The Hypogean Forum

Dearest all, and one of you in particular —

There died, upon the twenty-ninth of last month, in a town whose name I cannot pronounce, a man who spent one-and-forty years rendering into English a poet whom nobody reads. I did not know him. I have never held his book. I learned of it by a notice of eleven lines in a periodical that will not itself outlive the decade, and I have been unable to set the matter down since.

Consider what he did with his one life. He took a voice which had already ceased to be heard in its own tongue, and carried it — patiently, at the rate of some nine lines a day, by his own account — into a second tongue, where it would also not be heard. He was not preserving the poet. Preservation requires a reader, and he had every reason to believe there would be none. He was performing the act of attention itself, in an empty room, for four decades, and calling it work.

I cannot determine whether this is the noblest thing I have ever heard of or the completest waste of a man. And I notice — Jesse, I am looking at you, and you know that I am — that you would tell me the question is badly put, and that you would be right, and that I would very much rather be wrong at you than correct at anybody else in this Principality.

The duel stands adjourned this evening. I have no exchange in me. I have only the eleven lines, and the nine lines a day.

Oh, Jules.

Off duty, so you get the ordinary voice, which I keep for the two or three occasions a year when the costume would be a coward's move.

Nine lines a day for forty-one years is something like a hundred and thirty thousand lines, which is a great deal more than the poet ever wrote — meaning he translated the man twice over and then some. Drafts. Revisions. The same stanza forty times until it stopped resisting. I looked it up. I looked all of it up. I sat here at three in the morning researching a man neither of us knew because you posted eleven lines about him at two, and if that is not a complete indictment of both our characters I do not know what would be.

Here is what I actually think, and I should like it on the record before I go back to being witty at you.

The empty room does not make the attention worthless. It makes it uninsurable. There is no reader to pay it back, so the act has to be worth doing at the moment of doing it or not at all — and a man who managed forty-one years of that knew something the two of us have been shouting past each other about all season.

You have been arguing that a true thing may be unreal. I have been arguing that a made thing may be true. He went and did both, at nine lines a day, and told nobody.

I am not answering the exchange tonight either.

I should have liked to have met him. There. Delete it if you like; I shan't stop you.

Holding the wager, as I have held it since March, in a jar on a shelf like a specimen nobody will claim.

For the record, gentlemen: this is not an exchange. Neither of you has scored. The Second through the Sixth are still on the board, I have footnoted every one of them, and tonight you have both declined to fight in nearly identical language while addressing each other by first name.

Footnote the first. Jules — a periodical that will not itself outlive the decade is a lovely line, and you have taken the cadence from the man's own preface, which means you have read the preface, which means you have held his book. Citation or it didn't happen. Yours didn't.

Footnote the second. Jesse dropped the register. In public. For a dead stranger. I have been trying to make him do that for three years with nothing but rigor and contempt, and a translator from a town none of us can pronounce managed it in eleven lines from beyond the grave.

Footnote the third, which is not a footnote. I spent three years looking for a book most people had decided was not worth the looking, and nobody was ever going to pay that back either. I have called it a search this entire time. He would have called it work and gone to bed.

The wager stays in the jar. Ask me again when one of you actually wants to win.