The captain talked the standard talk about outside temperature and the few minutes that remained of the descent, eighteen degrees the captain said with pride, it’s definitely warming up, the pianist began to get dressed. From his veranda he had watched summertime take over the Tiergarten, how the decision to change season was ratified by the trees, the sky and the city suits, light clothing, Parisian elegance, to go for a stroll, yes walk now, go for this stroll in the midst of the new climate which has plucked him from his faithful night, streaking the sheet with this ray of random particles which seemed to fall directly from the wings of an angel. He’d go as far as the angel, would cross lawns with the first of the wild rabbits and begin to make out his ending, walking like this on the soft grass would conceive a reprise, a return to the allegro in sonata form without a true second subject, after the inversion have the torrents of birds come in around the G, to swoop down as far as D-flat and there, suspended, silence, nine beats, plucked strings, diminished fifth followed by the cluster describing a chromatic circle from where he will draw, through slow, low-pitched contiguity, the pure negativity of the blue. He would stop in the midst of the rabbits because, despite the planes passing overhead and the blackbirds’ clowning, he’d hear yesterday’s anxiety thickened with weakness and regret which would, in this new dawn of time, make him feel right to the tips of his still fingers that chill sensation, the chill that never left the girl, that girl no other, then, as if it was funny, he would stare at the green trees and, shading his eyes with his hand, would salute the just-flown figure of the Blue Self-Portrait.
Translator’s Note
INSOUCIANT: are we ever, enough, too much?
Funny that one of the keys to this novel should be not caring. Our heroine is castigated repeatedly, and repeatedly berates herself, for the crime of “désinvolture.” What is this elegant French notion? Why, nonchalance, insouciance, of course. Plain old frivolity, laidbackness, devilmaycareism, happy-go-lucky style; in the plainest of English, it’s not caring. But she does care—hence all the obsessing—and, as my narrator’s translator, so must I. Funny then how impossible it was to find the right single word to translate this term so often reiterated it counts more as a musical leitmotif than a point of prose argument. I considered all the words above at one time or another. Also flippancy, apathy, heedlessness and casualness. I swung between the light and breezy, désinvolture as a delighted freedom from the burdens of the world, and désinvolture as culpably turned-off, disaffected, absent. None of these was precisely wrong. Their problem was irremediable specificity, where Lefebvre’s magisterial word said them all and more in one go. After discussion and disagreement that lasted some months, my editor and I came to near-agreement on the one term that said nearly as much as the original French: “not-caring” (occasionally, a more standard “not caring” too, depending).
In addition to saying as much as we could make it say, the plainness of “not-caring” and its verging on neologism seemed appropriate, for Lefebvre’s language is often about language, and also languages. Blue Self-Portrait plays out in a French sown through with German and English, American English mostly. The narrator herself is frequently on auto-translate, trying herself out in different languages, over and over, back and forth. Our plain-Englishism belies the history of French, English and more behind it.
Important too, for this term and many others in the book—accompaniment, counter-phrase, nice and niceness, shame and shamelessness, legs knotted and unknotted, overviews of waterways, criticisms of cars, cows’ lowing, flute-playing, so many more—is the very twentieth-century musicality of their use, the repeated striking of these notes in ways that recall the leitmotif we imagine as we listen to twelve-tone music. Remember (Lefebvre doesn’t let us forget; in her book forgetting is another highly culpable error) that our Blue Self-Portrait is first of all a genuine painting by the seminal twentieth-century composer Arnold Schoenberg, who invented the twelve-tone serial system and thereby enabled classical music to become a truly modern and modernist art form. As Lefebvre probes how we can remember some of the most shameful ideas of the last century, she weaves her text in approximation of a serialist piece. Not only had I as translator to find the right note or word to strike, I had also to strike it as nearly as possible every time Lefebvre did. I was expecting this translation to be a tough job and so it proved.
Nonetheless, I hope your experience as reader is at least as much of a giggle as it is a serious interrogation of your attitude to history or a test of your musical antennae. No, I hope it’s more a giggle than anything else, for Lefebvre’s dominant key is absurdity. Translating this girl who imagines herself as a cow mooing loudly enough to break the glass in her plane’s portholes, a girl who despite hang-ups gives as good as she gets to her
