Intercultural Interaction & Poems

The Translator – John Crowley

This novel is about the intense relationship between a Russian poet exiled from the USSR and a young American student at a large Midwestern state university on the eve of the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962.

As a high school student, Kit Malone meets JFK in the White House because she won a poetry prize. In the receiving line, he mentions that the federal government has gotten dissident poet Innokenti Falin out of the Soviet Union. 

A short time later, enrolling in what sounds like Indiana University, she takes a poetry course from Falin. Through no fault of their own, they've been through more than their fair share of troubles in life. Lonely Kit has trouble connecting with people. She's been through a teenage pregnancy and home for unwed mothers. She grieves the loss of her brother in an accident in the Army. 

In the 1930s, Falin miraculously survived his experience as besprizornost', a homeless child who either lost or was separated from their parents and who therefore lacked any adult care and support at all. They are drawn to each other and translate his poems from Russian to English.

This literary and chaste passion between hurting people can’t last, however. For obscure reasons, US secret agents want to keep an eye on him. A stumblebum fiend and her dean at school instruct Kit to report what she hears and sees after she visits Falin. Kit also feels that her circle of left-wing friends has been infiltrated by a federal government made nervous over Russian-Cuban cooperation. The Sixties atmosphere of 'paranoia strikes deep/into your life it will creep' is persuasively evoked but not harped on. Crowley's sense of restraint, his light touch in a novel of such wide scope made me shake my head in wonder. It's magic, what he does with mere words.

I’d not read any Crowley since the middle 1980s. I found engaging writing, with some mystical overtones but not much in the way of magical realism. As in Beasts, Crowley still has low expectations of government’s ability to act justly, wisely, or temperately. And Crowley treats love and its stabs, well, in a lovely fashion, as in Little, Big. 

He lets the weather play the chorus in many scenes. Though from Michigan I’m not from the prairie Midwest, but I'll testify he’s got the winter snow and summer thunder storms down. His rendering of everyday details is stunning; really took me back, the scene of registering for classes at a midwestern state university, in huge intermural buildings, going from gym to gym clutching big computer cards sporting rectangular punches with the corner cut off (do not fold, spindle or mutilate). Hey, it's late winter, when else are we most vulnerable to the warmth of nostalgia?