Noshi Bei Wattapornpet drags the beat-up cheap piano bench one step away from the tacky old piano, its deal finish peeling, and places it up against the 900-year-old rosewood table and sits down. The lovely smooth wood of the table has two deep rounded valleys where generations of scholars have rested their elbows. Even Noshi’s tiny feather-light elbows have contributed. She is 89 years old, and was trained by her father to be a scholar from the time she was nine.
The two-room flat has only a narrow pathway in from the front door, circling the room, exiting into the next room, and circling it. Only one as tiny and narrow-shouldered as Noshi can walk the pathway facing straight ahead. The remainder is piled to the ceiling with boxes and parcels wrapped in cloth or paper, and tied about with string. The rosewood table itself is stacked high with books and dictionaries and papers, leaving only a small square workplace where she sits, with her brush and the little tray in which she mixes soot and oil to make ink.
She is translating Hamlet, re-forming its gorgeous blank verse into the sweeping and elaborate script of her own language, so that her nation, her people, can have this masterpiece. She is working on the great final scene, culminating in the treacherous duel between Hamlet and Laertes.
“We defy augury,” Hamlet is saying.
She needs to think about that line. How can she convey it into her culture without the reader thinking Hamlet is a fool? How can an educated man, especially one who has studied philosophy, defy augury? It is like snapping your fingers in the faces of the gods, challenging them to do their worst. It is a senseless and unnecessary thing to do. (She has had a candy bar for breakfast, and now she taps a king-size cigarette out of its package, breaks off the filter, and lights it, inhaling deeply.) When she had her four beautiful husky young sons, she told everyone how ugly they were. Who would not do the same? Even with her saying that, the gods looked and saw how handsome they were, and killed every last one of them, one by smallpox, one by tuberculosis, one fighting the Japanese, one fighting the communists. Just as she had spoken poorly always about the two strong husbands she had had in her life, telling everyone they were so weak they could not even beat her properly, and did not even have mistresses, but the gods had found them out anyway, and killed them both fighting the colonialists. And her four brothers—always in twos and fours, lucky enough numbers— and always males (except her), which showed how much good luck there was in the family (that’s why she is so unlucky, it suddenly occurs to her, because she is so cursedly lucky)—her four brothers, impressed into various armies of various warlords and killed fighting on one side or other. The gods, of course, had never noticed, had never needed to be jealous of her, so little and insignificant with her frail bones like dry sticks, and no muscles anywhere in her body. Her nickname is Sparrow. And that’s what she is like, too, so easy to crush that nobody bothers, able to live on grit, and missing nothing with her sharp eyes.
She will skip that line about auguries for the moment and get on to the duel itself, because a duel is something understandable in any language. She drags the bench the step back towards the piano. Playing Western music gets her blood into the proper rhythm for translating a Western language.
She bangs at the piano vigorously, and sings in her piping bird voice:
Mia-tsee dotes an do-tsee dotes
An ridder ramzee divy
Uh kiddery divy too
Wooden yu
Then she sings:
Yu ah mah des-tiny
Yu ah what yu ah to me
Now she feels ready to begin, and drags the bench back to the table. She has given up trying to translate word by word, since that seems to make no sense in her language, and of course there is no way blank verse can be duplicated—she had learned that when she made her translation of Paradise Lost—since most of the words in her language rhyme with each other. Nor could she write it as a play, for in her country plays are only music and dance and beautiful costumes and go on for hours, while the audience eats and visits with friends, no one listening to the words of the songs. So she is writing it as an epic novel, trying to capture the spirit and render it into something intelligible.
THE DEMON king Claudius (she writes) went to visit Ophelia where he was holding her captive in the Kingdom Under the Water. He was smitten sorely with love of her, but she was Prince Hamlet’s number one concubine. He ordered her to put her raiment aside, and took his pleasure from her young body—how could she resist a mighty king?—but she despised the odor of his aging body and the simpering expression on his wrinkled face, and in her heart she stayed loyal to her youthful lover. Claudius sensed her coldness, and ground his teeth with frustration. He had offered her half his kingdom and joint rule and everything her heart could want if she would agree to be his voluntarily, but she quietly resisted. He had tried to stay away from her, and Gertrude, his number one wife, and all his concubines and pleasure girls did what they could to make him forget her, but he kept coming back.
If this coldness is out of loyalty to Prince Hamlet, he said, then you are a fool. Prince Hamlet is not going to save you. In fact by tonight he will be dead. Then you will have no one but me.
She bowed before him in bodily submission, but in her heart she was steel.
King Claudius was depressed returning to his castle, but he felt better the moment he looked at the forces he was marshalling against Hamlet. The ghosts of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern had been converted into mighty demons, each with four heads and eight arms, each arm carrying a weapon. Laertes, mounted on a giant war elephant, was carrying a bow the size of the mast of a ship, and in it was nocked the magic arrow that could not miss. The ghost of the sledded Polack, wearing a magic armor that could not be pierced, and sending out a blast of icy cold that froze and shattered anything he touched, had gladly come to fight the son of his hated old enemy. And there was the ghost of Polonius, master of curses and deceits. Finally, King Claudius had purchased with gold the services of Fortinbras and his entire Army of the East.
Noshi pauses. In a traditional novel she would now outline Prince Hamlet’s forces, and they would be equally grand and magical. But in fact, there is no one to be in Hamlet’s army. There is only himself, not very brave or very strong, and with no special weapons. Horatio, his friend, who is not a warrior but a Buddhist priest. And Ophelia, but Ophelia is tiny and slight like Noshi herself, and a prisoner.
(Noshi stops chewing the end of her brush—a bad habit!—and lights a new cigarette.) She is thinking of the many times when she was herself a prisoner. Her status changed every time the government changed its policies. One time she would be a professor at the university, and have her precious rosewood table and her books and manuscripts and dictionaries, and a commission to translate a great work. Then she would write something wrong, and all her things would be taken from her, and she would be put in prison or on a work farm in the bitter north of the country. That had happened when her prizewinning translation of Paradise Lost had been published. First the colonials had arrested her, when she seemed to be saying the great powerful God from the West had sought to keep the native people in their tropical paradise naked and ignorant, preserving for himself the best fruits of their forest, and now the tireless Satan, with his forces in the hills, had got the people on his side, and dressed them and tried to bring them into the modern world. When the communists had thrown out the colonialists, they had released her and made her a hero. But then when they looked again at her treatment of Satan, they decided that what she was really saying was that Satan and God were fighting each other for their own selfish motives, and using the people as their pawns, and the people’s land as their battleground, and that the people were just as bad off either way. At that point she was put back in prison. Then the new more liberal and open government said that the past governments were wrong, and all praise should be given to the truth tellers, who were only loyally trying to make the country stronger with their intelligent and constructive criticism. The new government actually asked for, desired criticism, the harsher the better. So she was released, given her books and her rosewood table back, and commissioned to work on Hamlet. All of her generation were dead, either killed by the emperor, or by the colonialists, or by the communists. They were all stronger than she was, but not as patient. Now she is out again, and has quietly picked up her work where she left off.
ALL THE people are saying these are the good times, it won’t go back to the old bad days again, it can’t, the government would no longer dare. The government will listen to the people’s demands now, and the people have plenty of demands to make. (Some of the young people came to Noshi’s apartment last night and advised her that they would be gathering in the streets today to voice their protests, and she has been hearing the rising murmur of their voices outside her second-floor window all morning.) Noshi says nothing to discourage the people, but they are all so young they have not seen the pendulum swing as many times as she has. For herself, she is writing as fast as she can, eating her candy bars and smoking her cigarettes while they are available to her. As the Westerners phrase it, she is saying “Hey!” while the sun shines.
She has been reading Hamlet all her life, but had always been afraid to try to translate it. Because the more she read it, the more it seemed to consist only of its beautiful words, and since she could not translate it word for word, she would have to render it into equally beautiful words in her own language. In short, she would have to be Shakespeare at the top of his power.
But while she was in prison this last time, she had got an insight into one of the themes, and thought she could weave her translation around that. She was watching the young people around her dying of starvation and tuberculosis and despair, and watching, without listening, as the aging cadre came to give them their reeducation lectures every day, and she was looking at the posters everywhere of their leaders, more ancient and doddering than she was. In a flash she understood the play Hamlet and the character Prince Hamlet.
The big question had always been why he was such a coward, why he hesitated for five long acts to kill Claudius when in the first he promised to sweep at once to his revenge. When Noshi was first trying to puzzle out that question, she used to think, Why didn’t Shakespeare just put Othello in the part of Hamlet? And then she realized: because the play would have been over in the first act, Othello either killing Claudius or being himself killed in a reckless head-on charge against the palace guard. But that couldn’t be the only reason a great writer would make Hamlet hesitate, just to fill out the length of the play. Nor, for that matter, was Othello necessarily right and Hamlet wrong. For, look, if Hamlet had been put into the play Othello—he never would have been duped into killing his wife. That’s the answer, Othello was a rash fool, and rash fools are manipulated by the clever evil people. Laertes, after all, was hasty and rash, and Fortinbras was hasty and rash, and Claudius played them like instruments. He would have done the same to Othello.
The question was answered the moment you realized the play was a battle between youth and age, the old and doddering but rich and powerful and clever playing the young for fools, using wealth and cunning to get the young to fight each other, in order to preserve power for the old. Only Hamlet, by using patience, by holding back, by thinking and testing, could not be played for a fool. After all, he had first to be certain the ghost of his father was not a sort of supernatural Iago. And he had to be sure he killed Claudius in a way that would truly punish him. And finally, because Hamlet was young and full of imaginings and loved a beautiful young girl, it was only fair that he did not rush off at once to save his country, but had a moment to enjoy the attractiveness of life.
THE GODS had taken pity on Ophelia (she writes), and freed her so she could fight alongside her lover. On the plain beyond the river on the edge of the mountains, the two armies met.
Claudius was furious that Hamlet and Horatio and Ophelia could dare to challenge his authority, but he gloated when he saw how weak and unprotected they were. (Noshi can hear the crowds down on the street two floors below beginning to shout and chant. She has not looked outside, but she can tell by the sound they are in tremendous numbers.) First he sent Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, converted into eight-armed monsters, against them. Hamlet and his party threw stones and sticks at them, but could do nothing against the dazzling curved blades of their swords. Guildenstern chopped off Hamlet’s head with a single swing. Hamlet made a groan, quickly silenced, as his head went rolling, and his body, shooting up a geyser of blood, dropped lifeless. Rosencrantz swung with one sword against Horatio, and another against Ophelia, and they both similarly dropped, spouting blood. For fun, the two monsters stripped Ophelia’s clothing off, so they could ogle the private parts of her headless corpse. But suddenly the heads swelled up, and new arms and legs dangled out of them, like a crab coming out of a shell, and Hamlet and Horatio and Ophelia jumped to their feet with their new bodies. At the same time a nub appeared on the severed neck of their original bodies, and new heads quickly grew up. Now six friends were facing the monsters. Again the monsters swung, and now there were twelve, and then twenty-four. The monsters looked back at Claudius, worried, their arms growing tired. (There is louder chanting on the streets below, and a loudspeaker is ordering everyone to go home. Noshi hears the rumble of heavy vehicles slowly approaching in first gear.) Claudius called them back and now sent Laertes in with his giant bow, and his magic arrow that could not miss. He pulled the bow back and let the arrow fly. It whistled on its way, then curved, and weaving back and forth, went through the chests of all eight Hamlets, then curved and went through all eight Horatios, and all eight Ophelias. They cried out with the pain of the cruel jagged barb ripping their flesh aside, skewering their organs.
But soon they had risen, and flocks of sparrows began to fly out of the holes in their bodies, then the holes themselves closed. The sledded Polack sent out his cold . . . and the friends were fractured into pieces, but more sparrows flew out, and the body parts grew back again. There were thousands facing Claudius’s embattled army. Claudius saw the hatred in their eyes and could not believe it. I was always told that everyone loved me, he lamented. He staggered back to the castle on his cane. Kill them all, he ordered his army, then went into his room where he would not have to see any more. (She eats quickly the candy bar she has been saving for lunch, and takes the cigarettes out of her package and secretes them in the hem of her shapeless old house dress.) His army was weary, and beginning to feel sick at what they were doing. (Suddenly there is shooting, and she hears the people screaming, and the pounding of their feet as they run. She stops then for a moment, and closes her eyes, and thinks to herself how beautiful all the young people are. Then she begins writing again even faster.) Fortinbras’s army had sailed in chopping and cutting, and at first the easy victory, the smell of blood, the thought of how much money they were being paid, thrilled them. (She hears heavy booted footsteps running up the stairs.) But after the first surge of excitement, the blood began to smell repulsive to them, and besides, the people were coming on in bigger and bigger crowds, and even sticks and stones, when there were so many, began to hurt. And everywhere that there was blood, sparrows flew out, thousands and thousands, and fighting them was like fighting the drops of water in the sea.
THE SOLDIERS only have to hit her thin door once to knock it to splinters. She sits quietly looking straight ahead while one of them turns sideways and squeezes through the crowded room towards her. He jerks her hands up and puts manacles on them, which of course immediately fall right off her skinny hands and wrists. The soldier glares at her, then orders her to get up and accompany them down the stairs. She does not even glance behind her, so no one will notice how hard it is for her to give up her table and her manuscripts.
“This time you won’t be coming back, old woman,” the soldier says. It is at this precise moment that a new insight, a new understanding comes to her, which is why she raises her hand and snaps her fingers at her astonished captor, and answers him in English.
“We defy augury,” she says.