Close Reading and Inferences

Passage I — Literary Narrative: “Nine Crates” (original story written for this practice set)

The first thing my aunt Ruth taught me about the orchard was that the peaches did not care about my schedule. I had arrived at her farm in the middle of June with a duffel bag, a phone that got one bar of signal if I stood on the porch railing, and a plan to spend the summer reading. By the end of my first week, I had read eleven pages.

“They ripen when they ripen,” Ruth said on my second morning, handing me a canvas picking bag before the sun had cleared the ridge. “You can sleep when they don’t.”

She was my mother’s older sister, but the two of them had never seemed related to me. My mother talked constantly, narrating her own errands aloud—“Now the dry cleaner, then the bank”—as if someone might need a record of them later. Ruth could go an entire morning without saying anything more than “Higher” or “Leave that one.” At first I took her silence as a verdict on me. I spent those early days trying to fill it, telling her about my school, my friends, the robotics team I had quit, and she would nod once, as though acknowledging a delivery, and move on to the next tree.

The work itself was simpler than I expected and harder than I wanted it to be. A ripe peach, Ruth showed me, comes away from the branch with the slightest upward twist; if you have to pull, you are stealing it early. I bruised dozens that first week by gripping too hard, and each time Ruth would take the damaged fruit from my hand, turn it over once, and drop it into the bucket she kept for jam. She never said anything about it, which was somehow worse than if she had.

In the evenings Ruth sat at the kitchen table with a ledger, a narrow green book in which she recorded each row of the orchard: the date it was picked, the number of crates, the weather. Her handwriting was as spare as her speech. Once, when she had gone out to check the irrigation, I opened the ledger and paged back through twenty years of entries. Some summers filled a dozen pages; one, the year of a late frost, took up half a page and ended with a single word, Lost. I closed the book quickly, feeling that I had read something not meant for me, though there was nothing in it but numbers and dates.

The storm came on a Thursday in July. I noticed it first as a change in the light—the leaves went from green to a strange, bright silver as the wind turned them over—and then Ruth was beside me, already moving.

“The lower rows,” she said. “Everything that’s ready. Go.”

For the next hour we picked faster than I had known was possible. I stopped thinking about the twist and simply felt for it, my hand closing around each peach and lifting in one motion. Thunder rolled down the valley in long, uneven waves. When the first heavy drops hit, we had filled nine crates, and Ruth was still working the last tree in the row, her gray braid dark with rain.

We sat afterward in the packing shed, listening to the hail rattle on the tin roof. Neither of us spoke. It occurred to me that I had not said a word in over an hour, and that I had not wanted to. The silence between us no longer felt like something I had to repair. It felt like the quiet of two people who had been paying attention to the same thing.

Ruth reached into the nearest crate, pulled out a peach, and examined it for a long moment. Then she handed it to me.

“Not a mark on it,” she said.

It was, I understood, the longest speech she had made about my work all summer, and I have kept it longer than almost anything anyone has said to me since.

When my mother called that night, she asked if I was bored yet. I stood on the porch railing, holding the phone up toward the one bar of signal, and tried to explain about the storm and the crates and the peach. I could hear how small it sounded as I said it. “That’s nice, honey,” my mother said, and began telling me about a new restaurant near our house.

After we hung up, I stayed on the railing for a while. Down in the orchard, the battered trees were black shapes against a clearing sky, and somewhere in the shed, nine crates of peaches were waiting for morning.

Passage I — Literary Narrative: “The Seam” (original story written for this practice set)

Mara had assumed that tuning a piano would be loud. She had imagined her grandfather hammering at keys while she waited in the car with her headphones on, and for the first week of July that was more or less how the job went. Abel’s doctor had taken away his driver’s license after a small stroke in May, and because Mara was sixteen, unemployed, and—in her mother’s phrase—“available,” she had become his driver.

The clients were mostly old, like the pianos. There was a church in Fenwick with an upright whose middle C had stuck since Easter and a widow on Larch Street who played nothing but hymns. Abel answered each of them with the same three words, “Let’s see it,” and then he disappeared into the piano and did not come out for two hours.

On the eighth day it rained, and Mara came inside.

She had expected noise, but what she heard instead was a kind of patient argument. Abel would strike a single key, listen, and fit his tuning hammer onto a pin no thicker than a pencil. Then he would turn it—so slightly that Mara could not see his wrist move—and strike the key again. Between strikes he held his head tilted, the way a bird does when it hears something under the grass.

“What are you listening for?” she asked finally.

He did not answer right away. He played two keys together, an F and the C above it, and the sound that came out had a faint wobble in it, a pulse like a slow heartbeat. “That,” he said. “The beats. When two notes are almost right, they fight a little. You hear the fighting.” He nudged the pin and played them again. The pulse slowed. “Now they’ve nearly agreed.”

“Nearly?”

“A piano is never in tune,” he said. “It’s only in tune with itself, for a while.”

Mara thought this was the kind of thing old people said to sound wise, and she told him so. Abel laughed—a short, surprised bark she had not heard since before the hospital—and handed her the hammer.

It was heavier than it looked. He put her hand on the pin, closed his own hand around hers, and told her to play the F and the C with her other hand. She heard the wobble at once, now that she knew what it was, and she was startled by how obvious it seemed, as if it had been there all along in every piano she had ever heard. Together they turned the pin. The pulse slowed, and slowed, and then for a moment it was gone, and the two notes sat side by side as smoothly as water.

“There,” Abel said, and let go.

After that she came inside every day. She learned the names of the parts—the hammers that strike the strings, the dampers that silence them, the felt that wears thin over years of practice—and she learned that her grandfather kept no notes, that every piano in the county seemed to live in his memory with its particular faults. “The Larch Street one goes flat in August,” he told her. “Humidity. She keeps a window open.” Mara began to notice that he talked to the pianos more than he talked to their owners, and that he talked to her more than he had in years.

She noticed other things, too. He tired by early afternoon now. Twice he struck a key and then sat with his hand on the lid, not listening so much as resting, and she pretended to be reading the music on the stand until he began again. On the drive home he often fell asleep, his head against the window, and she turned the radio down so low that it was barely a sound at all.

In the last week of August they went to the high school, where the auditorium piano had to be ready for the first assembly. Abel tuned the bass and the middle of the keyboard himself. Then, when he reached the high treble, where the strings are short and the beats are fast and hard to hear, he sat down in the front row and said, “Your turn.”

She was not ready, and she told him so. He folded his arms.

It took her forty minutes to tune eleven notes. When she finished, she played a scale from the top of the keyboard down to the place where his work began, and she could not hear the seam. She turned around to ask whether he could. He had his eyes closed and his head tilted, the way he always held it to listen, and he did not open them for a long time.

Passage III — Humanities: “Carrying the Joke” (original essay written for this practice set)

The hardest sentence I have ever translated was four words long, and it was a joke.

It came near the end of a Brazilian novel I was putting into English, in a scene where an elderly fisherman, asked by a tourist whether the sea is dangerous, replies with a pun on two Portuguese words that sound nearly alike, one meaning “tide” and the other meaning “bad.” In the original, the line is both funny and sad, because the fisherman’s son drowned years earlier, and readers who know this hear the grief beneath the wordplay. The tourist, who knows nothing of the son, hears only a clever old man. In English, the two words share nothing: not a sound, not a letter. A literal translation would leave the tourist—and the reader—puzzled by an old man who seemed to be answering a question nobody had asked.

People who have never translated often imagine that the job is a matter of finding equivalents, as if every language contained the same furniture arranged in different rooms. For most sentences, this picture is good enough. A cup is a cup; rain is rain. But a joke is not furniture. It is a small machine built out of the particular parts of one language, and the parts do not travel. When I translate a pun, I am not moving the machine from one room to another. I am trying to build a new machine, from English parts, that does the same work.

That phrase—“does the same work”—hides most of the difficulty. What work does a joke do? This one makes the tourist laugh, uncertainly. It shows the fisherman’s habit of deflecting questions with humor. And it lets the reader, who knows about the son, feel a sudden weight that the tourist cannot. A translation that kept the laugh but lost the weight would be a failure, and so would one that kept the weight but turned the fisherman into a man who speaks in riddles.

This is why I distrust the familiar advice to translate “the meaning, not the words.” A joke’s meaning cannot be lifted away from its words; the words are what make it a joke. What can sometimes be kept is its effect on the listener, and even that has to be reconstructed rather than carried across.

I tried nineteen versions. Some were clever and some were faithful, and none were both. In the end, I used a technique that translators call compensation: I let the pun go in that sentence and placed a smaller piece of wordplay two pages earlier, in a line where the fisherman talks about his boat, so that English readers would already know him as a man who plays with words. When the tourist’s question comes, my fisherman answers with a plain sentence about the tide and then pauses, and the narrator notes that he “seemed to be listening to something farther out.” The grief is carried by the pause rather than by the pun.

I am not sure the solution is right. The author, to whom I wrote about it, was gracious; she said that the English fisherman was “quieter than mine, but the same man.” I have reread the passage many times since, and some days I hear the original beneath it and some days I hear only my own choices. That doubt, I have come to think, is not a sign that something went wrong. It is the ordinary condition of the work.

It is also, I suspect, why translators argue so fiercely among themselves. Give the same paragraph to ten experienced translators and you will receive ten different versions, each defensible, each a little foreign to the others. The differences are not mistakes. They are evidence that a sentence offers more than one road into another language, and that every road passes through a particular person.

Readers sometimes ask whether they are really reading the author when they read a translation. The honest answer is that they are reading two people at once—the one who imagined the book and the one who rebuilt it—and that a good translation tries to make the second person disappear. But disappearing is itself an act. Every choice I make in favor of the author’s voice is still a choice, made by someone with my ear, my vocabulary, and my sense of when an English sentence breathes. The most faithful translation is not the one with the fewest changes. It is the one whose changes the author would recognize as her own.