On Translating Anne Berest’s Novel The Postcard
As a literary translator, I’m routinely called upon to inhabit an author’s creative space in the most intimate of ways. Literature, I believe, is our purest expression of how we understand the world, life, and humanity, and so, when I translate a book, I make it my mission to share its author’s creative mentality as fully as possible. I try to climb inside the source text, to sense it and breathe it and feel it as completely as I can, so that the translation I produce is as much my own organic creation as the original book was the author’s.
This is the way I’ve always worked, and I can’t imagine doing it differently. But it has definitely meant, over my almost twenty years as a literary translator, that the work of translation is often challenging emotionally as well as intellectually. I’ve climbed inside scenes of pure beauty and tenderness and triumph, and those have brought real joy, but there have also been horrors. Murders and deaths in battle, assaults and molestations, and — perhaps worst of all, for me — the abuse and killing of animals. Translating these scenes is a visceral process for me, and I’ve shed real tears.
In the case of a novel inspired by real events in the life of an author, everything becomes just that much more intense. It’s an immense privilege to convey part of someone’s life to an English-speaking audience — but it’s also a great responsibility, because it has to ring as true to those readers as it did to the ones who read the original. I’ve perhaps never felt that more strongly than when translating The Postcard, a saga of author Anne Berest’s own family, their history and the times they lived in, and also the story of Anne’s own journey of self-discovery. The book is deeply personal, breathtakingly emotional, raw and intense and beautiful. My translation had to be just right.
I knew, going in, that this was partly a story of lives lost in the Holocaust. That raised the stakes immediately. Without Anne’s book, and everything that went into the writing of it, the members of her family who died at Auschwitz would have remained anonymous and silent, consigned to the darkness of history — just as their murderers intended. But in the pages of The Postcard, they live again. It isn’t just the terrible truth of their deaths on which Anne trains the glare of the spotlight; it’s the beauty of their lives, too. Their hopes and achievements, their laughter and their love for one another. Both parts of their story are vital and real. We come to know them and love them, just as Anne has done. They go from being strangers — statistics — to family.
Climbing inside the story of Ephraïm, Emma, Noémie, and Jacques meant that I would suffer their loss, and even though I was prepared for it, translating that part of the book was excruciatingly painful. But the revelation came in the happiness I felt as I was translating their lives. They were vibrant and funny, warm and smart and strong, and they lived. That’s what has stayed with me after finishing the translation, and what I hope will stay with readers, too. Their aliveness.
It makes me very happy to see Noémie’s face on the cover of the book, because she deserves to be seen, to be known, and because it means that she, and her family, have defied the dark forces that destroyed their physical selves. Millions of French-speaking readers know them now, and soon millions of English-speaking ones will know them too, and remember them forever. Being part of creating that reality, helping to bring them back into the light, is the great gift of being The Postcard’s translator, despite the tears. There’s an ancient Egyptian proverb that says, “To speak the names of the dead is to make them live again.” That’s what Anne Berest has done for her family, and I’m honored to add my voice to the chorus.
— Tina Kover
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from The Postcard by Anne Berest / the opening of “Book II”
Every Wednesday, my mother drives her little red car into Paris to pick my daughter up from school in the late morning. It’s their day, their special time together. They have lunch, and then my mother drops Clara off at judo and goes back out to the suburbs.
I was very early to pick Clara up that day, as always; the class wasn’t nearly over. This was my favorite part of the week. Time stopped, here in this gym with its weary fluorescent lights. A portrait of Jigoro Kano, the inventor of judo, gazed benignly down at the little lion cubs facing off on dingy tatami mats. One of those cubs was my six-year-old daughter, her tiny body swamped by the overlarge white gi she wore. I watched her, entranced.
My phone rang. I wouldn’t have picked up for just anyone, but it was my mother calling. Her voice was shaking. I asked her several times to calm down, to tell me what was wrong.
“It’s a conversation I had with your daughter today.”
Lélia tried to light a cigarette to calm her nerves, but her lighter wouldn’t work.
“Go get some matches from the kitchen, Maman.”
She put down the receiver and went off in search of a light. Meanwhile, my daughter threw a boy bigger than her to the floor with a swift, confident movement. I was smiling—a mother’s pride—when my own mother came back on the line, her breathing slowing as the smoke flowed in and out of her lungs. And then she told me what Clara had said.
They don’t like Jews very much at school.
My ears filled with a sort of buzzing. I had to hang up. “Maman, Clara’s class is finishing. I’ll call you back later.”
I felt hot bile rise in the back of my throat, and the gym began to spin. To keep from drowning, I clung to my daughter’s gi like a white lifeboat. Somehow I managed to do all the things a mother does: tell my daughter to hurry up, help her get dressed in the changing room, fold the gi and put it in her sports bag, retrieve the socks caught in the bunched-up cuffs of her trousers and the sandals that had slipped through the planks of the changing room bench, all the miniature objects—shoes, lunchboxes, mittens connected by a strand of yarn—designed to vanish into every nook and cranny. I put my arms around my daughter and hugged her as hard as I could, trying to calm my own racing heart.
They don’t like Jews very much at school.
On the way home I felt as if I could see the words hovering in the air above us. The very last thing I wanted to do was talk about it. I wanted to forget the conversation, forget that it had ever happened. I crept on cat-feet through the evening routine, built myself a suit of armor out of bathtime and buttered noodles and tooth-brushing and books about The Little Brown Bear—all those repetitive tasks that leave no room for reflection. That allowed me to detach. To turn back into a solid, depend- able mother.
Going into Clara’s room to give her a goodnight kiss, I knew I should ask the question. What happened at school?
But at the crucial moment, I stumbled over something inside me.
“Goodnight, sweetheart,” I said, turning out the light.
I had trouble falling asleep. I tossed and turned in the twisted sheets. I was hot, my thighs burning. I opened the window. Finally I got up, muscles knotted. I turned on my bedside lamp, but I still felt deeply uneasy. I felt as if water were rising up around my bed, murky and brackish, oily and gleaming. The dirty water of war, stagnating in underground pits, rising up from the sewers, seeping between the boards of my wooden floor.
An image flashed suddenly into my mind. Crystal clear. A photograph of the Opéra Garnier, taken at twilight.
From that moment onward, I was on the case. I wanted to find the author of the anonymous postcard my mother had received sixteen years earlier, whatever it took. The idea of finding the culprit became an obsession. I had to understand why that card had been sent.
Why did the postcard come back to haunt me at that exact moment in my life? The thing that started it all was the incident at my daughter’s school. But looking back, I think there was something else, too. A more subtle reason. I was about to turn forty years old.
The idea that I had already lived half of my life also explains my utter determination to solve this mystery, which occupied my every thought, day and night, for months. I’d reached the age where something, some force, pushes you to look back, because the horizon of your past is now more vast, more mysterious, than the one that lies ahead.
Chapter 1
The next morning, after dropping Clara off at school, I phoned Lélia.
“Maman, do you remember that anonymous postcard?”
“Yes, I remember.”
“Do you still have it?”
“It must be somewhere … my office, probably …”
“I’d really like to have a look at it.”
Oddly, Lélia didn’t seem too surprised. She didn’t ask me any questions, didn’t ask why I’d suddenly brought up such an old subject.
“It’s here at the house, if you want it. Come on over.”
“Right now?”
“Any time.”
I hesitated. I had work to do, pages to write. There was no logic to it at all, yet I heard myself saying to my mother, “I’ll be right over.”
There were two RER tickets left in my wallet, but they were expired. Since my daughter’s birth, I never took the train to my parents’ house anymore; I always drove. And even that was only once or twice a year at most.
*
Stepping onto the platform at Bourg-la-Reine, I thought back to the hundreds, maybe thousands of times I’d made this journey between Paris and the suburbs. As a teenager, I’d waited for the RER B on this very platform. The minutes always seemed interminable; the train could never arrive fast enough to take me to the capital with all its promise. I always sat down in the same spot, in the very back of the car, next to the window, facing for- ward. The red and blue fake-leather seats stuck to your thighs in summer. The smell of metal and hard-boiled eggs, so typical of the RER B in the ‘90s, that ever-present smell—to me, that was the smell of freedom. From ages thirteen to twenty I was always so happy on that train that took me away from the suburbs, my cheeks flushed, exhilarated by the speed and the grinding of the machinery. Now, twenty years later, I was impatient again, but this time I was going in the opposite direction. I wanted the train to hurry, to take me back to my mother’s house so I could see the postcard.
*
“How long has it been since you were here for a visit?” asked my mother, opening the door.
“Sorry, Maman. I was just thinking I should come more often. Did you find it?”
“I haven’t had time to look yet. I was just going to make some tea.”
I didn’t want any tea. I wanted to see that postcard.
“You’re always in such a hurry, darling,” Lélia said, as if she could read my mind. “But at the end of the day, the sun sets at the same time for everyone, you know. Have you spoken with Clara about what happened at school?”
She put the kettle on to boil and opened the tin of Chinese smoked tea.
“No, Maman. Not yet.”
“It’s important, you know. You can’t just ignore something like that,” she said, tapping a cigarette from her already-open pack.
“I’m going to talk to her, Maman. Can we go up to your office and look for the postcard now?”
Lélia ushered me into her office, which never changed over the years. Other than a photo of my daughter thumbtacked to the wall, everything was exactly the same as it had always been.
The same furniture cluttered with the same objects and the same ashtrays; the shelves full of the same books and the same archive boxes. While she began to look for the postcard, I picked up a small pot of black ink from her desk, beveled on the sides and gleaming like a chunk of obsidian. It dated from the time when she refilled her cartridges herself, from when I used to watch her type her articles on a typewriter. From when I was Clara’s age.
“I think it’s in here,” Lélia said, opening a desk drawer.
Her fingers groped in the darkness, rummaging among check stubs and energy bills and outdated day-planners and old movie tickets—all the scraps of paper we accumulate over the years, the kind future generations will hesitate to throw away when they’re emptying out our drawers after we’re gone.
“There it is! Got it!” my mother exclaimed, just like she used to do when extracting a splinter from my foot.
She handed the postcard to me. “What exactly are you planning to do with this?”
“I want to find the person who sent it to us.”
“Is this for a script?”
“No, nothing like that. I just want to know.” My mother looked surprised.
“How do you think you’re going to find them?”
I looked pointedly at the bookshelves. “Well, you’re going to help me.”
Lélia’s archive had gotten even larger since the last time I was here.
“I have a feeling their name is somewhere in those boxes,” I said.
“Listen, you can keep the postcard … but I don’t have time to think about all that.”
My mother was warning me, in her own way, that she wouldn’t help with my investigation. Which wasn’t like her at all.
“Do you remember, when the postcard first came, how we all talked about it together?” I said.
“I remember.”
“Did you have anyone specific in mind back then?”
“No. No one.”
“You didn’t think oh, so-and-so might have sent this?”
“No.”
“Strange.”
“What?”
“It’s like you’re not even curious to know who —”
My mother cut me off. “Take it if you want, but I don’t want to hear about it.”
She went to the window to light a cigarette. The atmosphere in the room was suddenly tense, charged, and I could tell my mother was trying to calm herself by putting some physical distance between herself and me. And, like a sheet of paper whose watermark becomes visible when you hold it up to the light, when my mother stood in front of the window I saw a kind of ice-cold iron box appear inside her, its lid rusted shut. She had put the postcard in that box, for reasons that were suddenly obvious to me, but that I’d never been able to articulate before. Whatever my mother had locked away in the black depths of her iron box was, to paraphrase the American writer Helen Epstein, “so potent that words crumbled before they could describe it.”
“I’m sorry, Maman. I didn’t mean to snap at you. I under- stand that you don’t want to hear about that postcard. Come on, let’s have some tea.”
We went back down to the kitchen, where my mother had put together a bag for me with a jar of Malossol cornichons, my favorite pickles, which I used to eat as an after-school snack—I loved their combination of softness and crunchiness and their bittersweet taste. Lélia often fed us pickled herring and sliced black bread when we were growing up, and cheese danishes and potato pancakes and tarama, blinis and eggplant caviar and chopped liver. It was her way of preserving a vanished culture. Through the flavors of Mitteleuropa.
“Come on, I’ll drive you back to the station,” she said.
Going down the front steps, I noticed the brand-new mailbox. “You got a new mailbox?”
“The other one finally gave out.”
I stood still for a few seconds, disappointed that our dilapidated old soldier had gone. It was like finding out that a key wit- ness in my investigation had died.
In the car, I reproached my mother for not telling me about the new mailbox. Astonished, she rolled down the window, lit her umpteenth cigarette, and said, “I’ll help you find out who wrote that postcard. On one condition.”
“What?”
“That you deal with what happened to Clara at school ASAP.”
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Excerpted from The Postcard by Anne Berest, originally published as La carte postale, copyright Anne Berest 2021. Translation by Tina Kover, copyright 2023 Europa Editions.