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Love in a Dead Language
A lonely translator of Native American texts finds an ancient manuscript -- and, finally, true love.
Reviewed by Brian Hall
Special to the Washington Post
In the middle of one of the most gripping action sequences in the Aeneid , Virgil deliberately calls attention to the artificiality of the story he is telling. It occurs in Book II, in the account of the sack of Troy. Virgil first says the Trojan horse is made of fir; a hundred lines later, he says it's made of maple; next it turns to oak; and, still later, it's pine. Not only does the horse's protean essence function as a metaphor for the inherent deceptiveness of Greek gifts, it serves to remind us that we are hearing a tale told to the Carthaginians by one very interested participant -- Aeneas -- thus alerting us to the presence of more subtle fabrications.
Late in David Treuer's deeply crafty, shape-shifting third novel, The Translation of Dr Apelles , he echoes Virgil. Lest the many inconsistencies in his novel be mistaken for authorial sloppiness, he arranges for the climactic scene of one of his two interwoven narratives to occur under a council tree in the middle of an Indian village. That tree is first an oak; eight pages later, it's a beech; two pages after that, it's a basswood. This should give some idea of the sophisticated game Treuer is playing. The hidden theme of his novel is that fiction is all about games, lies and feints, about the heightened pleasure we can derive from a narrative when we recognize that it is artful. Further -- and this is what readers allergic to "postmodern" or "metafictional" writing fail to see -- this literary strategy, in the right hands, can movingly evoke the real world, in which people are able to communicate with each other, or, say, fall in love, only by crafting stories about themselves, by becoming the unreliable narrators of their own lives.
Dr Apelles is a 43-year-old Native American librarian and linguist, a bachelor living in an unnamed American city who in his spare time translates Native American texts. His discovery of an ancient manuscript in "a language no one save him speaks" catalyzes another discovery: He is frozen with loneliness and desperately needs to find someone to love. A possible candidate is Campaspe, a coworker at his library.
The story of Apelles's pursuit of Campaspe alternates with another story, set in the upper Midwest in what appears to be the 19th century. Two infant foundlings, Bimaadiz and Eta, rescued by a nearby tribe in separate incidents from Indian camps annihilated by a harsh winter, are raised in the same village and gradually fall in love. Their Edenically innocent passion -- their names subtly invoke Adam and Eve -- must resist the deceptions and temptations of a whole series of snakes. There's the false friend who secretly lusts after Eta, a floating brothel that kidnaps her, a white government official who desires Bimaadiz and plots to adopt him. These episodes and others serve as the serial ordeals that all questers after true grails must endure.
One naturally wonders: Is the story of Bimaadiz and Eta the "ancient manuscript" that Apelles is translating? If you're the kind of reader who would be bothered by an answer such as "yes and no," or even "that's not the right question," this novel probably isn't for you. Treuer's double narrative works like a pond in which two stones have been dropped; the two circles of expanding ripples meet, overlap and flow on. Calvino comes to mind. A good alternate title for this novel would be If on a Winter's Night a Translator .
Virgil, Calvino and Genesis are not the only substrata Treuer wants us to sense beneath the undulations of his American terrain. The vast library warehouse in which Apelles works recalls Borges, too. Apelles's name is not noticeably Native American (a trait he shares with his Ojibwe author); it's the name of a Greek painter of the 4th century B.C., whose model for his most famous work was a woman by the name of Campaspe (a hint about creator and created that should not be ignored). The spirit of V.S. Naipaul inhabits the empty, ordered apartment of this Indian exile. By subtitling his novel "a love story" instead of "a romance," Treuer avoids making his nod to A.S. Byatt's Possession too obvious. And the story of Bimaadiz and Eta is patterned after a Greek pastoral romance of the 3rd century A.D. that I'll leave it to the novel, late in the game, to name.
Yes, a game. And (for this reader) an enjoyable and exhilarating one. But Treuer's intent is serious. He seems to want to do for Native American culture and literature what James Joyce did for the Irish: haul it into the mainstream of Western culture through sheer nerve and verve. Certainly it's nervy of him to begin Apelles's story in a linguistic style that mimics his protagonist's paralysis. The sentences, in a literary equivalent of claymation, labor mightily to get Apelles out of his chair, across a room, down a flight of steps. As Apelles's emotional life takes wing, the language lightens with him until they both soar and ultimately (when, like Elijah, Apelles is "translated") ascend into the empyrean -- in this case via an elevator -- and evaporate. The effect is tender and lovely.
As for verve, the tale of Eta and Bimaadiz brims with it. To serve his purpose, Treuer needed to take an ancient and highly artificial form and invest it with such conviction and energy that comic or skeptical responses would simply fall away, leaving delight -- or perhaps a better word is love -- in the truth-making magic of storytelling.
Reader, he did it. ·
Brian Hall's most recent book is "I Should Be Extremely Happy in Your Company: A Novel of Lewis and Clark."
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