For the next few days I rarely left my hotel room, working fitfully and without accomplishing much. There was neither a Petit nor a Grand Larousse, much less a Webster’s Third International, in H2’s puny seaside library. I didn’t mind the lack of online, but I did miss the books. I like to begin as a Luddite and progress towards progress. I start off longhand, pencil on paper, before committing to the screen of my laptop. The work feels more tactile and therefore rewarding when you do it by hand, and it’s such a pain to revise that you tend to write more carefully. Or I do.
Research is more cumbersome when you’re forced back on the Big Books of Reference, but these have the advantage of being reliable, or anyway difficult to disprove. Eventually I will submit the text to the infra dig of spell check and online glossaries and dictionaries, because my aim is accuracy not purity, but if, like me, you’re smitten with words themselves – their sounds, textures, associations, histories, connections, on and on to the break of dawn – then you will retain, as I do, a reverence for the twenty-volume OED that other, better souls reserve for sacred writings.
Who the hell am I kidding. I retain a reverence? For a fucking dictionary? Look, I do love words, that should be obvious by now, but what I love even better is showing off, which is why I will always pick the obscure or antiquated or even just flat out wrong word whenever possible if I think there’s a shot it’ll make me sound smarter than I am. Which is already pretty goddamn smart. But it’s never enough, is it? That stupid cliché (as opposed to all the smart clichés) about how you can never be too rich or too thin – for me, yes, that, but also you can never be too smart or too hot or too, I don’t know, just superior. Without my superiority to everyone else on earth who am I, really? Just a privileged, entitled, trust fund bitch who killed her lover. A murderess, an adulteress, a whore, a cassowary (flightless bird), a logothete, a hopeless toper, a volatile demirep. Sounds irresistible, I know. Well, boys and girls and non-binary hotties, the good news is that I am newly available! All of this and more (terms to be determined) can be yours for only three easy payments of your life force, made out to V. Salomon c/o Lucifer, the Original Poser. (Surely you don’t need our address.)
It’s time for me to admit that my plan to translate H2’s book before it’s been written has no hope of succeeding, and never did. What I initially had in mind was a kind of extension of Osvaldo Lamborghini’s ‘first publish, then write’ gambit, except on a broader scale. What upon further reflection I developed as The Way was an extension of the idea that ‘all writing is a form of translating’, which now that I put it down in words sounds sophomoric; but there’s a germ of the real in its truistic heart. The problem is, what I now realise I had in mind is translating (writing) my own book (book) and not H2’s unwritten opus, or anyone else’s for that matter.
For the punters in the back: this book is that book.
Now I just have to figure out a way to let H2 down softly.
I admire English because of its long battle with French and Latin after the Norman Conquest. Though not unscathed, the language endured, thanks to a thousand anonymous bards, thanks to John Wycliffe and John Gower and other people often named John. John Lydgate, one of the first English poets to wear spectacles, was a monk in the Benedictine abbey at Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk around 1385 ce. He was commissioned by Henry V to translate Giovanni delle Colonne’s thirty-thousand-line Historia Troiana, which took eight years. He also translated Boccaccio’s thirty-six-thousand-line De casibus illustrium virorum, among other things, and found time to write his own Siege of Thebes, which pretends to be a lost Canterbury tale. In the fourteenth century English had more dialects than literates. The North couldn’t understand the South, the Middle could understand a little of both, and the East and the West, because closer to the coasts, understood most and a lot else, too. In the end the South won, because the South was London, and London became the world, for better and for much, much worse.
French has been less changeable over the centuries, insofar As She Is Written. I say nothing of the giddy-making varieties of patois that existed from village to village across the country well into the twentieth century, nor of the langue d’oc that prevailed in the South and traces of which can still be found in Provence and as far off as Spain and Italy. Old French was indexed by the ninth century, and the establishment of the Académie Française in 1635 means that a native French speaker today can read without difficulty the essays of Montaigne (with modernised spelling), a rough contemporary of Shakespeare, more easily than a native English speaker can read Shakespeare. Early medieval chansons de geste are a cinch in the original Old French compared with Chaucer, whose fourteenth-century Middle English is incomprehensible without a tour guide. To me. Which is to say, I believe this to be the case. Credibile est, quia ineptum est. Certum est, quia impossibile.
A clouded, greenish mirror was tacked up on the wall above my desk in my hotel room, cracked, roughly trapezoidal in shape, bounded at the top by two right angles with ground edges and by a slightly curved oblique line with a sharp edge forming the bottom. I ran the tips of my fingers over the features of my face in the mirror; the mirror distorted at the point where it was cracked in a short, straight, vertical line the length of my face from forehead to chin. I could feel no crack in my face itself, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there.
There are, as I said, limits to everything, even those things that are by definition without limits, such as the void. One withal expects a limit, though I have not yet found it, to my belief in the void: in nothingness as the central fact of existence, before or behind which all other facts stand in serried ranks of insignificance. The apocalypse, or revelation if you prefer the Latin-derived option, is the realisation that there is no ego, no I am, no Great I Am. Where we go from here depends on you, as that fellow says in that thing.