“Please, you have to excuse me, but try as I have I can’t be my equal in English.” She fills my glass and holds up hers. “To the Western Wind. May it blow and blow.” We clink and drink. “Pretty good, yes? We never saw this good there in all my years. You’ll forgive me?” As part of the crowd breaks for her I see that woman by the food table, alone it seems and looking at me and then at her fork coming off her plate. Wait a moment so the woman I just spoke to doesn’t think I’m following her and then go over, say prosit or how goes it or nas zdorovie if I can remember how to pronounce it or just hello and after her hello show her the glass and ask if she knows what the Cyrillic letters mean or if she thinks the snowy troika and onion dome scene also tooled-in is just for foreign consumerism. No, no plotted approach and she might be married, in love, living with the man she’s married to and in love with and who’s here or coming later. But if so why’d she look at me way she did?
I finish my drink. Another? One more like that and I’ll be slurring through my nose. Maybe she just wants to have something extra to talk about later with her husband, lover, whatever, on their way home or just home if he didn’t come with her and won’t be here or on the phone if he’s out of town or lives alone and phones her at home later. I pour a quarter of a glass and will just sip. “Did you talk to anyone interesting?” she could say. “Not really,” he could say if he’s here or on the way, “you?” “A translator. Daniel Krin — ever hear of him? But whoever hears of translators or remembers their names, except for what’s-his-name again who does the famous German with the shaggy mustache and the other who only does prize-winning Latin-American novelists who if they haven’t received a prize yet get one soon after he translates them. He came over, for a while prior was flashing his eyes. I couldn’t just walk away, mouth filled with my fork and all those eatable edibles still on the table. Besides, he looked fairly interesting and I wanted to have something unusual but juicy to talk about with you other than those exotic foods. And he was fairly interesting, simplifying the supposedly inexplicable difficulties of translating this intricately simple Japanese poetical work. Then because I wanted a long uninterrupted answer from him so I could dish out more food for myself and chew it slowly, I asked if he also wrote poetry and if not what was stopping him and if it was a block what was he doing to break it and so forth. He said he used to but gave it up when he found he was short one minor gift and that was the real raw talent for apparent intelligence and cleverness to make up for the major one, or something with that twist. But because he still loved poetry, which he said most poets suddenly don’t once they give up writing it, he decided to do the next best thing to creating poetry which was translating it.”
