Hello NF Readers. Thank you for having me this month as writer-in-residence. I’m very excited to bring you a month of translation-related writing, including fiction, essays, and both traditional and non-traditional translations. I begin today, by way of introduction, with an essay…

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Unlikely spaces

Most people will agree that the best apprenticeship for writing is reading. Reading brings us to recognize and appreciate all that can be done with the almost never-ending source of words at a writer’s disposal. Because reading habits are highly individual, this apprenticeship becomes a personalized form of communion with the words we are to use. My particular reading world is an inquisitive starfish, arms out in various directions and moving slowly across an immense seabed of literature. One of those arms reaches toward the kind of reading that comes from taking a sentence written in one language and finding words for it in another. This kind of reading came to me slowly, and involves an unlikely part-time job, the accident of my birth and a single, ordinary word.

In May of 1998, I arrived in Paris with a confusing sense of relief. I had spent the previous fall studying at the Université de Paris IV, and although I had grudgingly returned to my real university in the United States when classes ended in January, I spent that spring semester with the uneasy feeling that I wasn’t where I was supposed to be. I knew enough to know this feeling was terribly clichéd; what young American student doesn’t love Paris when she finds herself surrounded by its 19th century glamour, the hush and revelation of its museums and the romantic shelter of its parks and cobblestone streets? I was embarrassed, but that didn’t help the feeling go away.

In reality, my illogical feeling of displacement had deeper roots than just four months pounding the Parisian pavement in my conspicuously American running shoes. I was born in rural southern Japan, in a city not many non-Japanese people have ever heard of. I have no memories of my early life in that country; I was only an infant when my family returned to America. But growing up, I was given a hint of what it might feel like to be a foreigner. Part of this made me feel very special: writing down my place of birth on official documents always gave me a little kick of delight, so did seeing the astonished, sometimes envious, reaction of a friend learning this detail about me for the first time. I also remember, however, being teased in elementary school, being called Japanese like this was a bad thing and how much it hurt to be singled out for being different. Children will go very far to find differences, in my case almost ridiculously so. I am as American-looking as a person can get. But my birthplace made me different and this was enough.

All of this is to say that I grew up with a curious feeling of belonging to two places. That I was born in one place meant to me that I could have been raised there, too. I could have had an entirely different life. At first, I tried to satisfy this dislocated feeling by studying foreign languages, learning about other cultures, and when I was old enough, I assumed that travel would resolve this question of where I belonged. I could go anywhere, and then come “home”. Surprisingly, travel didn’t work. Slowly, I began to worry I was a kind of misplaced person, someone who would never feel content anywhere. I didn’t have a word for this feeling until those few summer months in Paris in 1998.

I worked part-time that summer as a typist for a translator. Every few days, I took the metro across the city, rang a bell at the foot of an imposing residential building, crept nervously up a dimly lit stairway and found the door left ajar, presumably for me. It was a typical, old-fashioned Parisian apartment with creaky floorboards, ornate moldings at the edges of the ceiling and tall French doors in each room leading onto a wrap-around balcony. My boss was British, in his early sixties, and he translated patents.

For several hours a week, he read his translations aloud and I typed. I remember my first day and how astounded (and envious) I was that he could hold up a piece of paper with text written in French and simply pronounce its equivalent in smooth, rapid English. He rarely used a dictionary and he never had me go back and change a word or a sentence. We would work for about two hours until he would lean back, remove his glasses to rub his eyes, and then start chatting to give us a break.

He was a dignified older man, identical in most ways to any other Parisian man of the same age. Yet his sense of humor had remained distinctly British – ironic and very dry. He enjoyed having a young woman to shock. And I was happily, willingly, shockable. He told me too much about his French wife, who was often, to my distress, in the other room but apparently unable to hear or understand him. He also told me about his early life in Paris, about adventures with friends and about the women he had loved. He had left England when he was 19 years-old and had never gone back.

“I wasn’t escaping anything,” he said, with a bit of challenge in his voice. “I had a happy childhood.”

I couldn’t help wondering that he’d never been back. England and France were not so far apart.

“You find it a bit scary? Leaving everything behind like that?”

I shook my head and he saw, acknowledging the fact with a conspiratorial smile, that I was thrilled.

He told me then how he’d gone on a cruise with his parents when he was twelve years old. When the ship stopped for the first time, in a Scandinavian harbor, he disembarked with everyone else. Only when it was time to get back on the boat, he resisted.

“I knew,” he told me. “I was only twelve but I knew. Everything that I didn’t know about the world was much better, much more exciting, than what I knew about my own country. I did finally walk back on the boat. But I left a part of myself in each town we visited on that trip. Later, when I was old enough, I went back to find all those missing pieces.” He smiled at me. “Of course, they weren’t there. They are nowhere. That is what it feels like to be an expat.”

An expatriate. Someone who leaves their homeland behind. This word, offered so casually in the context of that part-time job, gave me understanding about who I knew I would become. What is so wonderful about this word is that when broken into its two parts, it contains both sides of the complicated reality it signifies. Patriate will always hold an echo of the images and memories of where I’ve come from, while the ex confirms that I am now somewhere else. In this way, both places remain linked. Fixed in me.

It is fitting that a translator was the one who gifted me this word, because it is in translation that I find the purest expression of my expatriatism. I have always been a passionate reader, and writing is my preferred form of expression. Naturally, these two disciplines have influenced one another. But learning to read in French and then in Japanese gave me new alphabets, new expressions and new words to consider. I found myself exploring two vast and completely different literatures. As I wandered around, experiencing these novel worlds, I found myself trying to shift them, bring them closer somehow, to find a home for them in my original, English-speaking, American self. I began to translate.

The expatriate in me is a constantly-fractured individual, engaged in several worlds but essentially homeless. The translator in me works to build bridges and find paths, to discover the unlikely spaces where each world touches the other. All this to find the way home.