The Translator
By Ward Just
Houghton Mifflin, 313 pages, $21.95
If, as Ezra Pound once said, an epic is a poem that includes history, then Ward Just`s ”The Translator” has to be an epic novel; for despite its relatively brief compass, it includes more history-past, present and future, American and European, political, cultural and emotional-than any recent work of fiction that comes to mind. Indeed, one of the book`s most remarkable traits, assuming that several months have passed since Just put the manuscript of ”The Translator” in the mail, is its wise-before-the-fact air about current events in Central Europe and points East-its sense that the author knows more about the whys, hows and wherefores of what is going on in our suddenly turbulent world than any other participant or would-be commentator.
We meet Just`s title figure-Siegmund ”Siggy” van Damm-in 1945, when he is 10 years old. The son of a conscientious German staff officer who will die at the hands of his Nazi superiors for relaying bad news (that is, for telling the truth about the military situation), Siggy lives with his mother in the north German town of Ilsensee, which was devastated in 1943 by errant English bombers on their way to Hamburg and is now about to be occupied by Allied soldiers.
That event stirs equivocal feelings in Siggy, in part because he had seen an American private detective film back in 1941 and fallen in love with the syncopated sound of the language, the film`s ”California ambiance” and the notion of the private detective who ”had no connection to anything, neither family nor government, yet he was never afraid.” And now, after a platoon of lost GIs has entered his mother`s house and behaved with the expansiveness of victors, Siggy has fallen in love all over again with the film`s very non-Germanic image of casual freedom-epitomized by ”the perfect smoke ring”
blown by the platoon`s departing officer.
But then the boy sees the American soldiers suddenly surrounded by Wehrmacht stragglers, who shoot them all and loot the bodies. And with that, Act One of Siggy`s estrangement and eventual expatriation is complete.
Then it is 1956, and the man who now calls himself Sydney van Damm arrives at a Paris railway station. Fluent in German, English and French, he has come to work as a translator for the German-American Foundation-a semi-benign, CIA-backed cultural enterprise. At the station he is met by an American wheeler-dealer named LeMessurier Sebastian ”Junko” Poole, who may or may not be a CIA man, and with whom, over the next three decades or so, Sydney`s life will be intermittently intertwined.
While Sydney works at the German-American Foundation, it is the smooth and charming Junko who hires him to serve as translator in a number of matters that call for discretion, loyalty and tact, and Junko who gets an abortion for Sydney`s French girlfriend. And it is Junko who introduces Sydney to his American wife-to-be, Angela Dilion, offspring of an old-line, old-money Maine family-although there is nothing even Junko can do when Sydney and Angela have an autistic child who eventually has to be institutionalized.
The ”present” of the novel, which is more or less today, finds Sydney and Angela still living in Paris, where he spends most of his time translating the formidably intellectual works of the expatriate German novelist Josef Kaus, who lives nearby in Paris but whom Sydney has never met.
Sydney and Junko are still on good terms, and it has been some time since Junko has involved him in his shady but often financially rewarding affairs. But now Junko has another dicey proposal to make, and it is one that Sydney finds hard to refuse-even though, or maybe because, it involves a visit to what was, until quite recently, East Germany, the land where Sydney`s mother has chosen to reside.
A promising setup for a John le Carre-like tale of disillusionment amid the weeds of espionage-or so one might think. But even though ”The Translator” has its moments of suspense, it is the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Milan Kundera that this novel brings to mind-Fitzgerald for the seemingly offhand grace of Ward Just`s prose, for the pity he bears toward his characters and for his sense of individual fates being worked out through and across the paths of time; Kundera for Just`s shrewd, essayistic insights into the ways in which specific nations and peoples behave and for the skill with which those insights are kept within novelistic bounds.
Notable, too, is the deeply European flavor of much of the book. Although Just divides his time between Paris and Martha`s Vineyard, this Continental strain seems new to his work, which usually focuses on profoundly American types caught in the buzz of electoral or bureaucratic politics, like the title character of his previous novel, ”Jack Gance.” European impulses also may be the source of the lyrical, almost allegorical, flow of ”The Translator” `s plot, in which the shapes of what happens next are like sentences in an alternate language, one that seeks to reveal what until then had been inexplicable.
Sydney, Junko and Angela-like many of Just`s previous characters-can begin to seem a bit thin over the course of an entire novel, their traits and social backgrounds having been sketched in with such speed and zest that doubts arise about the sheer neatness of the enterprise. But it is here that the historical aspect of ”The Translator” most valuably comes into play-for as these people move through a very unfinished world that is as likely to show up on tonight`s edition of ”Nightline” as it is in the pages of a novel, they acquire that agreeably shaggy look that goes by the name of reality.
The shaggiest of all, perhaps, is Josef Kaus, the novelist Sydney translates. Himself a handsomely realized, notably cranky figure, he also allows Just to ”paraphrase” a number of scenes from Kaus` novels-apparently so we can see how Sydney is transformed by the act of translating them. But glimpsed around the corner, as it were, the invented fiction of Kaus seems so good, and so different from anything Just himself might write, that the reader returns to the rest of the novel with an air of bemused delight, even though neither ”The Translator” nor Kaus` ”Die Katastrophe” are very happy books. Junko Poole is a dangerous trickster, and Sydney van Damm is, in Junko`s words, ”absolutely trustworthy and often naive.” That is one way to look at what happens in ”The Translator.” Or is it that Junko-one of those Americans who ”have been able,” as Kaus puts it, ”to avoid much that is frightful, lucky them”-is really a self-deluded charlatan, while Sydney stands revealed as a true latter-day descendent of the cinematic private-eye he fell in love with as a boy, ”a reliable man who can bear anything”?
It is among the pleasures of ”The Translator” that these and many other paths of meaning remain open at the novel`s end, without in the least leaving the reader with a sense of having been shortchanged. And if, as one suspects, this is the first novel of Ward Just`s European phase, all of his readers stand to gain.
