4 - The Art of the Impossible

Summary

In Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Aurora Floyd, the eponymous heroine's cousin Lucy feels for Talbot, the man she loves, intuiting from his behaviour that Aurora has rejected his marriage proposal. Yet her feelings are themselves misunderstood, for Talbot ‘could read pity in that tender look, but possessed no lexicon by which he could translate its deeper meaning.’ Earlier the same man is described as falling in love with Aurora before he realizes it: ‘Lucy knew, in short, that which as yet Talbot did not know himself: she knew that he was fast falling over head and ears in love with her cousin’. Some of us, according to the novelist, are better translators of others' emotions; some of us, she assumes, aren't good at translating our own. ‘Love / translates / as love’, Matthew Mead writes in ‘Translator to Translated’, his poem address to Johannes Brobowski. But consider uses of the word ‘love’ in relation to different people. If I say ‘I love you’ and then again ‘I love you’, but on each occasion the ‘you’ is another person who relates to me differently, wouldn't the differences concealed by the same second-person pronoun ‘you’ inflect the emotions represented by the same verb ‘love’? Altering the object of such verbs can dramatically change their implications (‘I love ice cream’ or ‘I love my country’, for example). They might inflect the subject pronoun ‘I’: the feelings we call love can have the power to sustain or attack the cohesiveness of our identities.