Ljubljana: My Reverse Babylon

In 2005, I published an essay entitled “Gained in Translation” that for a couple of years, as I was informed by a number of teachers, became something of a standard in introductory translation classes in this region. The essay opened with an embarrassing anecdote about a gaffe I made in the early months of my romance with my future husband:

In the early morning hours of an April day in 1992, I had a rendezvous with my long-distance lover, Aleš, at the Piazza Navona in Rome. I had traveled on a transatlantic flight from New York’s JKF Airport, and he had traveled by train from Slovenia, Italy’s newly-minted neighbor to the northeast. Sitting on a bench beneath Bernini’s Fontana dei Fiumi waiting for him to appear, I opened the book that I had started on the plane the night before: Immortality by Milan Kundera. While it may be difficult to become absorbed in a tale of fictional lovers while waiting at the center of an empty piazza for a real lover to appear, Kundera’s narrative sweep and originality were such that they drew me in. I had finished one chapter – the one that ends with Paul racing to Agnes’ hospital bed desperate for one last kiss – and was turning the page to embark upon another, when I sensed someone beside me on the cool stone bench and felt the touch of a hand at the small of my back. I looked round to see the face of my lover, long-distance no more, looking into my own.

In that instant, Kundera’s Paul and Agnes vanished into the bright sunlit square. Aleš, unknowingly taking up Paul’s fictional impulse, leaned in to kiss me. […] But just as his lips reached mine, he stopped and let out a cry of surprise.

“Wait,” he said and gestured toward the book that he had spotted on my lap.

He bent over to reach into the duffel bag that he had placed on the ground next to him. After rummaging in it for a few seconds, he pulled out his own book.

“Look,” he said triumphantly.

His was a paperback whereas mine was a hardcover and had a different cover design, but the coincidence was unmistakable. The book Aleš held up toward me was entitled Nesmrtnost and was written by none other than Milan Kundera. Laying his volume down on top of mine, Aleš took my face between his two hands and gazed at me with his melancholy central European eyes.

“We’re reading the same book,” he whispered.

His face was so close to mine that I could feel the heat of his words on my skin, and of all the many things I might have said at that moment, of all the phrases I might of murmured or sighed or moaned, this was my response:

“Only you’re reading in translation.”

It is not my habit to quote myself at such length but many years have passed since that day and much water has flowed beneath Plečnik’s Triple Bridge in Ljubljana where I have lived for the past three decades. Both my wonderful husband, seven years ago, and now Kundera, this past summer, have died. Many aspects of the America I left some thirty years ago and the Europe to which I arrived are hardly recognizable today. The dawning hope of that post-Berlin Wall era – even in the midst of the violent disintegration of Yugoslavia – has given way to a form of chaotic and unrelenting despair.  And yet after all these years, all these transformations, when I recounted this shameful tale to my son and his girlfriend, both committed Europeans, both polyglots to a greater or lesser degree, their jaws dropped in horror, and I knew that my blithe American naïveté (or stupidity really – there is no other word for it) still has the ability to shock and remains a cautionary tale about the provincialism of monolingual cultures.

The essay went on to give a survey of translation approaches (literal versus free, domesticating versus foreignizing), some highlights from the history of translation and its most colorful figures (Ezra Pound’s open approach to translation and his famous dogma – “Make it new!” – versus Vladimir Nabokov’s churlish position that only word-for-word transpositions count as valid translations, and his dismissal of the work of modern commercial translators: “…a school boy’s boner would be less of a mockery in regard to the original masterpiece…”), and a depressing comparison of America and Great Britain’s rather miserable publishing statistics (around 3% of all published works in these countries are translations) versus continental Europe’s more welcoming approach to other literatures.

In the course of this past tumultuous nearly half century, has anything about this narrow subject – about language, literature, translation – changed? Improved even? Well, for starters, I have, dear readers, I assure you I could never say something so idiotic now. After the past several decades working as a translator (from Slovenian to English) and a writer (whose work is frequently translated from English into other languages), I am acutely aware of the essential role of the translator in literature and the other arts and indeed life in general. Andrej Ilc, my editor at the Ljubljana publishing house Mladinska knjiga, tells me that, not just me, but the British and American publishing markets have also improved, are not so stubbornly monocultural, that the dreadful 3% number has doubled to a whopping 6% (though a quick Google search provides no evidence of this). He reported that, by way of comparison, between 40% and 60% of works published in Slovenia are translated from other languages, and while some cultural imperialists might suggest that that just shows what a tiny, obscure country Slovenia is, and what a tiny, obscure language and literary scene we have, I beg to differ. Slovenian readers (and writers) have, if not the whole world of literature in their bookstores and libraries, then a good chunk of it (and that is not to mention the whole world of film in their cinemas and festivals). The dedicated readers I meet in Ljubljana, a city that in this sense is more cosmopolitan than New York, often put me to shame. They are so versed in the work of new writers from all over the world, who’s hot and who’s not in other European countries from east to west, and not just European countries, also America of course and other places farther afield. It is a breadth and diversity of knowledge that one generally encounters only in connoisseurs and experts in more dominant-language cultures such as America.

And a more subtle point: during the intervening years my understanding of the cultural poles of the world and their relative levels of sophistication, diversity, and tolerance has almost flipped. When I first moved from New York City to Ljubljana in 1993, I felt as if I had been flung out from the absolute center of the universe – a Babylon of immense culture and riches and sin, teeming with peoples from all over the world, bubbling over with their multiple languages and cuisines – into a reverse Babylon, a flat, monochromatic, conservative backwater, so small that God might not even notice it if its inhabitants were building a daring tower that threatened to penetrate the heavens. In an early interview before political correctness had taken hold, I answered the question of what I missed the most about my homeland or at least New York City with the provocative quip: fags and ethnic food. This was no insult. I had lived in the two queer capitals of America and I missed the groove, the spice, the self-deprecating humor.  And yet over time I discovered in the relative marginality and uniformity of Slovenia and its capital of Ljubljana, a different kind of groove and spice hiding just beneath the surface. There were the fifty-plus dialects of the Slovenian language, a record in Europe for dialects per square kilometer. There were all the German words borrowed from the Austrian imperial past, even Turkish words borrowed from the Ottoman past. There was the multilingualism and playful code-switching inherited from the more recent Yugoslav past, and even the twisted, braying, truncated local Ljubljana slang, that made my children foreigners to me for a time when they were teenagers. In short, I discovered a diversity and wealth I would never have imagined.

As I write this piece, I am travelling from Ljubljana to Venice and on by train to Geneva to visit my son and his polyglot girlfriend who were so shocked by the fumbling romantic beginnings of my love story.  As the train approaches each station, a recording of a methodic digitalized female voice announces the next stop along the way.

Prossima fermata: Domodossola.
Prochain arrȇt: Domodossola.
Nächste Haltestelle: Domodossola.
Next stop: Domodossola.

Domodossola is at the half-way point, followed by Sion and Brig and Lausanne. As the hours of the voyage pass and the stops multiply, the mantra becomes an almost comical, seemingly superfluous, poetic repetition: the four introductory phrases, each followed by a single immutable word: the unchanging place name (only in the case of cities as large as Milano or Genève have the linguistic imperialists modified the proper noun to meet their cultural and pronunciation needs). Now I have also reached the half-way point in my larger journey, my life journey – the first thirty-one years in the United States, the country with the most dominant language in the world – and the second thirty-one years in Slovenia, a country with one of the least dominant languages in the world, almost a secret language. I am a half-half creature, not divided neatly – horizontally at the waist or vertically up and down – but a sort of palimpsest, a layered and multiple identity, part original and part transpositions picked up along the way, a series of introductory phrases and different melodies, and – at the end, or the center, or perhaps the very beginning – one, immutable, unchanging word.

Domodossola, Domodossola, Domodossola.

I have become, not only translator, but translation myself.