“Found in Translation” (Part 3)
There is a fascinating opinion piece in this Sunday’s NY Times from novelist Michael Cunningham, author of “The Hours” and a new book “By Nightfall.” Cunningham’s article is so thought-provoking that I decided to break it up into five parts so we could discuss it this week. Here is part three [bold emphasis added]:
Here’s a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they’d intended to write. It’s one of the heartbreaks of writing fiction. You have, for months or years, been walking around with the idea of a novel in your mind, and in your mind it’s transcendent, it’s brilliantly comic and howlingly tragic, it contains everything you know, and everything you can imagine, about human life on the planet earth. It is vast and mysterious and awe-inspiring. It is a cathedral made of fire.
But even if the book in question turns out fairly well, it’s never the book that you’d hoped to write. It’s smaller than the book you’d hoped to write. It is an object, a collection of sentences, and it does not remotely resemble a cathedral made of fire.
It feels, in short, like a rather inept translation of a mythical great work.
The translator, then, is simply moving the book another step along the translation continuum. The translator is translating a translation.
A translator is also translating a work in progress, one that has a beginning, middle and end but is not exactly finished, even though it’s being published. A novel, any novel, if it’s any good, is not only a slightly disappointing translation of the novelist’s grandest intentions, it is also the most finished draft he could come up with before he collapsed from exhaustion. It’s all I can do not to go from bookstore to bookstore with a pen, grabbing my books from the shelves, crossing out certain lines I’ve come to regret and inserting better ones. For many of us, there is not what you could call a “definitive text.”
Do you want proof of this on a personal level? Dig into your stack of scripts and manuscripts, and find one draft you were sure — at the time — was as close to perfection (for that story) as you could get. Read the draft. You may like it. You may find it cringe-worthy. But no matter where it lands on that spectrum, one thing is for sure: It is most assuredly not perfect. I doubt you will get to P. 2 before you start to edit it.
I speak from my own personal experience as I recently had reason to review a script I wrote 15 years ago. The script, which was optioned twice by two different companies, got us a lot of work. But reading it now with a set of ‘fresh’ eyes — it needs work.
I saw an interview with Woody Allen many years ago — I believe it was from the “60 Minutes” segment posted below — in which the famed writer-director described the fundamental frustration of his creative process [paraphrased]: “When I come up with an idea for a movie and flesh it out, it’s 100% perfect in my mind. Then I write the script and when I’m finished, it’s maybe 70% of what I originally envisioned. Then I shoot the movie and we’re looking at around 50%. By the time the movie is edited and in the theater, I’m lucky if it’s 30% of where I started.”
Perhaps this is one of the reasons that Allen does not watch his movies after they’re complete.
I get what Cunningham is saying, the frustration of what Allen expressed. But then there’s this story about the great composer George Frideric Handel:
In 1741, Handel composed Messiah and what we know now as the Hallelujah Chorus. While designing and composing Messiah, Handel was in debt and deeply depressed; however, the masterpiece was completed in a mere 24 days.
Despite his mental and financial state, the Hallelujah Chorus’s birth story is a glorious one. After Handel’s assistant called for him for a few moments, the assistant went to Handel’s work area because he received no response from Handel. Upon entering the room, the assistant saw tears emerge from Handel’s eyes. When the assistant asked why Handel was crying, Handel proclaimed, “I have seen the face of God,” while lifting up the composition of the Hallelujah Chorus, which ended up being the crowing achievement of his career.
Occasionally writers can wrangle that imagined “cathedral made of fire” and translate it into something resembling the sacred. Maybe we are too critical, unable to see it, while others can. Or perhaps even we can be bowed by what we create like Handel.
A few weeks back, we discussed on this blog the possibility of such a thing as a perfect movie. As I stated then, I’m willing to put The Apartment in that lofty category. I’d also include Casablanca, The Shawshank Redemption, and perhaps just for argument’s sake Manhattan by Woody Allen. And if I’m willing to grant that there can be perfect movies, then by logic I would have to accept that it’s possible to write a perfect story.
Okay, so if not perfect, how about hugely satisfying. My point — if I have one — is I guess I’d rather approach writing a story from the perspective that I can create a “cathedral made of fire.” And while I get what Cunningham is saying about a “translator translating a translation,” that still doesn’t negate the possibility, does it, of a writer creating a truly magnificent story, even one approximating their original inspiration?
What do you think? Are we bound throughout all our years of writing never capable of reaching the heights of what we can imagine with our stories or is it there a chance that we might write something so grand, it might approximate a sort of sacred experience?