For this week’s Translation Tuesday, we present to you a short story by Antoine Charbonneau-Demers, translated from the French by Trask Roberts. In it, a son frantically tries to outrun his mother’s approaching death by embarking on a total makeover: an aesthetic project which requires, most crucially, a long-anticipated nose job. His dissatisfaction with his face mirrors his resentment of his Quebec hometown, polluted by chimney smoke. Both are the unappealing, defective raw materials from which he was forced to fashion his life. Yet even as he rejects his origins, he is drawn to recreate them through his physical transformation. His ideal of beauty is, after all, his dying mother; he wishes to “breathe from the same smokestacks, taste the same exhaust fumes, the same deadly cold, the same snowy thoughts.”
At the clinic.
—What is it about your nose that bothers you?
If only I could come up with a good reason: I have a deviated septum, I struggle breathing, my nose keeps me from going out, from speaking—my nose, attached as it is to my windpipe, keeps me choked up, keeps me from living, plain for all to see—please, doctor, I’m begging you, fix it! But really, no, I don’t know what bothers me about my nose.
—I don’t really like it.
—Don’t really like it?
—I’ve always thought the nose makes the face. So, if I fix my nose, my face will follow.
—Yes, but…
I start to cry. Nothing showy, nary a sniffle, no, just tears on a stolid face.
—Young man, could it be that perhaps you’re not quite ready?
—No, I’m crying because I hate my nose.