From Paper to Pulp

Abstract

Writing a novel, often, isn't much fun. You pen a sentence, write a scene – and even as your fingers strike the keypad, as the words dribble across the screen, you're confronted, in an instant feedback loop, with the irremediable fact of their excruciating awfulness. Dutch literary culture has a colloquial term for first drafts: de eerste pannenkoek – the first pancake. When you're cooking pancakes, the first cupful of batter to be poured into the pan won't end up being eaten; it's just to make initial contact, prime the iron, establish working temperature. Those things achieved, you throw the scrambled mess away. So it is with a first draft. As William S. Burroughs more directly counsels: cut it into very small pieces and hide them in someone else's trashcan. Most of the 'fun' – or, to use a more respectably Lacanian term, pleasure – comes much later, when the novel is read. Or, to be precise: when you, the author, join the ranks of the book's readers. This relation to a work seems more honest, since this is what you, as author, were in the first place: a reader – namely, a conduit or channel through which other histories and bodies flowed and coalesced until they found some kind of form which, still provisional (always provisional) nonetheless seemed fixed enough to be read – or rather, since it was already a form of reading in the first place, re-read. There are no writers – only readers: isn't this what critical thinking from at least Heidegger onwards, never mind Derrida, has ceaselessly been telling us? As a writer who's gone out there, dived into the pan and tested the veracity of these claims, I can testify with absolute conviction that they're one hundred per cent true. But pleasure. I'm not really thinking, here, of reviews, which, when they're good ones, give the kind of pleasure that cocaine might – gratifying but short and utterly unsatisfactory. Nor even academic critical engagement, although that's more interesting, since it transposes currents moving through the work, conveys them elsewhere, cutting channels through to other bodies, thus continuing the work's own work. No, I have found – quite unexpectedly – that what affords me as a writer – sorry, reader, channel or transposer – the most fundamental type of pleasure is translation; in other words, the process of watching my novels being translated. If a literary text is made of metonymic chains, a balanced architecture of allusion, correspondence, semantic displacements playing out at verbal level, taking up and modifying each other, in a kind of echolalia – what Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, in their brilliant study of Freud's Wolf Man, call "cryptonymy" – then the most propitious, or faithful, mode through which to attend to this text's demand, to carry forth and outwards its own logic, would be translation. As the critic Fritz Senn pointed out back in the '80s: to best understand Joyce, you shouldn't read through Ulysses or Finnegans Wake to some supposed scene of Dublin life or Irishness or personal experience or even universal wisdom; rather, you should look at how these books have been translated. When you do this in intricate detail, at the level of the sentence, comparing (say) Italian with German versions, then the variants, the paths and faultlines opened by each – what's