My earliest memory is of a pot stand. It is set into a corner with a cupboard on one side and, on the other, a shallow step. This is where my head begins. The step leads to another room, and far on the other side of the room, there is a white-haired woman sitting in a chair.
Discussions with my mother lead to just one pot stand, in a seaside cottage the summer I was eighteen months old. It was, she says, made of black iron and it stood beside a real step and the white-haired woman must be her own mother who died when I was six. This image of her is all that I have, and even then it is not so much an image as a sense. She may have been asleep, but I think she was reading. And there was something very quiet and covert about the pot stand, which was a pyramid affair with shelves for four pots. I can remember a little saucepan on the top shelf. I am tempted to say that there was a big saucepan on the bottom one, but this is pushing things a bit. I would give anything to remember what the lino was like.
At nine months, the baby puts her head in a pot and says, Aaah Aaah Aaah. She says it very gently and listens to the echo. She has discovered this all by herself. By way of celebration, I put my own head into the pot and say, Aaah Aaah Aaah. Then she does it again. Then I do it again. And so on.
The rest of my family don’t believe that I remember the pot stand, on the grounds that it is a stupid memory and, anyway, I was far too young. It is the job of families to reject each other’s memories, even the pleasant ones, and being the youngest I am sometimes forced to fight for the contents of my own head. But my brother broke his elbow that summer. My mother had to take him to hospital in Dublin and my grandmother looked after us while she was away. This was the first time in my life that I was without my mother for any length of time. If she had stayed, then am certain that I would not have remembered anything at all of that house — not the pot stand, and not my grandmother either.
We pilfer our own memories, we steal them from the world and salt them away.
I first left the baby when she was four months old. Some of the days when I was away, she spent with my mother. I wonder what image might remain with her from that time: a colour, a smell, a combination of shapes perhaps, affectless and still — and in the distance, someone. Just that. Someone.
And in the foreground? The carpet perhaps. I hope she remembers my parents’ carpet, the one I remember as a child, with a pattern of green leaves like stepping-stones all the way down the hall.
I have another, possibly earlier, memory of pulling the wallpaper off the wall from between the bars of my cot. My mother is absent from this scene too, but though the Pot Stand Memory is neither happy nor unhappy, this one is quite thrilling. I almost certainly ate the paper. The plaster underneath it was pink and powdery, and I imagine now that I can remember the shivery taste of it. I also remember the shape of the tear on the wall, or I think I do. At any rate, I see it in my mind’s eye — a seam on the left, stunningly straight, with four gammy strips pulled away, like a fat raggedy set of fingers, on the right.
I know this memory is, in some sense, true, but when I try to chase it, it disappears. It exists in peripheral vision, and presents itself only when I focus on something else — like typing, for example. When I stop writing this sentence and look up from the screen to try to see the pattern of the wallpaper — a blank. Memories, by their nature, may not be examined, and the mind’s eye is not the eye we use, for example, to cross the road.
I wonder if this is the way that the baby sees things: vaguely and all at once. I imagine it to be a very emotional way to exist in the world. Perhaps I am being romantic — but the visual world yields nothing but delight to her. There are (it seems) no horrors, no frights. Tiny babies see only in monochrome. I imagine colour leaking into her head like a slowly adjusted screen — tremendously slow, like a vegetable television growing silently in the corner of the room. I imagine her focus becoming sharper and deeper, like some infinitely stoned cameraman adjusting his lens. ‘Oh,’ she says — or something that is the precursor to ‘Oh’, a shallow inhalation, a stillness as she is caught by something, and begins to stalk it: careful, rapt — the most beautiful sound in the world: the sound of a baby’s wondering breath.
Something pulls in me when she is caught like this. For months I am a slave to her attention. The world is all colour, light and texture and I am her proud companion. I have no choice. None of us do. In a café, three women look over to smile at her, and then, as one, they look up. ‘Oh, she likes the light,’ says one, and this fact pleases us all. Immensely.
The light, of course, is horrible, and this is one of the reasons mothers think they are losing their minds: this pride in the baby looking at the light, this pride in the light as they introduce it to the baby, ‘Yes, the light!’ There is a certain zen to it; the world simple and new as we all stop to admire the baby admiring a wrought-iron candelabra with peculiar dangly bits and five — yes, five! — glowing, tulip-shaped bulbs.
She is years away from knowing from what ‘five’ might be, but maybe she already gets the ‘fiveness’ of it. This is the way her eyes move: One, one more! Another one! All of them! The other two. The first one again, another one! Something else.
Sometimes she holds her hand up like the baby Christ, and looks as though she contains everything, and understands it all. I do not ask to be forgiven, but still I feel redemption in the completeness of her gaze. And I feel the redemption in her fat baby wrists and her infinitely fine, fat baby’s hand. The baby is a blessing, but sometimes she does, she must, also bless, which is to say that she simply sees, and lifts her hand, as a sign.
I pick the baby up and we look in the wardrobe mirror, which has always been for her a complicated delight: What is it? It’s a baby! She smiles, it smiles back! (Complication upon complication! It’s me! It’s me! she says, and all her synapses, as I imagine, going ping! ping! ping!) She sees me smiling at her in the mirror; she sees her mother turning to smile at her in the room, and oh, it’s too much, she lunges forwards to examine the knob on the wardrobe door.
There are actually two knobs on the wardrobe. One is wooden and the other, for some reason, is an amber-coloured plastic. The baby goes from one to the other and back again. One of the first confusions in her young life was when myself and Martin both looked at her at the same time: ‘Oh no, there’s two of them.’ It almost felt unfair.
As she grew older, there was nothing she liked more than to be held by one of us and to look at the other, in a somewhat haughty way. Older still, she is completely content when the two of us are with her, quietly in a room. She has travelled from one, to two, perhaps to many. I think of this as she goes from the wooden knob to the amber one — a fairy tale of sameness and difference. This one. That one.
Of course, the first difference between this and the other is not between mother and father, or even between baby and ‘baby in the mirror’, but between one breast and . . . the other! If women had five teats, then mankind might, by now, be living on the moon.
Yesterday, it was warm, and I took off her socks and stood her on the grass. She loved this, but maybe not so much as I did — her first experience of grass. For her, this green stuff was just as different and as delicious as everything else — the ‘first’ was all mine. Sometimes, I feel as though I am introducing her to my own nostalgia for the world.
In the meantime, grass is green and springy and amazingly multiple and just itself. It might even be edible. Everything goes into her mouth. This is the taste of yellow. This is the taste of blue. Since she started moving about she has also experienced the taste of turf, of yesterday’s toast, and probably of mouse droppings, because it was weeks before I realised we were not alone in the house. Paper remains her ultimate goal, and she looks over her shoulder now to check if I am around. That wallpaper looks nice.
I really do wish I could remember my own wallpaper, instead of just the tear I made in it. The baby sleeps in my cot now — the one my father made over forty years ago with some half-inch dowel, and a fairly ingenious sliding mechanism for the side to be let down. I sat beside it one night, feeding her, and I tried to remember what it was like to be inside; the view between the bars and the ripped wallpaper on the wall. Someone, over the years, had painted it nursery blue, but I remembered a green colour, I could almost recall chewing the cross bar at the top. The baby sucked, her eyelashes batting slowly over a drunken, surrendered gaze, and as my attention wandered I saw, under a chip in the blue paint, the very green I ate as a child. A strong and distant emotion washed briefly over me and was gone.
My mother, or someone, pulled the cot away from the wall and, in time, the wallpaper I do not remember was replaced with wallpaper that I do remember (flowers of blue, block-printed on white). Babies love pattern so much I have begun to regret my own attempts at tastefulness. Not a single curlicued carpet for her to crawl over, not a single flower on the wall. Even her toys are in primary colours and her mobile is from the Tate, cut-out shapes, like a Mondrian floating free.
Once I stop trying, I seem to remember my mother giving out to me about the ripped-up wall. She would have been upset about the wallpaper. Perhaps this is why I remember it. It was my first real experience of ‘NO!’
My own child thinks No! is a game. I say it once and she pauses. I say it twice and she looks at me. I say it three times and she laughs. The punch-line!
Tasteful as it is, she loves the mobile. It has a big red circle that spins slowly to blue, and a little square that goes from black to white. There are various rectangles that don’t particularly obsess her but, taken all in all, it is the thing she likes most in the world.
We moved when she was nearly eight months old, and it was another two weeks before I got round to stringing up the mobile for her again. When it was done, she shuddered with delight. It happened to her all in spasm. She realised, not only that the mobile was there, but also that it had once been gone. She remembered it. In order to do this she needed to see three things: the mobile in the old flat, the new room without the mobile, the new room with the mobile. Memory is not a single thing.
Martin says that his first memory, which is of one brother breaking a blue plastic jug over another brother’s head, is false. His mother tells him that they never did have a slender, pale blue plastic jug. He thinks he dreamt about the jug, and that the dream also contained the idea that this was his first memory, as he dreamt a subsequent ‘first memory’ of people waving to him from a plane while he stood in the garden below. He was convinced for years that this was real. This makes me think that we are very young when we search for our first memory — that single moment when we entered the stream of time.
My own mother, who is curator and container of many things, among them the memory of my pot stand, worries that she is getting forgetful. The distant past is closer all the time, she says. If this is true, then the memory of her own mother is getting stronger now; sitting in a house by the sea, surrounded by children who are variously delighted, or worried, or concentrating on other things.
When you think about it, the pots can’t have stayed there for long. I would have pulled them down. There would have been noise, though my memory of them is notably, and utterly, silent. Perhaps what I remember is the calm before a chaos of sound and recrimination. That delicious, slow moment, when a baby goes very, very quiet, knowing it is about to be found out.
The other morning, the baby (silently) reached the seedlings I have under the window, and she filled her mouth with a handful of hardy annuals and potting compost. I tried to prise her mouth open to get the stuff out. She clamped it shut. She bit me (by accident). She started to cry. When she cried, her mouth opened. She was undone by her own distress and this seemed so unfair to me that I left her to it. I hadn’t the heart. Besides, it said on the pack that the compost was sterilised.
But she will not let my finger into her mouth, now, even to check for a tooth (she is very proud of her teeth), and when she clamps it shut and turns away she is saying, ‘Me,’ loud and clear. ‘Oh,’ a friend said, when she started to crawl, ‘it’s the beginning of the end,’ and I knew what she meant. It is the beginning of the end of a romance between a woman who has forgotten who she is and a child who does not yet know.
Until one day there will come a moment, delightful or banal, ordinary or strange, that she will remember for the rest of her life.
Anne Enright, 'Time' in Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, London: Vintage, 2005, 65-72.
Prvo čega se sjećam je stalak za lonce. Nalazi se u kutu pokraj kuhinjskog ormarića s jedne strane i plitke stube s druge. Ovdje moja svijest počinje. Stuba vodi u drugu sobu, a na samom kraju nje sijeda žena sjedi na stolici.
Razgovori s majkom vraćaju se na onaj stalak za lonce u vikendici na moru, na ljeto kad sam imala osamnaest mjeseci. Kaže da je bio od crnog željeza i da se nalazio pokraj prave stube, a sijeda žena sigurno je njezina majka koja je umrla kad sam imala šest godina. Ova slika nje je sve što imam, ali više je to osjećaj nego slika. Možda je spavala, iako mislim da je čitala. Stalak u obliku piramide s policama za četiri lonca imao je u sebi nešto veoma tiho i tajanstveno. Sjećam se i malog lonca na najvišoj polici. Usudila bih se reći da je na donjoj polici bio veliki lonac, ali bi to onda bilo pretjerivanje. Dala bih sve da se mogu sjetiti kakav je bio linoleum.
Beba stara devet mjeseci stavi glavu u lonac i kaže: „Aaa“, „Aaa“, „Aaa“. Kaže to veoma nježno i sluša jeku. Sama je to otkrila. Stavim glavu u lonac, kao da slavim njezino otkriće, i kažem: „Aaa“, „Aaa“, „Aaa“. Onda ona ponovi. Onda ja. I tako ukrug.
Ostatak obitelji ne vjeruje mi da se sjećam stalka za lonce uz obrazloženje da je to glupo sjećanje i da sam ionako bila premlada. Zadatak obitelji je poricati sjećanja, pa čak i ona ugodna, a kao najmlađa se ponekad moram boriti za vlastite misli. Ali toga je ljeta moj brat slomio lakat. Majka ga je morala odvesti u bolnicu u Dublinu, a baka nas je čuvala dok je nije bilo. Bio je to prvi put da sam neko vrijeme bila bez majke. Sigurna sam da se ne bih sjećala ni stalka za lonce ni bake da je moja majka bila tu.
Potkradamo vlastita sjećanja, krademo ih od svijeta pa ih skrivamo.
Prvi sam put ostavila bebu kad je imala četiri mjeseca. Kad me nekim danima ne bi bilo, provodila bi vrijeme s mojom majkom. Pitam se kakva bi joj slika mogla ostati iz toga vremena: boja, miris, možda kombinacija oblika, bez emocija i nepomična – a u daljini, netko. Samo to. Netko.
A u prvom planu? Možda tepih. Nadam se da se sjeća tepiha mojih roditelja koji pamtim kao dijete, s uzorkom zelenog lišća koje je izgledalo poput kamenja koje se proteže niz cijeli hodnik.
Imam još jedno, možda i ranije, sjećanje kako između rešetki krevetića skidam tapete sa zida. Moje majke nema ni u ovoj sceni, a dok sjećanje na stalak za lonce nije ni sretno ni nesretno, ovo je poprilično uzbudljivo. Gotovo sam sigurno jela tapete. Žbuka ispod bila je ružičasta i praškasta, a sad mislim da se sjećam i groznog okusa. Sjećam se i oblika poderotine na zidu, ili bar mislim da se sjećam. U svakom slučaju, u mašti vidim nevjerojatno ravan šav na lijevoj strani, dok na desnoj vise četiri istrgnute trake nalik debelim raščupanim prstima.
Znam da je ovo sjećanje na neki način istinito, ali ono nestane kad ga pokušam uhvatiti. Postoji u perifernom vidu, a pojavljuje se samo kad se fokusiram na nešto drugo – na tipkanje, primjerice. U trenutku kad prestanem pisati ovu rečenicu i podignem pogled s ekrana da bih vidjela uzorak tapeta – praznina. Sjećanja se po svojoj prirodi ne smiju ispitivati, a vid kojim se služimo u mašti nije isti onaj koji koristimo za, recimo, prijeći cestu.
Pitam se vidi li i beba ovako stvari: nejasno i odjednom sve. Pretpostavljam da je to veoma emotivan način postojanja. Možda sam romantična, ali svijet oko nje donosi joj samo užitak. Čini se da nema užasa, strahova. Malene bebe vide samo jednobojno. Zamišljam da joj boja u glavu dolazi kao na ekranu koji se polako pali – užasno sporo, kao na televizoru koji vegetira i tiho radi u kutu. Zamišljam da joj fokus postaje oštriji i dublji, kao da je kamerman koji bez kraja i konca namješta objektiv. „Oh“, kaže ona, ili nešto što prethodi „Oh“, plitki udah, mirnoća kad joj nešto pobudi pažnju i počne mu se prikradati: oprezno, zaneseno – najljepši zvuk na svijetu: zvuk bebinog zadivljenog disanja.
Nešto me privuče kad je tako zanesena. Mjesecima sam rob njezinoj pažnji. Svijet je sav u bojama, svjetlu i teksturi, a ja sam njezin ponosni pratilac. Nemam izbora. Nitko nema. Tri je žene u kafiću pogledaju da joj se nasmiješe, a zatim zajedno podignu pogled. „Oh, pa sviđa joj se svjetlo“, kaže jedna, i to nas sve uveseli. Neizmjerno.
Svjetlo je, naravno, užasno, a upravo zbog ovakvih stvari majke misle da gube razum: ponose se bebom koja gleda u svjetlo, ponose se svjetlom kad ga predstavljaju bebi: „Da, to je svjetlo!“ Ima nekog zena u tome; svijet je jednostavan i nov onda kad svi zastanemo diviti se bebi koja se divi svijećnjaku od kovanog željeza s neobičnim visećim detaljima i pet – da, pet! – sjajnih žarulja u obliku tulipana.
Ona je godinama daleko od spoznaje što bi „pet“ moglo biti, ali možda već shvaća da ima nešto u toj „petici“. Ovako joj se oči kreću: Jedan, još jedan! Pa još jedan! Svi! Druga dva. Ponovno prvi, još jedan! Nešto drugo.
Ponekad podigne ruku poput malog Isusa i izgleda kao da je sve u njoj, a ona to sve razumije. Ne tražim oprost, ali ipak osjećam iskupljenje u beskraju njezina pogleda. Osjećam iskupljenje u bebinim debelim zapešćima i neizmjerno lijepim debelim ručicama. Beba je blagoslov, ali ponekad i ona mora blagosloviti jer vidi i, kao znak, podigne ruku.
Uzmem bebu u ruke i stojimo pred ormarom s ogledalom koje je za nju oduvijek bilo kompliciran užitak: Što je to? To je beba! Nasmiješi se beba, nasmiješi se i odraz! (Komplikacija za komplikacijom! Kaže ona: „To sam ja!“, „To sam ja!“, a ja zamišljam kako joj sve sinapse rade sto na sat!) Vidi da joj se smiješim u ogledalu; vidi svoju majku koja joj se smiješi u sobi, pa joj sve to postane previše i baci se naprijed pregledati kvaku na vratima ormara.
Na ormaru su dvije kvake. Jedna je drvena, a druga je, iz nekog razloga, plastična i boje jantara. Beba ide od jedne do druge pa natrag. Kao veoma mladu zbunjivalo ju je kad bi je Martin i ja istovremeno gledali: „O ne, pa ima ih dvoje“. Skoro pa nepošteno.
Dok je odrastala najviše je voljela da je jedno od nas drži dok u drugo gleda na pomalo ohol način. Kao još starija potpuno je zadovoljna kad smo s njom u sobi, u tišini. Putovala je od jednog do drugog, a možda i do mnogih. Razmišljam o tome dok ona ide od drvene kvake do jantarne – bajka o jednakosti i različitosti. Ova. Ona.
Naravno, prva razlika između ovoga i onoga nije između majke i oca, pa čak ni između bebe i „bebe u ogledalu“, već između jedne i druge … grudi! Čovječanstvo bi možda već živjelo na mjesecu da žene imaju pet sisa.
Jučer je bilo toplo pa sam joj skinula čarape i držala je na travi. Svidjelo joj se, ali možda ne koliko meni – njezin prvi doživljaj trave. Njoj je ova zelena stvar bila podjednako drukčija i ukusna kao i sve ostalo – ono „prvo“ bilo je samo moje. Ponekad imam osjećaj kao da je upoznajem s vlastitom nostalgijom za svijetom.
U međuvremenu je trava zelena, proljetna, nevjerojatno mnogostruka i jednostavno svoja. Možda je čak i jestiva. Sve joj završi u ustima. Ovo je okus žute boje. Ovo je okus plave. Otkad se počela kretati iskusila je i okus zemlje, jučerašnjeg tosta, a vjerojatno i mišjeg izmeta jer su prošli tjedni prije negoli sam shvatila da u kući nismo sami. Papir je njezin krajnji cilj, a sad se osvrće da vidi jesam li u blizini. Tapete izgledaju ukusno.
Da se barem mogu sjetiti svojih tapeta, a ne samo poderotine koju sam napravila. Beba sad spava u mojem krevetiću – onom koji je moj otac napravio prije četrdeset godina s nekim klinom od pola inča i kliznim mehanizmom koji se na zgodan način spušta s jedne strane. Sjedila sam pokraj krevetića jednu noć dok sam je hranila i pokušavala sam se sjetiti kako je to biti unutra; pogled između rešetki na poderane tapete na zidu. Netko ih je tijekom godina obojio u nježno plavu, ali sjećam se zelene boje i gotovo sam se mogla sjetiti da sam žvakala vrh poprečne grede. Beba je sisala, polagano trepćući s opijenim, prepuštenim pogledom, i dok mi je pažnja lutala, ispod krhotine plave boje vidjela sam onu zelenu koju sam kao dijete jela. Snažna i daleka emocija nakratko me preplavila, a zatim nestala.
Netko je, možda moja majka, odmaknuo krevetić od zida i s vremenom su se tapete kojih se ne sjećam zamijenile onima kojih se sjećam (plavi cvjetovi tiskani na bijelom). Bebe toliko vole uzorke da sam počela žaliti zbog vlastitih pokušaja dobrog ukusa. Nijedan tepih sa zavijutcima i viticama da na njemu puže, nijedan cvijet na zidu. Čak su i njezine igračke u primarnim bojama, a vrtuljak iznad krevetića kao da je iz Tate-a, s izrezanim oblicima, poput plutajućeg drva iz slike Pieta Mondriana.
Čini mi se, kad se napokon prestanem truditi, da se sjećam da me je majka grdila zbog poderotine na zidu. Sigurno bi bila uzrujana zbog tapeta. Možda se zato toga i sjećam. To je bio moj prvi pravi doživljaj riječi „NE!“
Moje dijete misli da je „Ne!“ igra. Kažem to jednom i ona zastane. Kažem to dvaput i pogleda me. Kažem to triput i nasmije se. U tome je cijeli štos!
Ona voli vrtuljak iznad krevetića, bez obzira na dobar ukus. Ima veliki crveni krug koji se polako izvrti u plavo i mali kvadrat koji prelazi iz crne u bijelu boju. Tu su i razni pravokutnici koji je posebno i ne zanimaju, ali sve u svemu, nema joj dražeg.
Preselili smo se kad je imala skoro osam mjeseci, a prošla su još dva tjedna prije negoli sam stigla ponovno montirati vrtuljak. Zadrhtala je od užitka kad je bio spreman. Dogodilo joj se to u trzaju. Shvatila je ne samo da je vrtuljak sad tu, već i to da ga nije bilo. Sjetila se toga. Morala je vidjeti tri stvari da bi to bilo moguće: vrtuljak u starom stanu, novu sobu bez vrtuljka i novu sobu s vrtuljkom. Sjećanje nije samo jedna stvar.
Martin kaže da mu je prvo sjećanje da je njegov brat o glavu drugog brata razbio plavi plastični vrč lažno sjećanje. Majka mu je rekla da nikad nisu imali uski, blijedo-plavi plastični vrč. On misli da ga je sanjao i da se u snu pojavila ideja da je to njegovo prvo sjećanje, kao što je sanjao i naknadno „prvo sjećanje“ na ljude koji su mu mahali iz aviona dok je on stajao u vrtu. Godinama je bio uvjeren da je to stvarno. Zbog ovoga mislim da smo veoma mladi kad tražimo svoje prvo sjećanje – onaj trenutak kad smo ušli u tijek vremena.
Moja majka koja nadzire i čuva mnoge stvari, pa tako i sjećanje na moj stalak za lonce, boji se da postaje zaboravna. Daleka je prošlost sve bliža, kaže. Sjećanje na njezinu majku sad je sve jače ukoliko je to istina; kako sjedi u kući pored mora, okružena ushićenom, zabrinutom ili zaokupljenom djecom.
Zapravo, lonci nisu mogli tamo dugo ostati. Srušila bih ih. Bilo bi buke, iako je moje sjećanje na njih potpuno tiho. Možda se sjećam zatišja pred oluju kaosa, buke i ukora. Onog predivnog, sporog trenutka kad beba sasvim utihne jer zna da će je uskoro otkriti.
Neki je dan, bez ispuštenog glasa, posegnula za sadnicama koje držim ispod prozora i, s punom šakom, napunila usta jednogodišnjim biljkama i kompostom za lončanice. Pokušala sam joj otvoriti usta kako bih to izvadila. Čvrsto ih je zatvorila. Ugrizla me, slučajno. Počela je plakati. Usta su joj se otvorila dok je plakala. Potpuno se izgubila u toj nevolji i to mi se činilo toliko nepravednim da nisam rekla ni riječ. Nisam imala srca. Osim toga, na kutiji je pisalo da je kompost sterilan.
Sad mi ne dopušta da joj stavim prst u usta, čak ni da provjerim zube (veoma se ponosi zubima), a kad zatvori usta i okrene se, ona jasno i glasno govori „Ja“. „Oh“, rekla je prijateljica kad je počela puzati, „to je početak kraja“ i znala sam na što je mislila. Početak je to kraja romanse između žene koja je zaboravila tko je i djeteta koje to još uvijek ne zna.
A jednog će dana doći trenutak kojeg će se sjećati zauvijek, bio on divan ili banalan, običan ili neobičan.
My earliest memory is of a pot stand. It is set into a corner with a cupboard on one side and, on the other, a shallow step. This is where my head begins. The step leads to another room, and far on the other side of the room, there is a white-haired woman sitting in a chair.
Discussions with my mother lead to just one pot stand, in a seaside cottage the summer I was eighteen months old. It was, she says, made of black iron and it stood beside a real step and the white-haired woman must be her own mother who died when I was six. This image of her is all that I have, and even then it is not so much an image as a sense. She may have been asleep, but I think she was reading. And there was something very quiet and covert about the pot stand, which was a pyramid affair with shelves for four pots. I can remember a little saucepan on the top shelf. I am tempted to say that there was a big saucepan on the bottom one, but this is pushing things a bit. I would give anything to remember what the lino was like.
At nine months, the baby puts her head in a pot and says, Aaah Aaah Aaah. She says it very gently and listens to the echo. She has discovered this all by herself. By way of celebration, I put my own head into the pot and say, Aaah Aaah Aaah. Then she does it again. Then I do it again. And so on.
The rest of my family don’t believe that I remember the pot stand, on the grounds that it is a stupid memory and, anyway, I was far too young. It is the job of families to reject each other’s memories, even the pleasant ones, and being the youngest I am sometimes forced to fight for the contents of my own head. But my brother broke his elbow that summer. My mother had to take him to hospital in Dublin and my grandmother looked after us while she was away. This was the first time in my life that I was without my mother for any length of time. If she had stayed, then am certain that I would not have remembered anything at all of that house — not the pot stand, and not my grandmother either.
We pilfer our own memories, we steal them from the world and salt them away.
I first left the baby when she was four months old. Some of the days when I was away, she spent with my mother. I wonder what image might remain with her from that time: a colour, a smell, a combination of shapes perhaps, affectless and still — and in the distance, someone. Just that. Someone.
And in the foreground? The carpet perhaps. I hope she remembers my parents’ carpet, the one I remember as a child, with a pattern of green leaves like stepping-stones all the way down the hall.
I have another, possibly earlier, memory of pulling the wallpaper off the wall from between the bars of my cot. My mother is absent from this scene too, but though the Pot Stand Memory is neither happy nor unhappy, this one is quite thrilling. I almost certainly ate the paper. The plaster underneath it was pink and powdery, and I imagine now that I can remember the shivery taste of it. I also remember the shape of the tear on the wall, or I think I do. At any rate, I see it in my mind’s eye — a seam on the left, stunningly straight, with four gammy strips pulled away, like a fat raggedy set of fingers, on the right.
I know this memory is, in some sense, true, but when I try to chase it, it disappears. It exists in peripheral vision, and presents itself only when I focus on something else — like typing, for example. When I stop writing this sentence and look up from the screen to try to see the pattern of the wallpaper — a blank. Memories, by their nature, may not be examined, and the mind’s eye is not the eye we use, for example, to cross the road.
I wonder if this is the way that the baby sees things: vaguely and all at once. I imagine it to be a very emotional way to exist in the world. Perhaps I am being romantic — but the visual world yields nothing but delight to her. There are (it seems) no horrors, no frights. Tiny babies see only in monochrome. I imagine colour leaking into her head like a slowly adjusted screen — tremendously slow, like a vegetable television growing silently in the corner of the room. I imagine her focus becoming sharper and deeper, like some infinitely stoned cameraman adjusting his lens. ‘Oh,’ she says — or something that is the precursor to ‘Oh’, a shallow inhalation, a stillness as she is caught by something, and begins to stalk it: careful, rapt — the most beautiful sound in the world: the sound of a baby’s wondering breath.
Something pulls in me when she is caught like this. For months I am a slave to her attention. The world is all colour, light and texture and I am her proud companion. I have no choice. None of us do. In a café, three women look over to smile at her, and then, as one, they look up. ‘Oh, she likes the light,’ says one, and this fact pleases us all. Immensely.
The light, of course, is horrible, and this is one of the reasons mothers think they are losing their minds: this pride in the baby looking at the light, this pride in the light as they introduce it to the baby, ‘Yes, the light!’ There is a certain zen to it; the world simple and new as we all stop to admire the baby admiring a wrought-iron candelabra with peculiar dangly bits and five — yes, five! — glowing, tulip-shaped bulbs.
She is years away from knowing from what ‘five’ might be, but maybe she already gets the ‘fiveness’ of it. This is the way her eyes move: One, one more! Another one! All of them! The other two. The first one again, another one! Something else.
Sometimes she holds her hand up like the baby Christ, and looks as though she contains everything, and understands it all. I do not ask to be forgiven, but still I feel redemption in the completeness of her gaze. And I feel the redemption in her fat baby wrists and her infinitely fine, fat baby’s hand. The baby is a blessing, but sometimes she does, she must, also bless, which is to say that she simply sees, and lifts her hand, as a sign.
I pick the baby up and we look in the wardrobe mirror, which has always been for her a complicated delight: What is it? It’s a baby! She smiles, it smiles back! (Complication upon complication! It’s me! It’s me! she says, and all her synapses, as I imagine, going ping! ping! ping!) She sees me smiling at her in the mirror; she sees her mother turning to smile at her in the room, and oh, it’s too much, she lunges forwards to examine the knob on the wardrobe door.
There are actually two knobs on the wardrobe. One is wooden and the other, for some reason, is an amber-coloured plastic. The baby goes from one to the other and back again. One of the first confusions in her young life was when myself and Martin both looked at her at the same time: ‘Oh no, there’s two of them.’ It almost felt unfair.
As she grew older, there was nothing she liked more than to be held by one of us and to look at the other, in a somewhat haughty way. Older still, she is completely content when the two of us are with her, quietly in a room. She has travelled from one, to two, perhaps to many. I think of this as she goes from the wooden knob to the amber one — a fairy tale of sameness and difference. This one. That one.
Of course, the first difference between this and the other is not between mother and father, or even between baby and ‘baby in the mirror’, but between one breast and . . . the other! If women had five teats, then mankind might, by now, be living on the moon.
Yesterday, it was warm, and I took off her socks and stood her on the grass. She loved this, but maybe not so much as I did — her first experience of grass. For her, this green stuff was just as different and as delicious as everything else — the ‘first’ was all mine. Sometimes, I feel as though I am introducing her to my own nostalgia for the world.
In the meantime, grass is green and springy and amazingly multiple and just itself. It might even be edible. Everything goes into her mouth. This is the taste of yellow. This is the taste of blue. Since she started moving about she has also experienced the taste of turf, of yesterday’s toast, and probably of mouse droppings, because it was weeks before I realised we were not alone in the house. Paper remains her ultimate goal, and she looks over her shoulder now to check if I am around. That wallpaper looks nice.
I really do wish I could remember my own wallpaper, instead of just the tear I made in it. The baby sleeps in my cot now — the one my father made over forty years ago with some half-inch dowel, and a fairly ingenious sliding mechanism for the side to be let down. I sat beside it one night, feeding her, and I tried to remember what it was like to be inside; the view between the bars and the ripped wallpaper on the wall. Someone, over the years, had painted it nursery blue, but I remembered a green colour, I could almost recall chewing the cross bar at the top. The baby sucked, her eyelashes batting slowly over a drunken, surrendered gaze, and as my attention wandered I saw, under a chip in the blue paint, the very green I ate as a child. A strong and distant emotion washed briefly over me and was gone.
My mother, or someone, pulled the cot away from the wall and, in time, the wallpaper I do not remember was replaced with wallpaper that I do remember (flowers of blue, block-printed on white). Babies love pattern so much I have begun to regret my own attempts at tastefulness. Not a single curlicued carpet for her to crawl over, not a single flower on the wall. Even her toys are in primary colours and her mobile is from the Tate, cut-out shapes, like a Mondrian floating free.
Once I stop trying, I seem to remember my mother giving out to me about the ripped-up wall. She would have been upset about the wallpaper. Perhaps this is why I remember it. It was my first real experience of ‘NO!’
My own child thinks No! is a game. I say it once and she pauses. I say it twice and she looks at me. I say it three times and she laughs. The punch-line!
Tasteful as it is, she loves the mobile. It has a big red circle that spins slowly to blue, and a little square that goes from black to white. There are various rectangles that don’t particularly obsess her but, taken all in all, it is the thing she likes most in the world.
We moved when she was nearly eight months old, and it was another two weeks before I got round to stringing up the mobile for her again. When it was done, she shuddered with delight. It happened to her all in spasm. She realised, not only that the mobile was there, but also that it had once been gone. She remembered it. In order to do this she needed to see three things: the mobile in the old flat, the new room without the mobile, the new room with the mobile. Memory is not a single thing.
Martin says that his first memory, which is of one brother breaking a blue plastic jug over another brother’s head, is false. His mother tells him that they never did have a slender, pale blue plastic jug. He thinks he dreamt about the jug, and that the dream also contained the idea that this was his first memory, as he dreamt a subsequent ‘first memory’ of people waving to him from a plane while he stood in the garden below. He was convinced for years that this was real. This makes me think that we are very young when we search for our first memory — that single moment when we entered the stream of time.
My own mother, who is curator and container of many things, among them the memory of my pot stand, worries that she is getting forgetful. The distant past is closer all the time, she says. If this is true, then the memory of her own mother is getting stronger now; sitting in a house by the sea, surrounded by children who are variously delighted, or worried, or concentrating on other things.
When you think about it, the pots can’t have stayed there for long. I would have pulled them down. There would have been noise, though my memory of them is notably, and utterly, silent. Perhaps what I remember is the calm before a chaos of sound and recrimination. That delicious, slow moment, when a baby goes very, very quiet, knowing it is about to be found out.
The other morning, the baby (silently) reached the seedlings I have under the window, and she filled her mouth with a handful of hardy annuals and potting compost. I tried to prise her mouth open to get the stuff out. She clamped it shut. She bit me (by accident). She started to cry. When she cried, her mouth opened. She was undone by her own distress and this seemed so unfair to me that I left her to it. I hadn’t the heart. Besides, it said on the pack that the compost was sterilised.
But she will not let my finger into her mouth, now, even to check for a tooth (she is very proud of her teeth), and when she clamps it shut and turns away she is saying, ‘Me,’ loud and clear. ‘Oh,’ a friend said, when she started to crawl, ‘it’s the beginning of the end,’ and I knew what she meant. It is the beginning of the end of a romance between a woman who has forgotten who she is and a child who does not yet know.
Until one day there will come a moment, delightful or banal, ordinary or strange, that she will remember for the rest of her life.
Anne Enright, 'Time' in Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, London: Vintage, 2005, 65-72.
Prvo čega se sjećam je stalak za lonce. Nalazi se u kutu pokraj kuhinjskog ormarića s jedne strane i plitke stube s druge. Ovdje moja svijest počinje. Stuba vodi u drugu sobu, a na samom kraju nje sijeda žena sjedi na stolici.
Razgovori s majkom vraćaju se na onaj stalak za lonce u vikendici na moru, na ljeto kad sam imala osamnaest mjeseci. Kaže da je bio od crnog željeza i da se nalazio pokraj prave stube, a sijeda žena sigurno je njezina majka koja je umrla kad sam imala šest godina. Ova slika nje je sve što imam, ali više je to osjećaj nego slika. Možda je spavala, iako mislim da je čitala. Stalak u obliku piramide s policama za četiri lonca imao je u sebi nešto veoma tiho i tajanstveno. Sjećam se i malog lonca na najvišoj polici. Usudila bih se reći da je na donjoj polici bio veliki lonac, ali bi to onda bilo pretjerivanje. Dala bih sve da se mogu sjetiti kakav je bio linoleum.
Beba stara devet mjeseci stavi glavu u lonac i kaže: „Aaa“, „Aaa“, „Aaa“. Kaže to veoma nježno i sluša jeku. Sama je to otkrila. Stavim glavu u lonac, kao da slavim njezino otkriće, i kažem: „Aaa“, „Aaa“, „Aaa“. Onda ona ponovi. Onda ja. I tako ukrug.
Ostatak obitelji ne vjeruje mi da se sjećam stalka za lonce uz obrazloženje da je to glupo sjećanje i da sam ionako bila premlada. Zadatak obitelji je poricati sjećanja, pa čak i ona ugodna, a kao najmlađa se ponekad moram boriti za vlastite misli. Ali toga je ljeta moj brat slomio lakat. Majka ga je morala odvesti u bolnicu u Dublinu, a baka nas je čuvala dok je nije bilo. Bio je to prvi put da sam neko vrijeme bila bez majke. Sigurna sam da se ne bih sjećala ni stalka za lonce ni bake da je moja majka bila tu.
Potkradamo vlastita sjećanja, krademo ih od svijeta pa ih skrivamo.
Prvi sam put ostavila bebu kad je imala četiri mjeseca. Kad me nekim danima ne bi bilo, provodila bi vrijeme s mojom majkom. Pitam se kakva bi joj slika mogla ostati iz toga vremena: boja, miris, možda kombinacija oblika, bez emocija i nepomična – a u daljini, netko. Samo to. Netko.
A u prvom planu? Možda tepih. Nadam se da se sjeća tepiha mojih roditelja koji pamtim kao dijete, s uzorkom zelenog lišća koje je izgledalo poput kamenja koje se proteže niz cijeli hodnik.
Imam još jedno, možda i ranije, sjećanje kako između rešetki krevetića skidam tapete sa zida. Moje majke nema ni u ovoj sceni, a dok sjećanje na stalak za lonce nije ni sretno ni nesretno, ovo je poprilično uzbudljivo. Gotovo sam sigurno jela tapete. Žbuka ispod bila je ružičasta i praškasta, a sad mislim da se sjećam i groznog okusa. Sjećam se i oblika poderotine na zidu, ili bar mislim da se sjećam. U svakom slučaju, u mašti vidim nevjerojatno ravan šav na lijevoj strani, dok na desnoj vise četiri istrgnute trake nalik debelim raščupanim prstima.
Znam da je ovo sjećanje na neki način istinito, ali ono nestane kad ga pokušam uhvatiti. Postoji u perifernom vidu, a pojavljuje se samo kad se fokusiram na nešto drugo – na tipkanje, primjerice. U trenutku kad prestanem pisati ovu rečenicu i podignem pogled s ekrana da bih vidjela uzorak tapeta – praznina. Sjećanja se po svojoj prirodi ne smiju ispitivati, a vid kojim se služimo u mašti nije isti onaj koji koristimo za, recimo, prijeći cestu.
Pitam se vidi li i beba ovako stvari: nejasno i odjednom sve. Pretpostavljam da je to veoma emotivan način postojanja. Možda sam romantična, ali svijet oko nje donosi joj samo užitak. Čini se da nema užasa, strahova. Malene bebe vide samo jednobojno. Zamišljam da joj boja u glavu dolazi kao na ekranu koji se polako pali – užasno sporo, kao na televizoru koji vegetira i tiho radi u kutu. Zamišljam da joj fokus postaje oštriji i dublji, kao da je kamerman koji bez kraja i konca namješta objektiv. „Oh“, kaže ona, ili nešto što prethodi „Oh“, plitki udah, mirnoća kad joj nešto pobudi pažnju i počne mu se prikradati: oprezno, zaneseno – najljepši zvuk na svijetu: zvuk bebinog zadivljenog disanja.
Nešto me privuče kad je tako zanesena. Mjesecima sam rob njezinoj pažnji. Svijet je sav u bojama, svjetlu i teksturi, a ja sam njezin ponosni pratilac. Nemam izbora. Nitko nema. Tri je žene u kafiću pogledaju da joj se nasmiješe, a zatim zajedno podignu pogled. „Oh, pa sviđa joj se svjetlo“, kaže jedna, i to nas sve uveseli. Neizmjerno.
Svjetlo je, naravno, užasno, a upravo zbog ovakvih stvari majke misle da gube razum: ponose se bebom koja gleda u svjetlo, ponose se svjetlom kad ga predstavljaju bebi: „Da, to je svjetlo!“ Ima nekog zena u tome; svijet je jednostavan i nov onda kad svi zastanemo diviti se bebi koja se divi svijećnjaku od kovanog željeza s neobičnim visećim detaljima i pet – da, pet! – sjajnih žarulja u obliku tulipana.
Ona je godinama daleko od spoznaje što bi „pet“ moglo biti, ali možda već shvaća da ima nešto u toj „petici“. Ovako joj se oči kreću: Jedan, još jedan! Pa još jedan! Svi! Druga dva. Ponovno prvi, još jedan! Nešto drugo.
Ponekad podigne ruku poput malog Isusa i izgleda kao da je sve u njoj, a ona to sve razumije. Ne tražim oprost, ali ipak osjećam iskupljenje u beskraju njezina pogleda. Osjećam iskupljenje u bebinim debelim zapešćima i neizmjerno lijepim debelim ručicama. Beba je blagoslov, ali ponekad i ona mora blagosloviti jer vidi i, kao znak, podigne ruku.
Uzmem bebu u ruke i stojimo pred ormarom s ogledalom koje je za nju oduvijek bilo kompliciran užitak: Što je to? To je beba! Nasmiješi se beba, nasmiješi se i odraz! (Komplikacija za komplikacijom! Kaže ona: „To sam ja!“, „To sam ja!“, a ja zamišljam kako joj sve sinapse rade sto na sat!) Vidi da joj se smiješim u ogledalu; vidi svoju majku koja joj se smiješi u sobi, pa joj sve to postane previše i baci se naprijed pregledati kvaku na vratima ormara.
Na ormaru su dvije kvake. Jedna je drvena, a druga je, iz nekog razloga, plastična i boje jantara. Beba ide od jedne do druge pa natrag. Kao veoma mladu zbunjivalo ju je kad bi je Martin i ja istovremeno gledali: „O ne, pa ima ih dvoje“. Skoro pa nepošteno.
Dok je odrastala najviše je voljela da je jedno od nas drži dok u drugo gleda na pomalo ohol način. Kao još starija potpuno je zadovoljna kad smo s njom u sobi, u tišini. Putovala je od jednog do drugog, a možda i do mnogih. Razmišljam o tome dok ona ide od drvene kvake do jantarne – bajka o jednakosti i različitosti. Ova. Ona.
Naravno, prva razlika između ovoga i onoga nije između majke i oca, pa čak ni između bebe i „bebe u ogledalu“, već između jedne i druge … grudi! Čovječanstvo bi možda već živjelo na mjesecu da žene imaju pet sisa.
Jučer je bilo toplo pa sam joj skinula čarape i držala je na travi. Svidjelo joj se, ali možda ne koliko meni – njezin prvi doživljaj trave. Njoj je ova zelena stvar bila podjednako drukčija i ukusna kao i sve ostalo – ono „prvo“ bilo je samo moje. Ponekad imam osjećaj kao da je upoznajem s vlastitom nostalgijom za svijetom.
U međuvremenu je trava zelena, proljetna, nevjerojatno mnogostruka i jednostavno svoja. Možda je čak i jestiva. Sve joj završi u ustima. Ovo je okus žute boje. Ovo je okus plave. Otkad se počela kretati iskusila je i okus zemlje, jučerašnjeg tosta, a vjerojatno i mišjeg izmeta jer su prošli tjedni prije negoli sam shvatila da u kući nismo sami. Papir je njezin krajnji cilj, a sad se osvrće da vidi jesam li u blizini. Tapete izgledaju ukusno.
Da se barem mogu sjetiti svojih tapeta, a ne samo poderotine koju sam napravila. Beba sad spava u mojem krevetiću – onom koji je moj otac napravio prije četrdeset godina s nekim klinom od pola inča i kliznim mehanizmom koji se na zgodan način spušta s jedne strane. Sjedila sam pokraj krevetića jednu noć dok sam je hranila i pokušavala sam se sjetiti kako je to biti unutra; pogled između rešetki na poderane tapete na zidu. Netko ih je tijekom godina obojio u nježno plavu, ali sjećam se zelene boje i gotovo sam se mogla sjetiti da sam žvakala vrh poprečne grede. Beba je sisala, polagano trepćući s opijenim, prepuštenim pogledom, i dok mi je pažnja lutala, ispod krhotine plave boje vidjela sam onu zelenu koju sam kao dijete jela. Snažna i daleka emocija nakratko me preplavila, a zatim nestala.
Netko je, možda moja majka, odmaknuo krevetić od zida i s vremenom su se tapete kojih se ne sjećam zamijenile onima kojih se sjećam (plavi cvjetovi tiskani na bijelom). Bebe toliko vole uzorke da sam počela žaliti zbog vlastitih pokušaja dobrog ukusa. Nijedan tepih sa zavijutcima i viticama da na njemu puže, nijedan cvijet na zidu. Čak su i njezine igračke u primarnim bojama, a vrtuljak iznad krevetića kao da je iz Tate-a, s izrezanim oblicima, poput plutajućeg drva iz slike Pieta Mondriana.
Čini mi se, kad se napokon prestanem truditi, da se sjećam da me je majka grdila zbog poderotine na zidu. Sigurno bi bila uzrujana zbog tapeta. Možda se zato toga i sjećam. To je bio moj prvi pravi doživljaj riječi „NE!“
Moje dijete misli da je „Ne!“ igra. Kažem to jednom i ona zastane. Kažem to dvaput i pogleda me. Kažem to triput i nasmije se. U tome je cijeli štos!
Ona voli vrtuljak iznad krevetića, bez obzira na dobar ukus. Ima veliki crveni krug koji se polako izvrti u plavo i mali kvadrat koji prelazi iz crne u bijelu boju. Tu su i razni pravokutnici koji je posebno i ne zanimaju, ali sve u svemu, nema joj dražeg.
Preselili smo se kad je imala skoro osam mjeseci, a prošla su još dva tjedna prije negoli sam stigla ponovno montirati vrtuljak. Zadrhtala je od užitka kad je bio spreman. Dogodilo joj se to u trzaju. Shvatila je ne samo da je vrtuljak sad tu, već i to da ga nije bilo. Sjetila se toga. Morala je vidjeti tri stvari da bi to bilo moguće: vrtuljak u starom stanu, novu sobu bez vrtuljka i novu sobu s vrtuljkom. Sjećanje nije samo jedna stvar.
Martin kaže da mu je prvo sjećanje da je njegov brat o glavu drugog brata razbio plavi plastični vrč lažno sjećanje. Majka mu je rekla da nikad nisu imali uski, blijedo-plavi plastični vrč. On misli da ga je sanjao i da se u snu pojavila ideja da je to njegovo prvo sjećanje, kao što je sanjao i naknadno „prvo sjećanje“ na ljude koji su mu mahali iz aviona dok je on stajao u vrtu. Godinama je bio uvjeren da je to stvarno. Zbog ovoga mislim da smo veoma mladi kad tražimo svoje prvo sjećanje – onaj trenutak kad smo ušli u tijek vremena.
Moja majka koja nadzire i čuva mnoge stvari, pa tako i sjećanje na moj stalak za lonce, boji se da postaje zaboravna. Daleka je prošlost sve bliža, kaže. Sjećanje na njezinu majku sad je sve jače ukoliko je to istina; kako sjedi u kući pored mora, okružena ushićenom, zabrinutom ili zaokupljenom djecom.
Zapravo, lonci nisu mogli tamo dugo ostati. Srušila bih ih. Bilo bi buke, iako je moje sjećanje na njih potpuno tiho. Možda se sjećam zatišja pred oluju kaosa, buke i ukora. Onog predivnog, sporog trenutka kad beba sasvim utihne jer zna da će je uskoro otkriti.
Neki je dan, bez ispuštenog glasa, posegnula za sadnicama koje držim ispod prozora i, s punom šakom, napunila usta jednogodišnjim biljkama i kompostom za lončanice. Pokušala sam joj otvoriti usta kako bih to izvadila. Čvrsto ih je zatvorila. Ugrizla me, slučajno. Počela je plakati. Usta su joj se otvorila dok je plakala. Potpuno se izgubila u toj nevolji i to mi se činilo toliko nepravednim da nisam rekla ni riječ. Nisam imala srca. Osim toga, na kutiji je pisalo da je kompost sterilan.
Sad mi ne dopušta da joj stavim prst u usta, čak ni da provjerim zube (veoma se ponosi zubima), a kad zatvori usta i okrene se, ona jasno i glasno govori „Ja“. „Oh“, rekla je prijateljica kad je počela puzati, „to je početak kraja“ i znala sam na što je mislila. Početak je to kraja romanse između žene koja je zaboravila tko je i djeteta koje to još uvijek ne zna.
A jednog će dana doći trenutak kojeg će se sjećati zauvijek, bio on divan ili banalan, običan ili neobičan.
Translation commentary
Anja Glavinić
I found Anne Enright’s short story titled 'Time' to be very interesting, engaging, and in many ways different from everything I have translated so far. The story employs a stream of consciousness and combines the present and past, to portray both the baby’s experience at this moment in time and the mother’s memory of her own childhood. In the form of an essay, the text deals with issues of motherhood, childhood, memory, and time itself.
As is always the case, the main aim was not to make the translated text far too literal. For example, when it came to the expression “the contents of my own head”, I opted for a somewhat freer translation and used “vlastite misli”. The meaning was kept, while the solution will surely be more understandable to the Croatian readers than, for instance, “sadržaj vlastite glave”. The sentence “This is where my head begins.”, translated as: “Ovdje moja svijest počinje”, represents a similar example.
On other occasions, the original was more challenging to interpret and, naturally, to translate, as in: “I imagine her focus becoming sharper and deeper, like some infinitely stoned cameraman adjusting his lens.”. Having envisioned what the author might have meant with this particular comparison, I decided to translate it as: “Zamišljam da joj fokus postaje oštriji i dublji, kao da je kamerman koji bez kraja i konca namješta svoj objektiv“, in an attempt to make the translated text as fluent as possible.
Enright’s writing style is interesting, unique, and challenging to (re)create in translation. While finding a balance between staying faithful to the original and adapting the translation to the Croatian language, I have tried to produce a translated text that will successfully show the interplay between mother-child, present-past, and direct experience-memory counterparts, which I believe are key to understanding the story.