With Halloween approaching, the latest session of the Tinta Viva workshop last week had as a theme Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. We were encouraged to think about the main characters and their attributes, their humanity. The writing task had us considering a question to shape the identity of that character and apply it to Frankenstein’s creature. The question I chose was: Who might he have become, had he made different choices?
Lo que pude ser
La cabina huele a sebo y a muerte. Afuera, el hielo gime contra el casco como un animal herido. Victor yace frente a mí, más pequeño de lo que lo recordaba.
Debería sentir triunfo. Siento frío.
Confieso lo que nadie sabrá: después de William, lloré dos noches en el bosque. Después de Elizabeth, vomité junto al lago. Cada muerte era una carta que él no quiso leer, y yo seguía escribiéndole.
Pude haber sido el guardián de una cabaña, el que enseña a leer a un niño ajeno, el viejo extraño que la aldea tolera. Tenía manos para arar y una voz para Milton. Elegí, en cambio, ser visto, aunque fuera con horror, porque el horror también es una forma de mirar.
Esa fue mi debilidad: necesitar sus ojos más que su perdón.
Le toco la mano. Todavía tibia. Es la primera vez que lo hago.
What I might have been
The cabin reeks of tallow and death. Outside, the ice groans against the hull like a wounded animal. Victor lies before me, smaller than I remembered.
I ought to feel triumphant. I feel cold.
Here is what no one will ever know: after William, I wept for two nights in the forest. After Elizabeth, I was sick by the lake. Every death was a letter he refused to read, and I kept writing.
I could have been the keeper of a cottage, the one who teaches someone else’s child to read, the strange old man the village learns to tolerate. I had hands for the plough and a voice for Milton. Instead I chose to be seen, whatever the cost, because horror is also a way of looking
That was my weakness: I needed his eyes more than his forgiveness.
I touch his hand. Still warm. It is the first time I have ever done so.
Comment: The English version was translated for sense and feeling rather than word by word. Where a literal rendering would have sounded flat or foreign, the translation chose the phrase an English reader would feel most sharply: “reeks” rather than “smells”, “hands for the plough” rather than “hands to plough”. The Creature’s voice has been given a slightly formal, old-fashioned turn (“I ought to”, “I have ever done so”), a nod to the fact that in Shelley’s novel he taught himself language from Milton and Plutarch.
The original was written to a strict limit of 150 words, and the translation tries to keep that economy. Read it slowly: much of its weight sits in the shortest sentences.