Beautiful Singing

"Beautiful singing" refers to a vocal technique and is the English translation of the title of Ann Patchett's 2001 novel Bel Canto, which I can't recommend highly enough to anyone interested in matters of translation.  The backdrop of the story, though fictionalized for the novel, is the 1996 hostage crisis at the Japanese embassy in Peru.  Patchett's novel imagines what could have taken place during the four-month stand-off, focusing on the emotional and romantic alliances that develop between human beings in such close proximity.  The opera singer Roxane Coss, the sole female hostage, meditates on the wonder of these encounters: "How else would there have been any way to get to know someone you couldn't speak to, someone who lived on the other side of the world, unless you were given an enormous amount of empty time to simply sit and wait together?" (Patchett, 238)  Of course, the character who most intrigued me was Gen, a polymath in the employ of a Japanese businessman who becomes the "official" translator for the captors and hostages.  Gen runs around all day, mediating between French, Russian, German, English, Swiss, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese but, ultimately, the hostages and their captors find themselves bound by the silences that they share and Roxane's bel canto.  Here are a few of my favorite passages on love, translation and music (spoilers ahead):

* "Wait," Gen said softly in English, trying to make the one word sound as benign as possible.  Wait, after all, did not mean that she would never go, only that her leaving would be delayed.
    She took the word in, thought about it for a moment.  She still doubted that's what he had meant even when she heard it in English.  As a child she had waited.  She had waited at school in line for auditions.  But the truth was that in the last several years no one had asked her to wait at all...And all of this, the birthday part, the ridiculous country, the guns, the danger, the waiting involved in all of it was a mockery...The line had stopped moving, even the women who were free to go now stopped to watch her, regardless of whether or not they had any idea of what she was saying.  It was in this moment of uncertainty, the inevitable pause that comes before the translation, that Roxane Coss saw the moment of her exit (70).

* "We would need a dozen translators and arbitration from the UN before we could decide to overthrow the one teenager with a knife," Jacques Maitessier said, as much to himself as anyone, and he knew what he was talking about, having once been the French ambassador to the United Nations (113).

* In response to Roxane Coss's rendition of the aria "Song to the Moon" from Rusalka: "She sings Czech like she was born into it," he whispered to Gen.
    Gen nodded.  He would never refute the beauty of her singing, the warm liquid quality of her voice that so well matched the watery Rusalka, but there was no point telling Mr. Hosokawa that this woman did not know a word of Czechoslovakian.  She sang the passion of every syllable, but none of the syllables actually managed to form themselves into recognizable words of the language. It was quite obvious that she had memorized the work phonetically, that she sang her love for Dvořák and her love for the translated story, but that the Czech language itself was a stranger which passed her by without a moment's recognition.  Not that this was any sort of crime, of course.  Who would even know except for him?  There were no Czech's among them (163-64).

* He tucked her into the crook of his arm and she breathed into his shoulder.  This was what it felt like, to be a man with a woman.  This was the thing Gen had missed in all the translation of language (250).