Mme Proust and the Kosher Kitchen Read Online Free PDF Page A

particularly joyous because Dick has announced he is definite about medicine once he finishes at the lycée. It was no surprise, of course, but Adrien did make a huge show of congratulating him. They were laughing about it all through dinner with Adrien regaling him with tales of all the pranks they played at the Faculty in his student days. Marcel joined in at first, but became quieter and quieter. We had just moved into the salon when he started that little wheezing sound of his. It is such a small noise, but I swear it is so horrible it could summon me from the other side of the Boulevard Malesherbes. His father told him to sit down and breathe calmly, but it only got worse and worse. We helped him to his room and tried to prop him up on pillows, but by this time he was panicking. Finally Adrien gave him some morphine—Marcel’s never liked the stuff and we hardly ever use it, but there seemed no choice. He quieted down, but still it was several hours before his breathing was regular again. I sat with him and read to him from Loti, which he has just started himself, while Adrien and Dick went back to their coffee.
    T HESE ARE MY own translations. You will excuse me if they are not as elegant as they might be, if I seem unable to purge a certain Gallic extravagance from her prose, perhaps making her appear pretentious where she is, in fact, highlysensitive. The syntax is slippery; her constructions a trifle formal by contemporary standards. How shall I deliver her voice to you?
    This is not, you understand, my regular line of work. I am a certified conference interpreter. A simultaneous translator. Academic papers, political speeches, that kind of thing. Like an old-fashioned typist, I pride myself on speed, accuracy, and a certain sixth sense about language, a premonition of what lies ahead—or perhaps merely an ability to reproduce correctly what has been only briefly glimpsed. A good interpreter will anticipate what direction a speaker’s sentence is taking him and form a construction that will fit it, so that she finishes up at the same spot that he does only seconds after him without recasting, repeating, or pausing. She will recognize a particular idiom or a piece of slang he tosses in and instantly find the equivalent in the other language. She will mimic his tone and his thoughts. She will talk and listen at the same time. It’s a narrow skill performed under exacting circumstances. Like an air-traffic controller, the interpreter is well rewarded for the stress involved.
    The literary translator is not as well paid, of course, but the calling is loftier. There is no need for speed here, and accuracy is taken for granted. The talent lies in nuance, in recognizing the layers of meaning in a word or a phrase, and finding some stylish version in the other tongue that will render not only the pretty surface but also hint at the yawning depths. I must confess these subtleties are often beyond me. Well, it is not professional ambition that has brought me here.
P ARIS . W EDNESDAY , D ECEMBER 31, 1890— TOWARDS MIDNIGHT .
    The first anniversary of Maman’s death is but three days away. I could not write this morning and finally tried to distract myself from my grief this afternoon with a much-delayed outing to the shops for a few New Year’s gifts. I had already picked an Anglo-Saxon theme for Marcel, George Eliot and Dickens, and I ventured down to Calmann Lévy where I bought
Middlemarch
—they have finally got the translation in. I look forward to discussing it with him, sharing Dorothea and Casaubon and all the rest. I also so want him to read Dickens and finally decided on
Great Expectations
.
    I was looking for a wallet for Dick and had the carriage drop me on the Boulevard Haussmann. The crowds were such that the cabman could not get near the doors of the Galeries Lafayette let alone wait for me, so I paid him off there, and eventually walked home despite the cold. The store windows were full of bright lights