The Empty Grave of Edgar Allan Poe

THE LIBRARY OF THADDEUS TRIPP

5. The Translations I

          “I knew a fellow called Bloxwich who suffered from your problem.”
          I wasn’t sure to which problem Thaddeus was referring.
          “He was a scribbler who couldn’t get anything published.”
          Oh, that problem. For a moment there I thought I must have mentioned waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat with no idea where I was. That had happened three times this week.
          “He got this idea into his head that he lacked the ability to connect with his readers. What in fact he lacked was the ability to write, but he would never admit to that failing. He saw himself as somehow separated from the rest of the world by some mystical barrier. He never quite explained the mechanics of it to me. Frankly, I don’t believe he understood it himself. But he devised a scheme to test his hypothesis. He decided to take one of his stories that had been rejected by every magazine editor in the land - and we’re talking now of a few decades ago when there was still a large market for short stories - and conduct an experiment with translation. He himself had no problem with his own work. He felt it was clever and witty and incisive and thoroughly worthy of publication. And yet he was faced with the fact that no one else seemed to share his opinion.
          “He therefore decided to distance himself from his work by employing an intermediary to subtly alter its content, thus hoping to break down the barrier and establish a connection with the so-called ‘real world’. So he hired a translator to render his story in French. Then, not wishing to embark on a literary career upon the boulevards of gay Paree, he sent the French version of his tale to another translator to have it returned once more to English. He read the finished article and was not pleased with the result, but he took that as a good sign and submitted the story once again for publication. It was rejected. He then tried the same story but a different language. German, I think. With the same result.
          “He continued with this process for a while, trying different languages, until he hit upon another possibility. Perhaps the process of translation needed to be deeper. Maybe the mystical barrier in which he so believed was not a single entity but rather composed of many layers, rather akin to an onion. And so Bloxwich sent his story, the same story, to a succession of translators. From English to French to German to Spanish to Russian to Swahili and so on. At each stage in the process he would retrieve his story and have it translated back into English and then send that off to a publisher, because he had no idea how many levels there were to the barrier and he did not wish to risk overshooting his mark.
          “In the end of course, he ended up quite mad. The obsession to break through this imaginary barrier, a thing entirely of his own creation, drove every other thought from his mind. He stopped writing, which, considering the quality of his work was no great loss to mankind, and he continued to submit this one story, in its variety of versions, to any publisher he could find. It was constantly rejected, which was no surprise to me. He would occasionally show me the latest copy and where I saw mere gibberish, he would point out supposedly great insights, fantastic truths about the nature of the world which had previously remained hidden in the earlier versions. He had begun with a fairly simple tale which as I recall was quite amateurish in its execution and simply banal in the triteness of its supposedly twist ending. I believe the character telling the tale turned out to be a cat. Frankly it was rubbish to begin with and by the end of the translating process it had not improved one iota. All he had done was waste his time and his energy and his money turning a sow's ear into sausage meat.
          “I am sure it was that which killed him. In his will he specified that the final version of the story should be read out at his funeral service. It was embarrassing. But, then again he had no family and few friends, so the cemetery chapel was not exactly packed to the rafters and we all managed to stifle our sniggers as the minister intoned the sacred words. I caught up with him after old Bloxwich had been dropped in the ground. He was wandering round the graveyard, muttering to himself. I felt I should apologise for Bloxwich having made him party to his madness, and I wanted to express my appreciation for his having acceded to the dear departed's dying wish, as it were. A lesser man of God would, I'm sure, have conveniently misplaced the piece of paper and made do with the usual platitudes. So, I said all this, but he seemed rather distracted. By now the few other mourners had left and we were alone in the cemetery, but he acted as though I was but one guest at a large and noisy party. His eyes kept darting around all over the place and I found it hard to maintain his attention.
          “We were surrounded by marble angels and old gravestones in various states of disrepair. Perhaps it was that which gave him that look of sadness. For a supposedly Christian country we don’t seem to show much respect for our dead. I thought it must be useful for a minister to have the ability to call upon such an emotion at will and then manage to maintain it until all those who had a real reason to grieve had left the stage. I wanted to tell him he could knock it off now, that none of us had known Bloxwich that well and none of us would miss him. There was no reason for the sad face. But, he was a professional, with his own standards of behaviour and so I kept my counsel. Instead I thanked him again and began to make my farewells.
          “I expected him to accompany me out of the cemetery, since the show was now over, but he made no signs of wanting to leave. I was a trifle embarrassed I suppose and so as a final flourish with which to leave him, I made up a story about Bloxwich. Or rather I adapted an anecdote of Harriett Jay’s about Robert Williams Buchanan. The minister hadn’t known the man, had just been brought in to conduct the service in the same way as that undertaker with an inordinate fondness for his black top hat had been employed to take care of the business at hand. I felt a duty to bring Bloxwich back to life for a few brief moments, to make him live for a while in the minister's mind. I felt it was an appropriate thing for a mourner to do and I wished to play my part as well as the minister had played his. However, since I knew little about Bloxwich beyond the mad obsession which had killed him, I made up something appropriate. The minister listened to me with that sad expression and rather distracted air, and as I made my final excuses and began to leave he shook his head and said, ‘That’s not true.’”
          Thaddeus went to over to the fire and poked some life back into it. Then he stared at the flames for a short while, as though lost in private thought. Finally he turned and said, “I think he must have been a Robert Williams Buchanan aficionado. There’s not many of them around today.”