| Eleven, The Spelunker
Fiction by Diane Greco Dear— You will be pleased, I think, to hear how I am getting on. The facilities are lovely. From my room, I have a clear view of the campus and the river, all the way to the corner where the glossy cube of our departmental building squats, visited at intervals by the shuttle bus, rocking on its shock absorbers, and by faculty members in station wagons that wait, directional lights blinking, at the intersection before tootling into the parking lot. From here, of course, our department is only a distant and amusing memory, one that only grows more amusing the more distant it becomes.
Perhaps you might be interested to learn that one of the first people I met after arriving was—your mother! I found her in the lounge staring at the pay telephone through her greasy hair. She said she was trying to remember your number, which I was pleased to provide. In return, she gave me news of your adventures, foreign and domestic, as an auteur. She did not omit, moreover, an exhaustive review of the many successes you’ve had since you left our doctoral program—the one subject about which your otherwise loquacious mother refused to speak, as if the memory of your experiences, as you reported them to her, made me unworthy of further contact with you.
I do recognize the error of my ways, and I hope you will permit me to make amends by offering up a modest story that you might find useful for your literary pursuits. In doing so, I’m reminded of the class you took with me during your first semester. I’m thinking in particular of the events that, in the end, you turned to such triumphant and delicious effect in your novel, which your mother informed me has been translated into fifteen languages (and counting!), including Icelandic and even Russian, which translation, evidently, you supervised yourself.
Well, congrats, as they say. Such translations are easier said than done (although to be perfectly precise these things are not “said” at all). And here, in my assessment of the difficulty of translation into Russian, I draw on my own experience of that language when it beats up against the translator’s art (of which more below). Now, if I may be permitted another small comment on a matter so large as art, I only wish that, in casting me as the pedantic, spinsterish anti-heroine in your book, you’d given me a fuller head of hair; baldness in women is so difficult, so tragic, that I think you, as a writer, might have misstepped in failing to imagine my character’s suffering sufficiently. But, no matter—the book was hilarious and at one of our Friday seminars everyone in our department concluded that your fame was indeed well deserved after we’d read and exhaustively discussed it, the book I mean, from the first sentence to the copy accompanying your author photo. Do you remember our Friday seminars? Those evenings in the big conference hall with the smoked-glass observation room at the top and the wall of fogged Plexiglas overlooking the river? Even though you’d already left by the time we got around to discussing your novel, during the course of the discussion I kept expecting you to saunter in at any time, or jog past the windows while lifting a breezy if not entirely respectful hand to us, as we suffered each other’s company in the close room like restive ants in a too-small terrarium, just as you did while you were a student, whenever the week’s special lecture was not to your liking.
My little vignette concerns our newest tenured faculty member, the young Russian spelunker. I’m sure you remember him. What a revelation I have for << Return to TSAR Volume 8, Number 2 | 
