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  At the AFSC Dora was kind to me. She saw to it that after six months as a typist I was promoted upstairs to the Foreign Service Section as a secretarial assistant. I worked for a man who administered a work camp program in Europe; we processed the applications of hordes of American college students who hoped to spend the summer living in Spartan conditions while digging wells or building schools or libraries in poor European towns, some still feeling the devastation of the war. I was barely older than the students going to the camps, and my boss—a gentle, innocent Quaker I thought of as elderly but who was probably about fifty-five—occasionally asked if I wouldn’t want to try a work camp myself.

  I said no, I didn’t care to sleep in a sleeping bag and eat cheap starchy food cooked communally in enormous pots and dig ditches for six weeks. I was an English major through and through and, innocent though he was, he soon came to grasp this. “Oh, but a human being can stand anything for six weeks,” he would tease. “I’m not so sure,” I retorted.

  It was 1960. Little by little over the past decade, details about the extermination camps had begun seeping into the public consciousness. When he said, “A human being can stand anything for six weeks,” I immediately thought of Auschwitz and Dachau. I couldn’t foresee that in later life, once I had escaped being a typist and become a writer, I would learn Italian and one day translate a book about Auschwitz. But I would sometimes imagine myself imprisoned there, in those hellish conditions, and did not think I’d be among the ones who endured. I was too hot-tempered and impatient—I would anger a surly guard, who would shoot me. Now I am no longer so hot-tempered, and when I imagine myself there, I think I might have the patience but not the physical stamina to endure. They’d take one look at me and, with a perfunctory wave of the hand, send me off to the bad side.

  In one of the six stories in Smoke Over Birkenau, which I was to translate long after I typed for the AFSC, an eighteen-year-old Dutch prisoner named Lotti understands quite well that some human beings can’t bear certain conditions. Watching her sister sicken and wither in the camp, Lotti volunteers to work in the Nazi brothel. When her dying sister disowns her in shame, Lotti justifies her choice in an ardent speech about her passion to stay alive by any means. She quotes from the Book of Job: “‘As the cloud is consumed and vanisheth away; so he that goeth down to the grave shall come up no more. He shall return no more to his house.’ Well,” Lotti protests, “I refused to be consumed and vanish like a cloud. I wanted to return to my house. I’m eighteen years old—I don’t want to die. I know, no one wants to die, you’ll tell me. But maybe I don’t want to more than the others. Maybe that’s the difference.”

  I was not only moved but alarmed when I came across this passage. It was hard enough to translate a contemporary Italian author. Must I tackle the Bible as well? What grave misgivings I suffered, until it dawned on me that the Bible had already been translated into English. All I had to do was locate the passage and copy it.

  The act of copying felt sneaky. Fiction writers store many beloved snatches from other writers in their heads, often for so long that we feel we’ve written them ourselves. We learn to be wary about what we appropriate. Even though it was perfectly legitimate in this case, I lifted from the Book of Job with unease.

  Meanwhile, when my Quaker boss teased me, back in 1960, saying, “A human being can stand anything for six weeks,” I replied, “I’m not so sure.” He looked perplexed; he really thought a human being could stand anything for six weeks—a tribute to the innocence of his imagination—and I did not enlighten him. He was a mild man; I wasn’t sure he could stand my fantasies about concentration camps for even a few minutes.

  I worked listlessly at the AFSC for two years and because of the innocence I perceived there, was probably the only employee who never attended the optional silent meeting held every morning before work. I also liked to sleep late. Toward the end of my tenure I did finally attend a few silent meetings at Pendle Hill, a Quaker retreat outside of Philadelphia, where our work campers came for a week of orientation and where I was permitted to use some of my college education in teaching rudimentary French classes. The silent meetings were fine, a curiosity, and I regretted my two-year intransigence, but I was disturbed by an evening talk given by one of the high-ranking AFSC executives. (As a Quaker group, the AFSC wasn’t supposed to have ranks but it did nonetheless, and everyone tacitly understood and observed them, for example in the company lunchroom where one was invited to sit anywhere, but the executives always sat at certain tables and the secretaries at others.)

  The talk was about pacifism. It was a very nice talk—Quakers and pacifism can be appealing—but during the question and answer period one of the students asked, as people invariably do, about Hitler. What would you do about Hitler? “Hate the deed and not the doer,” the high-ranking executive replied in his rasping voice. He said it as if he had been asked that question many times and was tired of it, even rankled—Why do they keep harping on that? I imagined him thinking—and had his answer prepared to deliver by rote. As if on cue, I walked out and strolled through the pleasant suburban grounds in the warm evening.

  After I left my secretarial assistant’s job at the AFSC I went to graduate school. What else, if typing and fruit flies were my only career options? I needed two languages for a master’s degree and decided to study Italian on my own. Languages had always come easily to me, and all I needed was enough to pass a reading comprehension exam. It was a happy choice, for two years later I found myself living in Rome. There I looked up Dora, who had also left the AFSC, married a Roman, moved to Italy, and had two babies, whom I would take care of a few times in gratitude for her invitations to the beach house in Fregene, and one of whom, decades later, would become my translation therapist.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about the convoluted trail of coincidence leading me back to Dora and her Italian daughter. It nagged at me with mounting intensity, the way a story idea nags. It wasn’t the coincidence as such that I found so compelling, after my initial surprise, as the discrepancy between my reaction to it and that of the translation therapist. It was interesting, in the Jamesian sense of the word, that the same situation could be so striking to one party involved, evoking whole chunks of the past, and so negligible to the other. And yet in this situation the discrepancy was natural and understandable.

  Misgivings. Listless. Rasping. Harping. Wary. Capitulate. Cue. Immersed. Mounting.

  As I got deeper into the translation and could navigate in the author’s idiom, the English version emerged, and with it the sensation that I myself was writing the book. I had familiar urges to cut, to revise, to sharpen and expand dialogue, move paragraphs around and make verbal links. I would see an opportunity for a metaphor or analogy, or an opening where characters from earlier stories might reappear speaking new words. I had to keep myself from capitulating to such urges. The text came to seem a constraint. What felt most peculiar was not the urge to cut but the opposite urge to expand. Maybe just another phrase or so here, … I’d think, and, on the verge of inventing something, would suddenly remember I wasn’t the writer. I wasn’t allowed to invent. Moreover, the book wasn’t really fiction, or fiction only in the loosest sense; it was a memoir, no doubt adorned and enhanced, but the events had really happened. Besides being only the translator, I couldn’t expand because I didn’t know any more than what was given on the page. I hadn’t been there. It wasn’t my memoir.

  While I was immersed in the translation, I went to the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire. Now, writers go to these colonies to write, not to translate, and even though no one checks your daily output, you do feel an obligation at least to try to write. I even wanted to write. It was almost spring, and I finally had words; I had a new novel in mind. But I had contracted to do the Birkenau book, and so I established a routine: I would spend the mornings on my allotted five pages of the translation, which was coming to feel interminable—the roll calls, the brutal labor, the hard crusts of bread and watery turnip
soup, the beatings, the selections, the smoke rising from the crematoria—and the afternoons on my novel.

  But something happened to disrupt my well-laid plans. They went astray, as the prim interviewer at Curtis Publishing might say. A part of my mind that was not routinized stealthily came up with a story idea parallel to my situation with Dora’s daughter, the translation therapist. What other pair of people might have similarly polar reactions to a chance connection? I imagined a man, a diffident, unformed young man, going to Italy, having a brief unforgettable love affair, returning home to resume his humdrum life, and years later meeting a young Italian woman who he realizes is his daughter. Francesca would be her name. He doesn’t tell her the whole truth, only that he knew her parents years ago in Rome. To him, the coincidence is astounding and impels him to review his entire life. To her, it’s nothing much.

  Bemused, I began pacing around my chilly MacDowell studio as the story took on vitality. I dropped my routine to write it and called it “Francesca.” It turned out, as stories do, to be about many other and more complex things than the discrepancy in two characters’ perception of a coincidence. And any of its other strands might be traced back through my life in a meandering quest much like this one.

  Stealthy. Bemused. Upbraided. Pacing. Predicament. Gasp. Runt. Deserted.

  Beyond its fictional offshoots, the translation generated scores of problems, all of which I had to work out myself. For a translation therapist is like any therapist—she cannot do the difficult thing for you; she can only offer information and a disinterested view, maybe setting the problem in a more auspicious context.

  The problems began with the very first sentence. A raw literal translation would be: “There was a bit of confusion that morning because there had been a medical check the night before, and many girls had been sent to the sand block.” Those “girls,” for openers. The book had been written in 1946, a time when men were men and women were … girls. People like the interviewer at Curtis did their damage unchallenged. But no longer. There was no way I could refer to a group of women doing hard labor and facing imminent death, many grieving for the husbands they’d left behind and the children torn from them, as girls. Yes, quite a few were in their late teens, but most were in their twenties and thirties, and one major character and several minor ones seemed around fifty. The real girls—children—had been destroyed before they ever reached the camp or else at its gates.

  I agonized over the word, trying to be true simultaneously to the author’s vision, to the idiom of the contemporary reader, and to my own convictions. Generally, when seeking the right word, my principle had been to imagine how the writer would express herself were English her native tongue. But I had no idea how Liana Millu, over seventy now, felt about American feminism or the politics of language; perhaps at her age any woman under thirty or even forty seemed a girl.

  I tried it both ways—“women” and “girls”—and in the end took a liberty. Whenever “girls” didn’t sit right with me—and by extension, with my imagined readers—whenever it felt distracting or alienating, I used “women.” I also used “women” when referring to the characters in groups. But I kept Millu’s “girl” when the character was a teenager, as in, “Two rows away stood a very young, pretty girl with a friendly smile,” and in the case of the two sisters, one of whom dies of hunger while the other goes to the well-fed Nazi brothel: not only did “girls” seem all right given their age, but the poignancy of the word heightened the pain of their predicament.

  Also in that first sentence, the girls or women “had been sent to the sand block.” On receiving my manuscript, the editor wrote and asked, What is this sand block? Well, I replied, it says exactly that, “block della sabbia.” “Block” was the German word used throughout for the barracks where the women slept. Many prisoners worked in the sand pits, pointlessly hauling truckloads of sand back and forth. I could only assume “the sand block” referred to the barracks housing those women who worked in the pits. I agreed, though, that the phrase was vaguer than Millu’s usual style. And in English it had an auditory suggestion of “sandbox,” which was very inopportune.

  Imagine our surprise when, the book already set in galleys, a letter arrived from Daniel Vogelmann, the Italian publisher. I wonder if I mentioned, he wrote, that in the 1986 edition there were two typos. It wasn’t the “block della sabbia” at all, but the “block della scabbia.” “Scabbia” (I had to look it up in my fat dictionary) means “scabies.” That is, after “the medical check of the night before,” many women had been sent to be disinfected for scabies, and thus the confusion in the barracks. Who would have thought it?

  A reference to scabies was a fine opening stroke on the author’s part, almost lost to something blander and ambiguous. It makes one wonder about all the enduring works passed down through centuries, painstakingly copied by hand—or maybe not so painstakingly—and what similar misreadings might be serving as the pillars of Western thought.

  The other typo was the same perilous, just possible, kind. A young woman in the camp tries to conceal her pregnancy—a forbidden condition in Birkenau—by binding up her stomach with rags to make it look flat. Unwilling to submit to the required abortion, she fervently hopes the war will end in time for her to have her baby at home. She tells the narrator how hard it is to carry the heavy loads assigned to her: “i sacchi di acqua, i sacchi del pane, i sacchi della paglia”—sacks of water, sacks of bread, sacks of straw.

  Water is not carried in sacks. Yet given the camps’ surreal absurdities, the fact that idiotic and impossible tasks were demanded simply to destroy morale, it might just be. I don’t recall what I was planning to do about those sacks of water; one mediocre way out might have been to have the character complain of “loads” of water, bread, and straw.

  Not “sacchi,” Vogelmann wrote, but “secchi.” Buckets. A single letter made the difference between the absurd and the ordinary. And yet the notion of carrying water in a sack is less absurd than the actuality of being forced to conceal a pregnancy and haul buckets of water all day for being born into a race scheduled for extermination.

  More trouble arose when the narrator and Lili, the “young, very pretty girl with a friendly smile,” visit the barrack of an exotic Tunisian prisoner, Madame Louise, the camp’s fortuneteller. For a slice of bread or a few leaves of cabbage, the enigmatic Madame Louise will read the tarot cards. She predicts a long journey for Lili, so long that she can’t even see the end of it. Lili is overjoyed: she imagines going home to her mother. I managed the intricate laying out of the cards—hearts, spades, the wicked queen of spades. But I was stumped when Madame Louise laid out an ominous card she called the stella, or star. It wasn’t clubs or diamonds. The dictionary was no help. Even the translation therapist was baffled. I thought of Francesco, my polyglot friend who knew everything.

  “Pentagram,” he said over the phone, without hesitation. Pentagram. I’d never have gotten it. I would have committed a worse blunder than sacks of water. And I envisioned his fifth-floor walk-up apartment, the crowded living room, the spiral staircase, the birds, the roof terrace with the lush plants and brightly colored streamers, and wished he were helping me, bounding about the room as he liked to do, talking of history and politics and books and movies in his exuberant way, his dark fluid eyes ever attentive.

  Whisked. Piteously. Incorrigible. Reprisals. Gaping. Gross. Furtive. Chide.

  Smoke Over Birkenau reflects a polyglot world, dotted with phrases from the various languages spoken in the camp—what we’d call today a multicultural text. In keeping with the author’s choice, I left such phrases as they were, now and then giving their meaning unobtrusively in parentheses or a footnote where I feared American readers might be puzzled. For instance, the story about the two Dutch sisters, one dying in the infirmary and the other working in the brothel, is called “Scheiss Egal,” a German phrase equivalent in English to “the same old shit.”

  It was easy enough to explain that title in a note
. But when the phrase appeared in the story, used by a middle-aged SS man visiting the brothel, I hit a snag. Liana, the narrator, has just told Lotti, the young prostitute, that her sister is dying. As Lotti weeps, the SS man, hurriedly unbuckling his belt to get down to business, grumbles, “Her sister is sick? Who gives a shit? Always the same old shit!”

  “That atrocious, despairing phrase,” the narrator comments, “that they would repeat day in and day out, as if to confer on Cambronne’s words the dignity of a philosophy.”

  Who was this Cambronne whose name is dropped so casually, as if every reader ought to know? And what were his words? I tried the encyclopedia. A French general who served under Napoleon. Present at the defeat at Waterloo. So? I called a French friend, who had a good laugh when she heard my question. General Cambronne earned immortality, she told me, by his famous response at the battle of Waterloo: Merde. Since then every French schoolchild has been scolded at one time or another for uttering what is called “le mot Cambronne.” I hadn’t thought of asking Francesco, and I wonder now if he would have known.

  Cambronne became a small but, to me, crucial footnote to the text. Whenever I succeeded in solving some such tiny problem I felt a great delight, the same delight I knew from my own writing when things suddenly fell into place. An instant later I felt a twinge, resembling guilt, at the bizarre discrepancy of my response. I was so tickled to be able to get it right, so transported by the gifts of language that I lost sight of the dreadful subject—in this case the German officer’s unbuckling his belt to make use of the grieving girl—a scene for which language was only the means, the translation.