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Being Paul Austers Ghost Motoyuki Shibata The attempt to discuss the experience of translating Paul Auster is a slightly discouraging task, since one cannot help feeling that such experience has already been given a perfect expression by Auster himself. I am referring to a memorable passage in The Invention ofSolitude: He sits at his desk reading the book in French and then picks up his pen and writes the same book in English. It is both the same book and not the same book, and the strangeness of this activity has never failed to impress him. Every book is an image ofsolitude.... A man sits alone in a room and writes. Whether the book speaks of loneliness or companionship , it is necessarily a product of solitude. A. sits down in his own room to translate another man's book, and it is as though he were entering that man's solitude and making it his own. But surely that is impossible. For once a solitude has been breached, once a solitude has been taken on by another, it is no longer solitude but a kind of companionship . Even though there is only one man in the room, there are two. A. imagines himself as a kind of ghost of that other man, who is both there and not there, and whose book is both the same and not the same as the one he is translating. Therefore, he tells himself, it is possible to be alone and not alone at the same moment. (136) Having quoted the passage that marvelously illustrates my own fascination in translating Auster intoJapanese, there still remains one question that seems to be worth pursuing. Is translating Auster in any significant sense different from translating other authors? In other words, does this passage apply more aptly to the experience of translating Auster than to that of translating others? In my case, the answer seems to be yes. I have translated four of Mr. Auster's books: Ghosts, The Locked Room, The Invention ofSolitude, and Moon Palace, in the order of publication, and am currently working on In the Country of Last Things. l Among other 184 Motoyuki Shibata contemporary American writers I have translated are Steven Millhauser, Ethan Canin, Steve Erickson, and Stuart Dybek. These authors have all given me both the translator's usual bliss (the grand illusion that you yourself are writing the great book) and the usual despair (the everlingering frustration that you can never do justice to the original no matter how hard you rack your brain), and on this point Auster has been no exception. Something is different, though. Without belittling thejoy and honor of translating other writers, I can say that translating Paul Auster has been a singular experience. This essay is an attempt to explain why it feels different to be the ghost of the author of Ghosts. I am well aware that my position may not be so unique. It can be argued that every reading is an act of translation; translation, the theory goes, is only a more deliberate, more self-conscious kind of reading. Granting that, I would still claim that translation is a moderately special kind of experience in that it involves the effort at transparency. There is an element of self-effacement. Walter Benjamin said that the task of the translator consists in "finding that intended effect upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it the echo of the original" (76). One tries to play the role of Echo, to Narcissus that is the author. It is not the author alone that is "both there and not there"; the translator, too, tries not to be there while still being there. An Echo never completely successful, the translator is forever trying to disappear. And disappearing, needless to say, is a quintessential Austerian act. Daniel Quinn, Blue, Fanshawe, Benjamin Sachs: so many of Auster's central characters go through various stages of disappearance - social, existential, literal- as the plot unravels, or rather ravels even more. The female protagonist in In the Country ofLast Things searches for her brother who has disappeared in a country where things are disappearing one after another. The Music ofChance begins at a point where the protagonist thinks he has made his social disappearance complete. It is not for nothing that Auster's book ofselected poems is entitled Disappearances. These disappearances are often preceded by the state ofdestitution. In American literature, destitution in most cases simply means social...

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