Transgressions Read Online Free PDF

world into good and evil, the way the protagonists were often alienated from themselves and the world around them. She understood that feeling; as a child she had seen it in her father, a man wrenched out of one country and never entirely able to root himself in another.
     
    “I wonder what your father would have made of it,” Charles had said to her that afternoon as he saw her off at the subway.
    “I’m surprised you remember him.”
    “I don’t really. But you do.”
    “Yes,” she had said quietly, not for the first time taken aback by his perceptiveness. “You’re right. I do.”
    So what would her father have thought about the book? Czech words with American sensibilities. He would have seen it as evidence of a culture twice destroyed, first by socialism, then by capitalism. Certainly the novel was unashamed in its homage to the West and in particular that hard-boiled tradition that America exported so well. Not easy to copy, though in this case the writer had made an effort: chronicling the devastation of a post-Soviet economy, drugs, and prostitution against the Pinocchio charm of the Charles Bridge and the grandeur of Wenceslas Square. Even the story had a certain swing: good cop, bad karma, a man wading through violence driven by the memory of lost love.
    For a translator its deliberate street slang was its own challenge. She was lucky, of course. For as far back as she remembered she had spoken Czech. Her father had never used any other language with her. Moving between the two tongues had been as normal as breathing. Until he took her to Prague when she was six, she thought they were the only two people in the world who spoke it, a secret language between father and daughter. It was only later that she understood how this was a way of confirming his identity. Teaching her was reminding himself. Their visit back was his first since the war. He had left a young man and returned old. Ten months later the Russian tanks moved in on the Prague spring and his exile became permanent. After he had his heart attack, when she had been in her first year at university studying—well, what else but Czech?—it was she who had written the letter to the few remaining relatives, a letter that turned into an elegy in his native tongue. It was fitting. Toward the end, all he had had were memories and a language that his daughter had helped keep alive for him. Sometimes, when she was at her worst, she wondered if that was what she was still doing now, helping to keep it alive as some kind of memorial to him.
    She imagined him sitting at her shoulder reading the book with all its crude images of violence and decay. She didn’t need his disapproval to have her own. As a story the whole thing was shot through with a kind of careless misogyny. All acceptable within the genre, but nonetheless distasteful for that. How will I feel, she had thought when she had taken it on, sitting at night in an empty house translating scenes of women being threatened and abused by men who enjoy their pain rather than their sexuality? Rape, torture—it was so common nowadays that it was almost a form of punctuation for a certain kind of trash novel. Some of it would have to be cleaned up to make it to the screen. You can’t do those sorts of things to Irène Jacob and get away with it, even if it is Brad Pitt who gets to lick her wounds. As a translator she could make a decision not to wallow in it, but it still had to be made flesh in English. Well, she knew what she was doing. And if the images got too rough, she’d just make sure she worked on certain scenes only under the cover of daylight.
    Not that darkness scared her. At least not the darkness of this house. That was what was so extraordinary about everybody else’s sudden concern for her. There was nothing in this house to make one feel bad. There never had been. She had known that from the moment she walked in off the street.
    It had been the first property she’d seen after her