Reading, writing, translating

A brief extract from a great essay by Michael Cunningham, author of The Hours and other books, including By Nightfall.

Here’s a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they’d intended to write. It’s one of the heartbreaks of writing fiction. You have, for months or years, been walking around with the idea of a novel in your mind, and in your mind it’s transcendent, it’s brilliantly comic and howlingly tragic, it contains everything you know, and everything you can imagine, about human life on the planet earth. It is vast and mysterious and awe-inspiring. It is a cathedral made of fire.

But even if the book in question turns out fairly well, it’s never the book that you’d hoped to write. It’s smaller than the book you’d hoped to write. It is an object, a collection of sentences, and it does not remotely resemble a cathedral made of fire.

The essay is primarily about the art of translation, but it also takes in what readers bring to a book, and the music of writing and a variety of other things...all in a fairly short span.

Norwich

The memory I have of Norwich from when I was here in the early seventies, is of an accessible town, not that large, near a river, and full of interesting old buildings and dozens of churches.

I don’t know what happened to that Norwich, but it certainly isn’t the place we visit spasmodically while we’re staying in Norfolk. This one is large – much larger than my own home town – has many modern buildings (some of them tucked around ancient stone walls) and has the typical shopping malls that you expect in a large city.

Today we went to see the Cathedral, but we came out into a street called Tombland. No prizes for telling us how that name came into being. Tombland is a bit more like I remember Norwich, but only a bit.

Where have all the churches gone? There seemed to be one of every corner in the past, rather like corner dairies. And where’s Julian of Norwich’s ‘cell’ gone? I guess it’s around somewhere, but it’s certainly not obvious.

Someone’s gone and changed the place.