Reading Lolita in Tehran_ A Memoir in Books - Azar Nafisi [129]
I asked her, with a certain persistence, about her unfinished book on James. I had the simplistic and wishful notion that once she started to work on the book, everything would fall into place. She said she would never resume her work. She needed time to breathe, she added later, to enable her to concentrate on her work again. In the meantime, she had translated Leon Edel’s The Modern Psychological Novel and was in the process of translating Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel. She said, Of course, these books aren’t so fashionable these days. Everyone has gone postmodern. They can’t even read the text in the original—they’re so dependent on some pseudo-philosopher to tell them what it says. I told her not to worry, that nobody taught James anymore either, that he too was unfashionable, which was a sign that we must be doing something right.
Mina was a meticulous and literal translator. This created difficulties with her publisher, who wanted her to make the text “accessible” to the public. She was contemptuous of the existing translations of Virginia Woolf. She refused to use the Iranian translation of Mrs. Dalloway for the quotations in the Edel book, and this had caused her more trouble.
She asked me about my classes. I told her my students and I were having a hard time with James, especially with his prose. She smiled. Then your students are in good company, she said. Some of the best-known critics and writers have complained about it. Yes, but here our problem is different, you know. I assigned them more obviously difficult novelists—Nabokov and Joyce—but somehow they’re having a harder time with James. The surface realism gives them the illusion that he should be easier to understand, and baffles them all the more. Look here, I said. What’s the deal with this word fuliginous? He uses it in The Bostonians—“fuliginous eyes”—and in The Ambassadors, to describe Waymarsh’s face. What does the blasted word mean? You know it cannot be found in the American Heritage Dictionary?
Mina could not let me continue; her loyalties would not allow it. She, like Catherine Sloper, had an “undiverted heart” and, despite her brilliant mind, sometimes took things awfully literally. She said, with evident emotion, How else but by giving volume to his words could he create the illusion of life? Are you thinking of dropping him?
She had asked me this question a long time ago, and every once in a while that anxiety returned to her. I said, No, of course not. How could I drop a novelist who in describing a brilliant woman says not dazzling or incandescent but “unobscured Miss B”? I wish I could steal his intricacies of language. But give my kids a break—remember, most of them were fed on Steinbeck’s The Pearl.
I told her what fun we had the day we chose our best and worst passages. Mahshid pointed to the “bird haunted trees,” and Nassrin read a passage from The Ambassadors describing a lunch by the waterside: “—the mere way Madame de Vionnet, opposite him over their intensely white table-linen, their omelette aux tomates, their bottle of straw-coloured Chablis, thanked him for everything almost with the smile of a child, while her grey eyes moved in and out of their talk, back to the quarter of the warm spring air, in which early summer had already begun to throb, and then back again to his face and their human questions.”
These talks with Mina, seemingly so irrelevant to the events around us, were a great source of satisfaction to us both. It is only now, when I try to gather up the morsels of those days, that I discover how little, if ever, we talked about our personal lives—about love and marriage and how it felt to have children, or not to. It seemed as if, apart from literature, the political had devoured us, eliminating the personal or private.
31
One of the last missiles to land before the cease-fire hit a nearby