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Finishing Someone Else’s Sentences

You are going to read an extract. Seven paragraphs have been removed from the extract. Choose from the paragraphs A-H the one which fits each gap (1-7). There is one extra paragraph which you do not need to use.

When the parcel arrived from Budapest, it contained four hundred and twelve pages of typescript, two school exercise books and a note from the novelist’s widow that ran to a single line: ‘He would have wanted you to see the mess.’ Teodor Varga had died the previous winter, three chapters short of finishing the book he had been writing for nine years. I had translated his five previous novels into English, and I suppose I had grown used to thinking of his sentences as, in some small sense, partly mine. The parcel cured me of that presumption within an afternoon. [GAP 1] My English publisher, to whom I described all this over a long and increasingly gloomy lunch, took a robust view. Readers, she said, wanted a novel, not an archive. Couldn’t I simply choose the most plausible ending, tidy up the inconsistencies and add a discreet note at the back? It was, I recognised, a perfectly reasonable request, and I spent the train journey home trying to work out why it made me feel faintly sick. [GAP 2] In the spring I went to Budapest, ostensibly to consult the widow, though I suspect I was really hoping she would make the decision for me. Judit Varga received me in the flat where her husband had worked, in a room so crammed with books that the desk seemed to have been fitted in around them as an afterthought. She heard out my account of the three endings without interrupting, then went to a drawer and took out a fourth. [GAP 3] Embarrassed was not, I came to think, quite the right word. Varga had spent his career writing about people who could not bring their stories to a satisfactory close: exiles, divorcees, a priest who loses his faith halfway through a sermon. To leave his own last book unresolved was less an accident than a kind of signature. The difficulty was that publishers cannot sell a signature, and the Hungarian edition, I learned that afternoon, was already at the printer’s, with an ending chosen by his editor. [GAP 4] All of which left me in a position I had not anticipated. My contract obliged me to translate ‘the Hungarian text as published’, and the Hungarian text as published now included an ending that its author had never written and had expressly asked no one to write. To honour the contract would be to collude in a fiction; to depart from it would be to impose my own scruples on readers who had not asked for them. I wrote to Judit, half hoping she would release me from the choice. [GAP 5] The arrangement we eventually arrived at, after months of correspondence that grew steadily more good-humoured, was in some ways the obvious one. The English edition follows the Hungarian, spliced ending and all, but it is followed by an appendix containing the three versions from the exercise books and, on a page of its own, the list of instructions. Readers are free to stop at the novel or to carry on into the workshop. My publisher, to her credit, now claims it was her idea. [GAP 6] I understand that reader better than she might suppose. For most of my working life I had thought of fidelity as a matter of words: getting the tense right, preserving the rhythm of a sentence, resisting the urge to explain a joke. Varga’s last book taught me that it can also be a matter of what one declines to do; that a text may contain silences as deliberate as any of its sentences, and that to fill them, however gracefully, is a quiet form of betrayal. [GAP 7] The typescript and the exercise books are now held by a university library in Budapest, where anyone with a reader’s card may consult them. I went to see them last year, partly out of sentiment and partly to check a doubtful reading in chapter twelve. They looked smaller than I remembered, and a good deal less frightening. In the margin of the final page, which I had somehow overlooked, Varga had pencilled a single word. It is the Hungarian for ‘enough’.

• A. It was a single typed sheet, dated a fortnight before his death, and it was not an ending at all. It was a list of instructions, addressed to no one in particular, about what should become of the manuscript if he did not live to finish it. The last item read, in its entirety: ‘Do not finish it.’ Judit watched me read it twice. ‘He never showed this to his editor,’ she said. ‘I think he was embarrassed.’
• B. Remarkably few reviewers mentioned the appendix, and those who did treated it as a scholarly curiosity, of interest chiefly to specialists. But I have had more letters about this book than about any other I have translated, from readers who say that its last page altered how they read everything before it. One woman wrote that she had wept not at the ending but at the instruction not to write one.
• C. Judit’s answer, when it came, was unequivocal. The English edition should stop exactly where her husband had stopped, in the middle of a sentence, and anyone who wanted more could learn Hungarian. She had already written to my publisher to say as much, in terms that left little room for negotiation, and she expected me to support her position in whatever discussion followed.
• D. Her reply was characteristically brief. She did not mind, she said, what the English edition contained, provided it also contained the truth. That phrase, which I first took to be evasive, turned out to be the most practical advice anyone gave me. It did not tell me which ending to use. It told me what I could not leave out.
• E. The typescript was less a draft than an argument he had been conducting with himself. Whole paragraphs had been struck through and then, in a different ink, reinstated; marginal notes contradicted one another across the same page; a character called Ilona became, two-thirds of the way through, a character called Edit, with no hint as to whether this was a change of mind or a different woman altogether. The exercise books were worse. They held what appeared to be the ending, in three incompatible versions.
• F. I am conscious of the irony that the English edition, like the Hungarian, does fill them, at least until the appendix begins. I have made my peace with that, more or less. A novel is a public object, and its readers have rights too, including the right to an ending, however provisional. What they do not have, I think, is the right to be deceived about where that ending came from.
• G. That edition appeared in the autumn, and the reviews were respectful, even warm. Several critics singled out the final chapter as the most moving thing Varga had ever written. I read it with mixed feelings, since I knew it to be a splice: the first half of one exercise-book version grafted, with considerable skill, onto the second half of another. It was, I had to concede, better than either.
• H. Part of the answer lay in the nature of the job itself. A translator is already, by definition, a kind of forger: every sentence I produce is one Varga never wrote, offered to readers under his name. That uncomfortable fact is bearable only because there is an original against which the forgery can, in principle, be checked. Here there was no such original, or rather there were three, and choosing between them felt less like translation than ventriloquism.