Excerpt translated by B. J. Epstein

A single minute from some TV show,
London Weekend Television.
No other moving pictures preserved –
of Sandy Denny with Fairport Convention on stage?
The 9^th of August 1975.
In clothes typical of the times.
They play “White Dress.”
Her skin is shiny, with a thin line of sweat under her bangs,
tension breaking the line between her eyebrows.
Jerry Donahue in something sky-blue.
Swarbrick totally in white, with the mandolin’s shoulder strap
coolly lying over his right shoulder,
as though he
was going to shoot ducks
from his hip.
Like some hasty, startled applause –
I am suddenly reminded of how ducks lift from out of the reeds.
The melody is pretty mediocre.
Almost inappropriate under the circumstances.
And yet Glyn John’s favorite track.
How did they get Sandy to agree to this?
She was known to be difficult.
She flings the melody out as though the words were
something other than the text –
as though the words were actually about herself.
But she’s already married.
To the gentle, tall redhead,
with a twelve-string guitar.
Trevor – a ladies’ man?
Life in chaos.
Is the song ironic, an exhausted grimace?
They know her well.
Swarb, Pegg, Bruce Rowland,
they all live in the next village.
She has recently moved out to Byfield.
To The Twistler.
Just three years later, she’s gone.
She drives around in the fire-red beetle.
With moss-green fenders.
In a drunken state. Stoned?
Backing into a ditch. Running over a field.
The baby still in the backseat. Pounding on the Swarbricks’ door,
but they can’t deal with her.
Neil – what are you doing? You’re her dad.
All of London lies between you.
Like an impenetrable organism
 – between Wimbledon and Byfield.
And she’s married. Grown up.
You can’t keep holding her hand.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Stellan rarely eats sweets. The pastry lies half-eaten on his plate. It’s like it’s curling up, shriveling into where it’s been bitten. As though the pastry were whimpering, trying to heal its sore, the bite – the pattern from his teeth. The coffee has been drunk. All that’s left is the emptiness in the cup. Stellan just as thin as when we first got to know each other in high school.

“I don’t know. I mean, Neil Denny…Weren’t you writing about Fats Waller anyway?

“Not anymore. I can’t write about Sandy either. I don’t want to go into it. It’s just a tragedy all the way through. But Neil chose life.”

 “Hmm…maybe…or rather, death didn’t choose him.”

The tea in my cup has gone cold. I’m avoiding coffee until I’ve managed to sort out my sleep.

“But yeah,” he said, “that sounds good.”

 And then he moves to get up, smiles. “Shall we go?”

            We carefully shift our hips sideways between the backs of the chairs and the edges of the table, as though we’re the slalom stars from our childhood. The simplest route out is past the jacket sleeves and the pram handles. We’re in Djurgården, because it is a special day. They have managed to bring back the Indian elephants, who had been – well, removed – when they had positive tuberculosis tests. We slouch across the street outside the Little Park café. The dry autumn leaves follow us, tumbling in the air, stressed. Worried about the draft from the passing trams, but then hurry, hurry with the wind all the way to Skansen. And yes, the elephants are there, ready to receive visitors. They’re right inside the gates by the main entrance. They stand there next to one another, adorned in an Indian saffron shade. Rocking their forebodies, sweeping their long trunks. Loads of people. And the visitors – I’ve never seen them so – I don’t know, fulfilled? But even before this day is over, the elephants will be taken out of the manuscript.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

In Norwich, there’s a breeding pilgrim pair, high up in the tower of the city’s cathedral. They are celebrities. Watching through the webcam, we can see every spoil the peregrines take. Year after year. And then it’s spring again – and everything changes. Another female tries to get the male. She attacks the nest. Breeding is threatened. And as though playing god, someone decides to take the eggs from the nest and hatch them in a machine. For the chicks, maybe it doesn’t make that much of a difference. But for the rest of us, well, as long as they survive… The webcam stops sending videos.

            On a lukewarm summer evening, K and I walk aimlessly towards the apartment we are renting among the churches here in the city. We pass the Norwich Puppet Theatre. It is one of the best evenings we’ve had this summer. Warm, sky blue. The sun carefully setting. Traffic has slowed down. And then we hear her. A piercing cry. She lands for a short moment where they had had their nest. We stop and watch. Then she flies up again and hovers around the steeple. Circling over and over. Screeching. Is it the rival? Her wings pull her forward. Cries loudly through the air. No, it must be the original female, who hasn’t given up.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

It is the music journalist Philip Ward who finds the film clip, just by chance. He was searching for something else in a TV archive and brought this minute-long sequence up to the surface. “Surface”  quickly becomes “put on YouTube”. Ward writes in his book that he was a moony young man, with fantasies of saving Sandy. In my text, it’s you, Neil, who never stops reaching out your hand. How did you manage to survive? I play the clip again.

The tones lift up, out of her voice.
Leave the nicotine-grey teeth.
 As though the meaning of the song offers relief
and has left words and letters behind
 for a long time.
Swollen face.
Her gaze just barely glimmering
in short blinks from her eyes,
closed in concentration.

The clip is over in a minute. Fades quickly to black where the old TV program’s credits used to start rolling. That’s it. Quiet. Done. No applause. The ducks never lift out of the reeds.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Then one summer day we’re sitting in very cold Sussex, while the fog covers the headland and quickly comes inland. As soon as the text offers an opportunity, there is a longing back to Moy Avenue. The house with the yellow door. It’s hard to drink tea on a June day here in England. We’re sitting in the garden. The temperature falls right down into the mug and an unpleasant humidity fills the air. But the words want to be put in order like in a crossword – hydrangeas, martagon lilies, Tip Tree Marmalade, 80 bags of Clipper Natural, Fair & Organic. The gull balances on the upwind. The apple tree’s bow-shaped branches stretch back down into the grass. The cement path twists.

            At the end of the garden is another space, the lower patio, the tool shed, the rose bed. But here, up here, fuchsias and geraniums in concrete pots. And green plastic furniture just outside the kitchen window. The thin, fragile wastewater pipe from the washing, on the outside of the house, down to a stormwater well – sun-dried Bakelite against the brown bricks. The neighbor boys knock balls over the wall. A runaway kick and the discharge pipe is in pieces. The book with descriptions of walks over the South Downs is lying open next to the chair. My eyes wander over the pages. I close my eyes so I can wander the paths on the inside of my eyelids. After a few miles, you have the right to sit down. Do you know the region in south England where the ridges undulate like the waves under the white cliffs? The open, wind-blown expanses where the hills lean their shoulders towards the sky, and the safe hollows where small farms lie warmly enclosed in on themselves, like a carnation in a buttonhole? On long summer days, it’s lovely to lie on a slope between the clipped grass and the pale, clear sky, smelling the thyme and listening to the clinking of sheep bells and the lark’s trilling in the sky.

            I find myself smiling, because E. Nesbit’s literary style is like when a good friend opens the door and invites you to come along. Now I’m a child again. A chilly summer evening in Roslagen. We are about to row the boat home. And I get to borrow my father’s sweater. It’s so comfortably familiar, but still too large. And my shoulders, yes, all of my length, longs to fill it out. His grown-up smell. I curl in the prow with my chin over the rail. The strangely quiet world of seaweed, stones, barnacles and wrack. It slides slowly under me, while the reflection of the sky on the surface tries to cover everything and instead shows its dark-grey storm clouds. The oar-strokes. The mosquitoes. The stitches in the sweater, a hard-to-read cuneiform. But everything is there. Already written down. Is that why I can suddenly step out into a text about a south English landscape? Robins with insects à la saison in their beaks. From the house next door comes the cat and heaves itself up. Shaggy, with a little bell. It hesitates on the garden wall. My impulse is to warn the robin, but she has already heard – heard the revealing suspicious jingle. And she rustles, upset, and moves up a branch. With its flat nose and angry face, the cat mostly seems comical as it creeps and sneaks along the wall with its tinkling collar. To survive your own children – no, I can’t just sit here and invent things. The tea in my cup, the cat – where did it go? No, I can’t write at all right now. So I reach for Edith Nesbit’s story collection. There’s an odd story. It takes place just a stone’s throw from here, on the other side of Beachy Head. Edith lived in Friston. The couple in the story have their farm past the cliffs by Birling Gap. They are both beside themselves with grief after the loss of their daughter, but they are both also convinced that the other one is going out of their mind – turning crazy. A desperate worry for their mate, amidst their own fog. The woman writes to a young nurse to ask for help. When the nurse arrives, the couple gradually begins to recover. Intimate conversations, walks. Their concern for each other returns, takes off. They tidy, cook food. Do they really need a nurse? They aren’t ill. And she cannot replace their lost daughter. No, the nurse cannot continue. She prepares to leave. And then the couple gives up. Dies. First the man. Then the woman. The violet car drives in from the side to make this story a genre, but the terror is something altogether different.

            I spend a whole morning walking in the rain along Crowlink Lane. Trying to walk myself warm in Edith Nesbit’s stylistic landscape. She lived here a time, by the green slopes down towards Cuckmere Haven. The rhythm of the ridges and the twang of the English vowels. There aren’t many houses along this road. I talk for a little while with two workmen renovating a façade – so that they can see that I’m not getting up to trouble. The rain increases. Sheep look at me. Quiet in their short-cropped fields. I walk back to the car. They chew, watch, wait. If one starts to bleat, the others all join in. So then I might as well bleat at them too.

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I’m wrong. There’s more on YouTube. In the end, I find two sequences that seem to have been filmed from a flickering black-and-white TV screen. You can see the screen’s rounded edges cutting the straight sides of the picture. The entire so-called Fotheringport Confusion – Sandy’s second sojourn with Fairport Convention – and they play the song “Solo”. The year is said to be 1974. That seems likely. The sound is dreadful. The picture too. Still, it’s a very good version – maybe the best I’ve heard of this song? Then another sequence, from the same occasion. Sandy alone by the piano in “Like an Old Fashioned Waltz.” The picture and the sound just as bad. The piano clinks to a stop and the sequence transitions to a long introduction by Trevor, before the ballad about Ned Kelly. Sandy’s Australian husband, with his twelve-stringed guitar – but the sequence stops just when his song is about to get going.

            A concert filmed by some TV team – could it even be the BBC? They have the resources for several cameras. And editing. And then – a black-and-white TV screen filmed with a simple cine film camera? In that case there’s a space between the TV and the amateur camera – a few meters of air inside a house that we watch everything through. If you could look to the side there, between the lens and the TV, what would you see? A room? A house? Immortelles, place mats, crumpled cookie wrappers, a stained ring left by a glass, on a table, in a living room, by a sofa, a wall-to-wall carpet, a pipe in an ashtray, and a bookshelf? This is a film of a film – taken in a room that can scarcely be glimpsed. And yet someone lives here. How does this room look? Who saved these film clips with their poor quality, while the TV company themselves erased the recording? It could be you, Neil. It could be you who rigged the camera in the parlor at 9B Arthur Road. Yes, to preserve Sandy when she played on TV because you knew – even then – that the TV companies would end up erasing almost all the recordings of her. The radio stations too. A cup of tea – or two – sandwiches with grilled chicken, crackers, plum jam. You must have been sitting quietly, you and Edna, while the camera was on. Limited amounts of blank film in the cassette. You must have tried to carefully capture what you wanted to save. Trevor’s long introduction of “The Ballad of Ned Kelly” – it was too late when you realized it was he and not Sandy who was going to sing the next song – was that why you so suddenly turned off the camera?

[avatar user="bepstein" size="thumbnail" align="left" ]B.J. Epstein[/avatar]

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“In Norwich, there’s a breeding pilgrim pair, high up in the tower of the city’s cathedral.”

Meanwhile, also in Norwich, there is a translator, standing at a desk in her home office, books lining the shelves beside her. While translating an excerpt from a novel that takes place partially in her city, she is taken back to a time when she too saw the peregrines in the tower of the Norwich cathedral. As she translates a description of them, she finds herself there again, walking around the cathedral grounds, craning up to peer at them, high above the city.

And then she remembers walking around Norwich, talking to some friends. These friends are a Swedish family; both parents are novelists, and this translator has been lucky enough to work on both of their oeuvres at various times in the past thirteen years. Four years ago, the translator, her wife, and their then-only child and the two Swedish writers and their two children walk and talk. They see the cathedral and discuss the birds, they amble over paved streets, they pass other churches, theatres, restaurants. They swap between English and Swedish, chatting about the sites, about books, about music, about travel, about life. She remembers this. She remembers the warm days and the sun shining in its cool British way. She remembers meals together and long conversations and the feeling of always being caught between two languages and two selves.

The translator reads words from the page and types words into her computer, and at the same time, she is with the author as he explores Norwich. He hears the female bird screech. He explores the city with his wife. And his family also travels to other parts of the country. The translator reads and translates and follows his journey, moves along with him to Sussex, and to Sweden, and on, and on. She is carried with him through this book, all the while working alone in her office.

So as the author inserts himself into his text (and why not? It is, after all, his story), the translator goes with him, and she finds herself living the story too. This is beautiful – this is one of the best, most meaningful parts of being a translator – but it is also challenging. Where is the translator now? What is happening in her life? She has forgotten. She is forgotten. She has temporarily become her author. She has to, or she couldn’t translate his words.

And so, they travel together. Does he even know he has a passenger tracking his steps and his words so carefully?

Here, the author has not used a pronoun or a noun and the sentence must be untangled and rewritten in English, and here there’s a compound word that sounds right in Swedish but not in English, and now his style has become even more poetic and harder to transform into another tongue, and now he has combined words and feelings in a new way, and now he is speaking directly to a particular reader, and now he has suddenly moved on to another thought, and now he is in a childhood memory, wrapped in his father’s sweater, and the translator too wraps herself in her author’s father’s sweater, and it is too big for her, as it is too big for her author, but it is far, far too big for her, and it hangs and hangs, but she must nonetheless make it fit.

This is how she translates. This is how she has to. She must follow her author and hold tight to him and she has to try on that sweater and somehow, imperfectly, she must make it fit.

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