The Poetry of the Cold War

THE TRANSLATOR

A Novel

By John Crowley

William Morrow

298 pages, $24.95

John Crowley is the award-winning and much-admired author of seven previous novels, vast in conception and hard to classify. Though he is generally considered a fantasist, Crowley’s fantasy is of a sort that seems to lurk just under the surface of our own world, like a mirror urgently reflecting our image back at us with increased intensity and subtly altered perspectives.

“The Translator” is in many ways a surprising departure, a Cold War drama whose emotional and political realism is conveyed with unexpected delicacy and nuance. By the end, the novel blooms into a container for the largest questions, as it weighs the meaning of individual lives against the fate of empires.

The translator of the title is Kit Malone. It is February 1961, and she is one of a group of high school poets being feted at the White House. She shakes President Kennedy’s hand and hears for the first time the name of Innokenti Falin, a recently exiled Russian poet now teaching in the Midwest.

From this point we move forward and backward in time, caught up in three separate strands of Kit’s life: emblematic scenes from her childhood, her college career and involvement with Falin, and a present-day conference in Russia devoted to the work of the long-vanished poet, much of which survives only in Kit’s translations.

Kit’s father’s job setting up “a network of electronic brains” means frequent childhood moves, so she grows especially close to her older brother, Ben. When she needs to assemble an insect collection for school, he helps her overcome her reluctance. Later she will write a poem about growing closer to nature “by means of the one thing nature doesn’t possess of itself, its names.”

Ben, in a burst of patriotism, enlists in the Army and joins the Special Forces. Kit’s response to this abandonment of their shared world is a reckless pregnancy, which she spends in a convent; the infant dies at birth. She also gives up poetry, or so she thinks.

Kit’s tentative first days on a Midwestern campus in the early 1960s are evocatively portrayed. Her fortuitous enrollment in Falin’s advanced poetry class, heady discussions of verse, their hesitant involvement with one another for differing reasons they only gradually come to understand--all this is rendered with aquarelle freshness. The Manichean political atmosphere of the Cold War adds palpable shadows to the edges of the picture.

A second tragedy befalls Kit when news of Ben’s death arrives. Her private griefs allow her to grow closer to Falin’s more worldly life of loss and exile, though much about him remains mysterious. Kit becomes friendly with a melange of student radicals, which places her relationship with Falin in a larger, unsettling political perspective. She is questioned by a government agent. This paranoid milieu eventually provokes her doubts about the true circumstances of her brother’s death.

The book’s central thread, the erotic relationship between teacher and student, unfolds through an accretion of unexpected details (such as the fact that Falin owns a sports car, but Kit must teach him how to drive it properly). Though she knows no Russian, Falin asks Kit to help him translate his poetry, which--like the poet himself--can now only live a shadow life in the exile of another language. The progress of their linguistic intimacy--the poems and fragments of poems, the Russian’s American diction, Kit’s naive assurance, the human yearnings for which translation is only a metaphor--is thoroughly convincing. Kit is simultaneously propelled back into poetry and forward into feeling and the understated sexual denouement is all the more powerful.

Crowley’s control of these interwoven strands is impressive. Each layer of time feels like a renewed present, and the jumps between them are never disruptive or coercive.

Even as Falin’s own political position grows murkier (is he some sort of agent for the U.S.? For Russia?) he elaborates a Gnostic vision drawn from the actual Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev: The soul of each nation is overseen by two angels, a greater and a lesser, and they can be corrupted or in conflict with one another. Is this a political parable? Strategic obfuscation? Or a real explanation? Falin tells Kit he must go away. His wrecked car is found, but no body.

Just as the various time-threads in the novel are kept open through its structure, so the book honors its mysteries. The fates of nations and of individual lives continue to hang in the balance as “The Translator” resonates long after the last page is turned.