head, in the Chomskyesque sense, but not the words. I also had a feeling for how the book should sound in English.
There was still another reason. The subject—the Nazi death camps—was something I thought about a lot, as do many writers, perhaps all thinking people. But it would probably not find a path into my writing except in the most oblique way, since it existed in my life only in an oblique way. Even if I knew what to say, even if I had the skill and imagination, I would still hesitate; I would worry about my ignorance, my possible arrogance in attempting it. The translation would be a way of writing about the camps without actually writing, just as I had not actually lived in them. It would be taking part in some way, doing a small service. It would also be an escape from the need or desire to write about the subject, just as my having been born when and where I was was an escape from the reality.
Haggard. Cantankerous. Imploring. Dreary. Plucky. Banter. Superb. Vivacious. Snarling. Prattled.
There ensued a lengthy period of correspondence and cantankerous negotiations with the publisher, again, a period longer than the time Liana Millu spent in Birkenau: The endless delays were galling, especially as the project was a modest book of one hundred sixty pages, involving a sum of money in the middling four figures.
Toward the end of July I wrote a letter from the beach saying I’d be interested in doing the book. A few months later, in early fall, I was invited to submit a sample translation of five pages, any five pages I wished. I chose a passage in which a prisoner sneaks out to the camp’s black market in the evening to trade a bit of bread for a carrot or piece of onion she could smuggle to her thirteen-year-old son, whom she has discovered, scrawny and haggard, working in the garbage detail in nearby Auschwitz. It was a passage which made the despicable outrage of the camps quite clear, as the imploring mother bargains with fellow prisoners over miserable scraps of food.
It took me two weeks to get the five pages in good shape. If five pages took two weeks, I figured that one hundred sixty pages would take about thirty-two weeks or eight months.
Early in December, winter coming on, the beach a distant memory, I received a written offer to do the book. I set myself a goal of five pages a day in very rough form—a literal, not yet literary, translation. As anticipated, I had to look up many words. I had a fat, excellent Italian-English dictionary, and I became so intimate with this dictionary that I could turn automatically to the correct page for the first letter of the word I sought, and soon to the correct page for the first two or three letters of the word. This is no mean feat with a dictionary, particularly one so thick.
But help was not always to be found in the dictionary—for instance in the story of Bruna, the prisoner who one day spies her half-dead son in neighboring Auschwitz. The narrator, Liana, wonders how she can help Bruna smuggle food to the boy to keep him alive, as well as to make his coming birthday a bit less dreary. She recalls how on her own recent birthday in the camp, a friend with an unquenchable sense of style presented her with a “small slice of salted bread and a tiny curl of margarine,” procured by saving up crusts and trading them on the camp’s black market. This plucky friend, elegant and freckle-faced, she calls “la mia amica fiumana.”
Fiumana, that adjective describing the friend, was a puzzler. It obviously derived from flume, “river,” and indeed there it was in the dictionary, right above flume, in the “f’s,” to which my trained finger turned unerringly. But it was listed as a noun meaning “broad stream” or “large stream”; another meaning was “flood.” Figuratively, fiumana could also mean a crowd or stream of people, as in “a stream of people came out of the theatre.” “My streaming friend?” No, that wouldn’t do.
I spent some time pondering this freckled, stylish amica fiumana. She must have had a generous, vivacious nature, since in such straitened circumstances she’d managed to give the narrator that gift of bread and margarine. “My generous friend?” No, the author would simply have called her generosa. There was more to it. “My bountiful friend?” I was leaning towards “my exuberant friend,” trying to keep the riverlike, overflowing sense contained in the word. But I wasn’t satisfied. I happened to mention my problem on the phone to the Italian professor who had gotten me involved in the project to begin with. “Fiumana?” he repeated, amused. “From Fiume.”
Fiume is a Northern Italian city and fiumana was a simple adjective of location like romana (Roman) or fiorentina (Florentine). What threw me off was that in Italian, adjectives derived from proper nouns are not capitalized. Of course I knew this elementary fact, but because of my geographical ignorance—not having heard of the city of Fiume—I never thought to apply it to the situation at hand. Meanwhile, being a novelist, I had developed a whole identity for this friend who exists in a mere four lines—bountiful, exuberant, with long flowing hair and moist, brimming eyes and an undulating way of moving. A common practice of fiction writers is: When you don’t know something, make it up. But it clearly wasn’t going to be the proper strategy for a translator.
In the end, the narrator decides to emulate her bountiful friend from Fiume and persuades the other women in the barrack to put aside a morsel of bread each day for a week. By this means they amass enough bread to trade on the black market for a clove of garlic for the boy’s birthday; his mother is overcome with gratitude.
For all I knew, people from Fiume might be noted for their generosity and exuberance, their lush features and fluid grace, the way, for example, people from New York are noted (mistakenly) for their brusque manners and haste and snarling speech. At any rate, I realized that to avoid similar errors, I needed help. A translation therapist, so to speak. For a year or so there had been ads on the New York City buses for psychological services. “Let’s face it,” the ads said. “Emotional problems don’t go away by themselves.” Well, neither do translation problems. I needed someone to elucidate turns of phrase, offhand jokes, and references that are clear only to native speakers or insiders. I had lived in Italy for a year, long ago, but that wasn’t enough.
I thought immediately of Francesco, a language teacher I had lately made friends with. Francesco was thirty-two years old then, and a polyglot. True, he was not a native speaker of Italian—he was from the Bronx—but he had grown up speaking it with his Italian father, as well as speaking Spanish with his mother, who was Dominican. Along the way, at Cardinal Spelman High School in the Bronx and later at Cornell, he had picked up Latin, French, and Portuguese. When it came to matters linguistic, Francesco was the ultimate authority. During his first few years out of college he had worked for a bank, where he was a most valuable employee since he could be sent anywhere in the world. If he didn’t already speak the language he’d pick it up in a few minutes.
It was plain to see that Francesco was not born to bank. He was slender and sprite-like, full of vitality, with quick, lithe movements—rather like the friend from Fiume. He had darkish skin, straight coal-black hair, and a gap between his teeth; he had huge dark soulful eyes, and he was warm and ebullient, full of laughter and banter. He read religion and philosophy and was a fervent believer who went to church regularly—a Protestant church, not the church of his parents. He had also studied history, and knew the dates and names of everything that had ever happened in Western Europe and perhaps elsewhere. After a few years in a business suit he’d quit the bank and begun giving language lessons; that way he could wear jeans and his superb and colorful silk shirts.
I imagined bringing the translation to him for help: we would sit in the tiny living room of his fifth-floor walk-up, or else climb the spiral staircase to the room with the birds. He kept two finches in a cage, and if they made too much noise when he had friends or students over, he would spread a towel over the cage to make them think it was night, and the gullible creatures would immediately shut up. Or we might go out on the roof terrace, which he’d decorated with thriving plants and colored banners—red, purple, green, pink, blue, and yellow—and look out over the city as I told him my translation problems and he listened with sympathetic nods.
But Francesco said regretfully that he was too busy with students and suggested someone else, a young Italian woman across town. Her name sounded familiar. I remembered I had known a couple by that name when I lived in Rome in the 1960s. There might be no connection at all, but then again it was an unusual name. I went to her apartment and asked her if her parents’ names were Dora and Ruggiero. Yes, they were. “I knew your parents in Rome,” I said in astonishment. “We were friends. I knew your mother even before that, back in Philadelphia. In fact I think I even baby-sat for you once or twice. Were you a year or two old in 1964?” “Yes,” she said, “that must have been me.”
She was pleasant enough, but she didn’t seem astounded at the coincidence as I was, or even terribly interested. Her interest was perfunctory, as I prattled on about how I’d stayed at her parents’ beach house at Fregene and looked after her and her sister as a favor—I was hardly more than a girl myself then. I grasped that while it was for me indeed an astounding coincidence to be referred to the daughter—living unaccountably in New York—of friends I’d known almost thirty years ago in Rome, for her it was simply running into an old friend of her parents, ho-hum.
Insipid. Puny. Taunt. Rejoinder. Seethed. Rancid. Drab. Halting. Surly.
I had met the young translation therapist’s American mother, Dora, shortly after I graduated from college: she was the personnel director who interviewed me for a typing job at the American Friends Service Committee in Philadelphia. I had just married and was to be the breadwinner while my husband went to graduate school.
Typing for a Quaker social service agency was not my first choice. Since I’d been an English major, I had initially looked in the field of publishing, specifically Curtis Publishing Company, whose headquarters were in Philadelphia and which published the Saturday Evening Post and other popular magazines of the day. The interviewer at Curtis—I remember her still, a bony woman in a narrow, insipid little dress with a cap of dark hair that clung to her puny head—raised her eyes from my resume and said, as if it were a taunt, “I see you are married.” In those days such information was included on resumes. “Yes,” I acknowledged. “If you’re married,” she countered, “you might get pregnant.” That was definitely a rebuke.
I could hardly dispute the bare statement. “But I don’t plan to get pregnant for a long time,” I said. “The best laid plans of mice and men go oft astray,” was her rejoinder.
Fresh from college and steeped in English literature, I might have told her that the line she misquoted was actually, “The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ Men, Gang aft a-gley.” But I didn’t have the presence of mind. I seethed with outrage. In 1959 we didn’t know that what she was doing was a form of discrimination, of sexism, as well as intimidation. Or was it? Is injustice abstract? Does it exist before it is officially recognized as such? Well, that is a metaphysical question, like the tree falling in the forest. In any case I felt very badly used, but at the time there wasn’t anything I could do about my rejection. It’s possible that enough of those encounters might make a young woman go out and get pregnant in a fit of spite, to fulfill the prophesy. I left the Curtis building with the rancid taste of injustice on my tongue.
I wasn’t too successful at hunting up jobs. Another I applied for was in a laboratory, removing the legs from fruit flies, the kind you swat in the kitchen. The man who interviewed me was a drab person with halting speech. “You know about fruit flies?” he mumbled. “Drosophila melanogaster.” As a matter of fact I did know, even though I was an English major. I remembered from high school biology that because of certain physical properties, and perhaps also because of their ubiquity, fruit flies were commonly used for experiments in genetics. Not only had Mendelian genetics been one of the few topics in biology that interested me, but I liked the fruit flies’ Latin name: Drosophila melanogaster. Perhaps they are still used, though with recent discoveries about DNA and the Genome Project under way, they may have been superseded.
Despite a certain repugnance, I was considering taking the fruit fly job with the mumbling scientist, when I was offered the typing job at the American Friends Service Committee by Dora, future mother of the translation therapist. Typing was not what I’d had in mind all those years I pored over English literature, but it seemed preferable to fruit flies. I had tried to rationalize the fruit fly job by telling myself I’d be contributing to genetic research, and now I tried to rationalize the typing job by telling myself I’d be contributing to peace in the world, for the Quakers who ran the AFSC were doing a variety of good works in trouble spots such as Algeria and South Africa and Harlem. But I think what clinched it was the vision of myself interminably plucking the legs from fruit flies—after all, who knew how long it might take my husband to finish his graduate studies?
At the AFSC Dora was kind to me. She saw to it that after six months as a typist I was promoted upstairs to the Foreign Service Section as a secretarial assistant. I worked for a man who administered a work camp program in Europe; we processed the applications of hordes of American college students who hoped to spend the summer living in Spartan conditions while digging wells or building schools or libraries in poor European towns, some still feeling the devastation of the war. I was barely older than the students going to the camps, and my boss—a gentle, innocent Quaker I thought of as elderly but who was probably about fifty-five—occasionally asked if I wouldn’t want to try a work camp myself.
I said no, I didn’t care to sleep in a sleeping bag and eat cheap starchy food cooked communally in enormous pots and dig ditches for six weeks. I was an English major through and through and, innocent though he was, he soon came to grasp this. “Oh, but a human being can stand anything for six weeks,” he would tease. “I’m not so sure,” I retorted.
It was 1960. Little by little over the past decade, details about the extermination camps had begun seeping into the public consciousness. When he said, “A human being can stand anything for six weeks,” I immediately thought of Auschwitz and Dachau. I couldn’t foresee that in later life, once I had escaped being a typist and become a writer, I would learn Italian and one day translate a book about Auschwitz. But I would sometimes imagine myself imprisoned there, in those hellish conditions, and did not think I’d be among the ones who endured. I was too hot-tempered and impatient—I would anger a surly guard, who would shoot me. Now I am no longer so hot-tempered, and when I imagine myself there, I think I might have the patience but not the physical stamina to endure. They’d take one look at me and, with a perfunctory wave of the hand, send me off to the bad side.
In one of the six stories in Smoke Over Birkenau, which I was to translate long after I typed for the AFSC, an eighteen-year-old Dutch prisoner named Lotti understands quite well that some human beings can’t bear certain conditions. Watching her sister sicken and wither in the camp, Lotti volunteers to work in the Nazi brothel. When her dying sister disowns her in shame, Lotti justifies her choice in an ardent speech about her passion to stay alive by any means. She quotes from the Book of Job: “‘As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away; so he that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more. He shall return no more to his house.’ Well,” Lotti protests, “I refused to be consumed and vanish like a cloud. I wanted to return to my house. I’m eighteen years old—I don’t want to die. I know, no one wants to die, you’ll tell me. But maybe I don’t want to more than the others. Maybe that’s the difference.”
I was not only moved but alarmed when I came across this passage. It was hard enough to translate a contemporary Italian author. Must I tackle the Bible as well? What grave misgivings I suffered, until it dawned on me that the Bible had already been translated into English. All I had to do was locate the passage and copy it.
The act of copying felt sneaky. Fiction writers store many beloved snatches from other writers in their heads, often for so long that we feel we’ve written them ourselves. We learn to be wary about what we appropriate. Even though it was perfectly legitimate in this case, I lifted from the Book of Job with unease.
Meanwhile, when my Quaker boss teased me, back in 1960, saying, “A human being can stand anything for six weeks,” I replied, “I’m not so sure.” He looked perplexed; he really thought a human being could stand anything for six weeks—a tribute to the innocence of his imagination—and I did not enlighten him. He was a mild man; I wasn’t sure he could stand my fantasies about concentration camps for even a few minutes.
I worked listlessly at the AFSC for two years and because of the innocence I perceived there, was probably the only employee who never attended the optional silent meeting held every morning before work. I also liked to sleep late. Toward the end of my tenure I did finally attend a few silent meetings at Pendle Hill, a Quaker retreat outside of Philadelphia, where our work campers came for a week of orientation and where I was permitted to use some of my college education in teaching rudimentary French classes. The silent meetings were fine, a curiosity, and I regretted my two-year intransigence, but I was disturbed by an evening talk given by one of the high-ranking AFSC executives. (As a Quaker group, the AFSC wasn’t supposed to have ranks but it did nonetheless, and everyone tacitly understood and observed them, for example in the company lunchroom where one was invited to sit anywhere, but the executives always sat at certain tables and the secretaries at others.)
The talk was about pacifism. It was a very nice talk—Quakers and pacifism can be appealing—but during the question and answer period one of the students asked, as people invariably do, about Hitler. What would you do about Hitler? “Hate the deed and not the doer,” the high-ranking executive replied in his rasping voice. He said it as if he had been asked that question many times and was tired of it, even rankled—Why do they keep harping on that? I imagined him thinking—and had his answer prepared to deliver by rote. As if on cue, I walked out and strolled through the pleasant suburban grounds in the warm evening.
After I left my secretarial assistant’s job at the AFSC I went to graduate school. What else, if typing and fruit flies were my only career options? I needed two languages for a master’s degree and decided to study Italian on my own. Languages had always come easily to me, and all I needed was enough to pass a reading comprehension exam. It was a happy choice, for two years later I found myself living in Rome. There I looked up Dora, who had also left the AFSC, married a Roman, moved to Italy, and had two babies, whom I would take care of a few times in gratitude for her invitations to the beach house in Fregene, and one of whom, decades later, would become my translation therapist.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the convoluted trail of coincidence leading me back to Dora and her Italian daughter. It nagged at me with mounting intensity, the way a story idea nags. It wasn’t the coincidence as such that I found so compelling, after my initial surprise, as the discrepancy between my reaction to it and that of the translation therapist. It was interesting, in the Jamesian sense of the word, that the same situation could be so striking to one party involved, evoking whole chunks of the past, and so negligible to the other. And yet in this situation the discrepancy was natural and understandable.
Misgivings. Listless. Rasping. Harping. Wary. Capitulate. Cue. Immersed. Mounting.
As I got deeper into the translation and could navigate in the author’s idiom, the English version emerged, and with it the sensation that I myself was writing the book. I had familiar urges to cut, to revise, to sharpen and expand dialogue, move paragraphs around and make verbal links. I would see an opportunity for a metaphor or analogy, or an opening where characters from earlier stories might reappear speaking new words. I had to keep myself from capitulating to such urges. The text came to seem a constraint. What felt most peculiar was not the urge to cut but the opposite urge to expand. Maybe just another phrase or so here, ... I’d think, and, on the verge of inventing something, would suddenly remember I wasn’t the writer. I wasn’t allowed to invent. Moreover, the book wasn’t really fiction, or fiction only in the loosest sense; it was a memoir, no doubt adorned and enhanced, but the events had really happened. Besides being only the translator, I couldn’t expand because I didn’t know any more than what was given on the page. I hadn’t been there. It wasn’t my memoir.
While I was immersed in the translation, I went to the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. Now, writers go to these colonies to write, not to translate, and even though no one checks your daily output, you do feel an obligation at least to try to write. I even wanted to write. It was almost spring, and I finally had words; I had a new novel in mind. But I had contracted to do the Birkenau book, and so I established a routine: I would spend the mornings on my allotted five pages of the translation, which was coming to feel interminable—the roll calls, the brutal labor, the hard crusts of bread and watery turnip soup, the beatings, the selections, the smoke rising from the crematoria—and the afternoons on my novel.
But something happened to disrupt my well-laid plans. They went astray, as the prim interviewer at Curtis Publishing might say. A part of my mind that was not routinized stealthily came up with a story idea parallel to my situation with Dora’s daughter, the translation therapist. What other pair of people might have similarly polar reactions to a chance connection? I imagined a man, a diffident, unformed young man, going to Italy, having a brief unforgettable love affair, returning home to resume his humdrum life, and years later meeting a young Italian woman who he realizes is his daughter. Francesca would be her name. He doesn’t tell her the whole truth, only that he knew her parents years ago in Rome. To him, the coincidence is astounding and impels him to review his entire life. To her, it’s nothing much.
Bemused, I began pacing around my chilly MacDowell studio as the story took on vitality. I dropped my routine to write it and called it “Francesca.” It turned out, as stories do, to be about many other and more complex things than the discrepancy in two characters’ perception of a coincidence. And any of its other strands might be traced back through my life in a meandering quest much like this one.
Stealthy. Bemused. Upbraided. Pacing. Predicament. Gasp. Runt. Deserted.
Beyond its fictional offshoots, the translation generated scores of problems, all of which I had to work out myself. For a translation therapist is like any therapist—she cannot do the difficult thing for you; she can only offer information and a disinterested view, maybe setting the problem in a more auspicious context.
The problems began with the very first sentence. A raw literal translation would be: “There was a bit of confusion that morning because there had been a medical check the night before, and many girls had been sent to the sand block.” Those “girls,” for openers. The book had been written in 1946, a time when men were men and women were ... girls. People like the interviewer at Curtis did their damage unchallenged. But no longer. There was no way I could refer to a group of women doing hard labor and facing imminent death, many grieving for the husbands they’d left behind and the children torn from them, as girls. Yes, quite a few were in their late teens, but most were in their twenties and thirties, and one major character and several minor ones seemed around fifty. The real girls—children—had been destroyed before they ever reached the camp or else at its gates.
I agonized over the word, trying to be true simultaneously to the author’s vision, to the idiom of the contemporary reader, and to my own convictions. Generally, when seeking the right word, my principle had been to imagine how the writer would express herself were English her native tongue. But I had no idea how Liana Millu, over seventy now, felt about American feminism or the politics of language; perhaps at her age any woman under thirty or even forty seemed a girl.
I tried it both ways—“women” and “girls”—and in the end took a liberty. Whenever “girls” didn’t sit right with me—and by extension, with my imagined readers—whenever it felt distracting or alienating, I used “women.” I also used “women” when referring to the characters in groups. But I kept Millu’s “girl” when the character was a teen-ager, as in, “Two rows away stood a very young, pretty girl with a friendly smile,” and in the case of the two sisters, one of whom dies of hunger while the other goes to the well-fed Nazi brothel: not only did “girls” seem all right given their age, but the poignancy of the word heightened the pain of their predicament.
Also in that first sentence, the girls or women “had been sent to the sand block.” On receiving my manuscript, the editor wrote and asked, What is this sand block? Well, I replied, it says exactly that, “block della sabbia.” “Block” was the German word used throughout for the barracks where the women slept. Many prisoners worked in the sand pits, pointlessly hauling truckloads of sand back and forth. I could only assume “the sand block” referred to the barracks housing those women who worked in the pits. I agreed, though, that the phrase was vaguer than Millu’s usual style. And in English it had an auditory suggestion of “sandbox,” which was very inopportune.
Imagine our surprise when, the book already set in galleys, a letter arrived from Daniel Vogelmann, the Italian publisher. I wonder if I mentioned, he wrote, that in the 1986 edition there were two typos. It wasn’t the “block della sabbia” at all, but the “block della scabbia.” “Scabbia” (I had to look it up in my fat dictionary) means “scabies.” That is, after “the medical check of the night before,” many women had been sent to be disinfected for scabies, and thus the confusion in the barracks. Who would have thought it?
A reference to scabies was a fine opening stroke on the author’s part, almost lost to something blander and ambiguous. It makes one wonder about all the enduring works passed down through centuries, painstakingly copied by hand—or maybe not so painstakingly—and what similar misreadings might be serving as the pillars of Western thought.
The other typo was the same perilous, just possible, kind. A young woman in the camp tries to conceal her pregnancy—a forbidden condition in Birkenau—by binding up her stomach with rags to make it look flat. Unwilling to submit to the required abortion, she fervently hopes the war will end in time for her to have her baby at home. She tells the narrator how hard it is to carry the heavy loads assigned to her: “i sacchi di acqua, i sacchi del pane, i sacchi della paglia”—sacks of water, sacks of bread, sacks of straw.
Water is not carried in sacks. Yet given the camps’ surreal absurdities, the fact that idiotic and impossible tasks were demanded simply to destroy morale, it might just be. I don’t recall what I was planning to do about those sacks of water; one mediocre way out might have been to have the character complain of “loads” of water, bread, and straw.
Not “sacchi,” Vogelmann wrote, but “secchi.” Buckets. A single letter made the difference between the absurd and the ordinary. And yet the notion of carrying water in a sack is less absurd than the actuality of being forced to conceal a pregnancy and haul buckets of water all day for being born into a race scheduled for extermination.
More trouble arose when the narrator and Lili, the “young, very pretty girl with a friendly smile,” visit the barrack of an exotic Tunisian prisoner, Madame Louise, the camp’s fortuneteller. For a slice of bread or a few leaves of cabbage, the enigmatic Madame Louise will read the tarot cards. She predicts a long journey for Lili, so long that she can’t even see the end of it. Lili is overjoyed: she imagines going home to her mother. I managed the intricate laying out of the cards—hearts, spades, the wicked queen of spades. But I was stumped when Madame Louise laid out an ominous card she called the stella, or star. It wasn’t clubs or diamonds. The dictionary was no help. Even the translation therapist was baffled. I thought of Francesco, my polyglot friend who knew everything.
“Pentagram,” he said over the phone, without hesitation. Pentagram. I’d never have gotten it. I would have committed a worse blunder than sacks of water. And I envisioned his fifth-floor walk-up apartment, the crowded living room, the spiral staircase, the birds, the roof terrace with the lush plants and brightly colored streamers, and wished he were helping me, bounding about the room as he liked to do, talking of history and politics and books and movies in his exuberant way, his dark fluid eyes ever attentive.
Whisked. Piteously. Incorrigible. Reprisals. Gaping. Gross. Furtive. Chide.
Smoke Over Birkenau reflects a polyglot world, dotted with phrases from the various languages spoken in the camp—what we’d call today a multicultural text. In keeping with the author’s choice, I left such phrases as they were, now and then giving their meaning unobtrusively in parentheses or a footnote where I feared American readers might be puzzled. For instance, the story about the two Dutch sisters, one dying in the infirmary and the other working in the brothel, is called “Scheiss Egal,” a German phrase equivalent in English to “the same old shit.”
It was easy enough to explain that title in a note. But when the phrase appeared in the story, used by a middle-aged SS man visiting the brothel, I hit a snag. Liana, the narrator, has just told Lotti, the young prostitute, that her sister is dying. As Lotti weeps, the SS man, hurriedly unbuckling his belt to get down to business, grumbles, “Her sister is sick? Who gives a shit? Always the same old shit!”
“That atrocious, despairing phrase,” the narrator comments, “that they would repeat day in and day out, as if to confer on Cambronne’s words the dignity of a philosophy.”
Who was this Cambronne whose name is dropped so casually, as if every reader ought to know? And what were his words? I tried the encyclopedia. A French general who served under Napoleon. Present at the defeat at Waterloo. So? I called a French friend, who had a good laugh when she heard my question. General Cambronne earned immortality, she told me, by his famous response at the battle of Waterloo: Merde. Since then every French schoolchild has been scolded at one time or another for uttering what is called “le mot Cambronne.” I hadn’t thought of asking Francesco, and I wonder now if he would have known.
Cambronne became a small but, to me, crucial footnote to the text. Whenever I succeeded in solving some such tiny problem I felt a great delight, the same delight I knew from my own writing when things suddenly fell into place. An instant later I felt a twinge, resembling guilt, at the bizarre discrepancy of my response. I was so tickled to be able to get it right, so transported by the gifts of language that I lost sight of the dreadful subject—in this case the German officer’s unbuckling his belt to make use of the grieving girl—a scene for which language was only the means, the translation.
The author quoted songs, too, in several languages, for despite their wretchedness the characters would occasionally sing as they worked, or sing to cheer each other up, or sing during the few hours’ rest on Sunday afternoons. One musical woman even sleeps with a German kapo in exchange for a harmonica, along with a few slices of bread. But when the songs were translated into Italian, they needed to be rendered in English, as in the story of Lili, who is nicknamed for the familiar German war song, “Lili Marlene.” It was Lili who, according to the tarot cards, would be taking a long journey, so long that Madame Louise couldn’t even see the end of it.
The pungent lyrics of “Lili Marlene” become emblematic of the characters’ situation. After the Bible episode, I realized right away that these lyrics existed in an English translation. Hunting for them took me to the Library of the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center in New York, where I waited in a cozy armchair while the librarian whisked off behind locked doors to fetch my request. She handed me a mound of tattered old sheet music from the 1940s and I whiled away the afternoon, transported back half a century and enchanted by the songs printed in innocent old typefaces with period illustrations.
The other songs in the text were originally Russian and Dutch, and since it wasn’t feasible to visit the Russian and Dutch versions of the Lincoln Center Library of the Performing Arts, I translated them as best I could. This was a treat; I was growing nostalgic for my own work, and almost felt I was back in the lyrics for my nonexistent musical comedy.
Consorting with the kapos wasn’t unusual; the women prisoners did it not only for bread, but to snatch a few moments of pleasure in a doomed life, or to have a possible ally during a selection for the gas chambers. Because of their desperation, I needed to know the proper declensions—masculine, feminine, singular, and plural—for the Polish word kochany, meaning lover, or more informally, boyfriend or girlfriend. A Polish-English dictionary was no help, so I went to the Slavic languages department at Columbia University, hoping a kind professor might come to my aid. I was so disappointed to find no one in that I moaned piteously to the secretary, a plump blonde woman who seemed a tolerant sort, “All I wanted was the right spelling for a few simple Polish words.” “Is that all?” she said. “I’m Polish. What do you need to know?” The experience not only corroborated but extended my astute friend’s maxim: Tell everyone you meet what you’re looking for, even if it isn’t one of the basics such as a job, an apartment, or a mate, but merely the word for mate.
My last foray away from the dictionary was to the Yivo Institute in New York to find the English terminology for the different work groups in the camps—commandos, as they were called in Nazi military argot. The Yivo Institute, a center for the study of the Holocaust, is housed in a stately Fifth Avenue mansion with marble walls and a magnificently curving wrought-iron staircase in the lobby. It contains endless shelves of documentation—war reports, statistical breakdowns of prisoners by nationality, age, and sex, as well as by how they died, with photographs. Here too I spent an afternoon mesmerized by old books and papers, though not so happily as in the Library of the Performing Arts with the sheet music.
I didn’t find what I needed and ended up fudging it, but I found something else: a chart showing the Nazis’ division of prisoners into categories with distinct identifying marks. A red triangle sewn on the uniform meant political prisoners, a purple triangle meant Jehovah’s Witnesses, green was for criminals, pink was for homosexuals, black for “antisocial” types, blue for immigrants, and yellow for Jews, though in this last case an additional triangle was superimposed to form a six-pointed star. A Rainbow Coalition.
I’ve thought a great deal about the list of words scrawled in my handwriting in the front of the book in different colored pens, signifying that the entries were made at different times. Interminable. Outrage. Stampede. Rancid. And so on. It’s true many of the words suit the text and appear in my English version, but others do not. I think they weren’t simply suggested by the Italian, but were also words I liked and hoped to find an opportunity to use, like an heiress seeking social occasions to display her collection of jewels. That sounds a trifle frivolous, I know, especially for a translator. How can words come first? What about the truth of a piece of writing, its meaning or content?
Well, a writer’s real allegiance is to language, words and their proper placement, without which there is no truth or meaning. The list reminds me that along with the given of Millu’s stories, the translation is built out of the English lexicon, the way bricks and mortar make walls to house life.
Just a few months ago my polyglot friend Francesco died of AIDS at thirty-five years old. He would have worn a pink triangle. When he was sick and I visited him in his fifth-floor walk-up apartment with the caged finches and the plants and colored banners on the roof, I saw lying on a table the copy of the translation which I’d given him. Only he had known the name for the pentagram in the tarot deck, the card Madame Louise said meant a long journey, so long that she couldn’t even see the end of it.
Visiting the Yivo Institute, I knew immediately that the information about the colored triangles, the rainbow of prisoners, would become a poem. Sometimes the form of a piece of writing or the images by which it will travel hit you before anything else. I haven’t yet written it but when I do, it will become another instance of the finite time during which I worked on the translation stretching out and arching, bending as physicists tell us time does when viewed under the aspect of eternity, reaching its tentacles back and forth over my life to encompass it all in a vast and flexible hand.