A few weeks ago I posted about Jacques Poulin’s Spring Tides .  I actually first read Translation Is a Love Affair (La Traduction est une histoire d’amour, 2006; tr. from the French by Sheila Fischman, 2009).  However, when I put down this short book I had the unsatisfying feeling that I’d missed something, that there was, as I put it earlier, some layer I failed to penetrate.  Thus, the book didn’t work for me, yet I had glimpsed enough to know that something was there.  Turns out reading Spring Tides before reviewing this little book was the best thing to do.  To me, Spring Tides worked alone, but Translation Is a Love Affairworks better as a variation on a theme or even a revisioning of a theme written nearly thirty years earlier.  If you’ve read my review of Spring Tides, you will remember the strong allegory running through that text.  The last chapter in Translation Is a Love Affair is entitled “The Earthly Paradise.” 

Review copy courtesy of Archipelago Books.

Here the primary character is a woman named Marine.  She works as a translator, sometimes “tormented by the groundless fear that [she is] living the life of a parasite.”  She has recently met and began translating the work of Monsieur Waterman, an older and very established French Canadian writer.  He has given her a place to live while she works on his translations. 

If there was a way to get close to someone in this life — of which I was not certain — it might be through translation.

One thing I enjoyed about this book is that the love it is talking about is not necessarily romantic love.  And that seems to be Poulin’s point, too.  Marine has been a guilty wanderer for years.  As in Spring Tides, this novel is very quiet.  We know little about Marine’s past, and what we do know is vague.  This is a potential flaw in the novel.  Marine sometimes says things like, “The only rules I accept are the rules of grammar.”  But there’s not much here to make me believe that, let alone feel that.  She’s just not that way in the time period this novel moves through.  I read the book twice and still had a hard time believing that Marine used to be anything but the slightly lonely yet loving woman we meet on page one when she tenderly describes her fat cat walking around.

This book has a very significant plot line, however, that stands out much more than Marine’s translation job.  A new cat wanders into Marine’s yard one day, and eventually Marine finds this note tucked away in the collar:

My name is Famine.  I am on the road because my mistress can’t take care of me, . . . . .  The final words, after the comma had been erased.

After some sleuthing, Marine and Monsieur Waterman discover that the words after the comma compose a sort of SOS.  Throughout the remainder of the book, these two very different people try to find a way to help the person who wrote the note and abandoned the cat.  Running along underneath this narrative is the relationship between Marine and Monsieur Waterman, between author and translator.  It’s a very intriguing story and a perspective on love and translation that I never before have encountered.

We have to go further, pour ourselves into the other person’s writing the way a cat curls up in a basket.  We must embrace the author’s style.

Though my estimation of Translation Is a Love Affair went up after reading Spring Tides I consider this a lesser work that does little to inform a reading of the greater work.  That said, it is a quiet little book full of tenderness and sadness.  It is not slight and for anyone who has read Spring Tidesthis might be a nice revisit to Poulin’s strange world of men, women, cats, and translators.

Review copy courtesy of Archipelago Books.

A quick note on the cover: isn’t it beautiful?  The texture and the unconventional shape make these books feel just right.

Spring Tides won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for Literary Merit for fiction in the French language (the same year Alice Munro won it for the English language with Who Do You Think You Are?), yet Poulin is apparently not widely read.  I can see one reason for that: this book is very quiet, running the risk of seeming like a straightforward allegory (the problem I had with Translation Is a Love Affair at first).  The book does not force the reader to come to terms with it, and the prose is so deceptively simple that a reader might miss the deeper complexities. 

The central character in this book is the otherwise nameless Teddy Bear, a nickname derived from T.D.B.  “And T.D.B. come from Tradecteur de Bandes Dessinées, because I translate comic strips.”  Here is how this book starts; I think you’ll catch the allusion.

In the beginning he was alone on the island.

Teddy Bear likes his solitude and works consistently to have his translations done each week when the boss’s helicopter comes to collect them and drop off new ones.  His main companion is his cat Matousalem and a tennis machine.  The island is the boss’s, and he gave it to Teddy Bear hoping it would bring a bit of happiness (“It isn’t heaven on earth, but it’s a pleasant spot,” he said.).

Happiness is the ellusive beast in this book.  The boss’s main goal seems to be to ensure that Teddy Bear experiences happiness.  Though lonely (dictionaries and reference books “took the place of the friends he didn’t have”) and apparently content in his solitude, Teddy Bear obviously was missing some communication, something he was never good at anyway:

He started thinking about his brother Theo.  He never heard from his brother, but he must be somewhere in southern California, and as the weather got warmer on the Pacific coast, he would surely be preparing to return to San Francisco. . . .  Teddy was thinking about someone else too: a girl.  She didn’t exist in reality, but her features and appearance were beginning to take shape in his mind.

Then, as if by miracle, a girl appears.  One day during the spring tides, the boss drops off Marie: 

“. . . My dream is to make people happy.  That’s why you’re here on this island.  And it’s why I brought Marie here too.  Obviously I don’t think I’m God the Father and I didn’t tell myself, ‘It is not good that man should be alone’ or anything like that, but I thought you’d have a better chance of happiness if there was someone here with you. . . .” 

I enjoyed this part of the novel more than any other part.  Teddy Bear and Marie enjoy an uncomfortable friendship on island, though they live on opposite sides.  She tries not to interfere with his work, and he tries not to interfere with her swimming.  In a revealing and comic part, Teddy Bear decides to make Marie dinnner, but an unwelcome voice comes:

“I’m sorry,” he said, for his brother’s benefit.

“Quit behaving like a zouave and read the recipe like a normal person,” he told himself.

“What’s got into you?”

“Don’t make me laugh with that ‘intrusive presence’ nonsense.  You’re only turning fine phrases to forget she’s a girl.  Did you notice her eyes, at least?  Have you ever seen such beautiful black eyes in your whole career as a translator?”

“Never.”

“And what about the rest?”

“How do you expect me to read the recipe like a normal person if you keep talking about that girl?” he complained.  “It’s ten after four and did you read what it says on the box?  ‘Allow to cool at room temperature for three hours before serving!’  Do you konw what time that means we’ll be eating supper?”

Though there are two people on the island, it still feels like a pleasant solitude.  This is interrupted again when the boss drops off his own wife so she can enjoy a few days (which turn into months) on the island.  Then the boss brings more people, and more still, until the island is a minor community.  Each person or couple comes with the spring tides, like the debris on the island.  Teddy Bear’s work is becoming harder amidst the distractions, but he’s getting better at it.  Then all is suddenly shattered.

The plot introduction above seems to me to focus primarily on the allegorical side to this novel.  That’s hard to miss, actually, and it’s hard to summarize a plot like that without it showcasing how contrived it is.  However, to me the allegory was incidental and unnecessary, even if it cast some of the themes in a deeper relief.  To me the most fascinating and maybe central part of the novel was the aspect of communication, of a connection between us.  This is hardly a novel theme, but here, with the biblical references and the work of translation, it is dealt with in a novel (and pleasantly lonely) manner.  If you find the above plot summary unsatisfactory (as I do) take heart that when I’m thinking back on the individual episodes, isolated from the larger contrived plot, I love this book.  Here is a central line, not Poulin’s but Vincent Van Gogh’s:

There may be a great fire in our soul, yet no one ever comes to warm himself at it, and the passers-by see only a wisp of smoke coming through the chimney, and go along their way.

That’s heartbreaking to think about, and Poulin succeeds in this novel-length rumination on just that quotation.