One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories(67)

But, luckily or not, the need to write always went away before he felt the need to really do anything about it.


One day, it didn’t.

One day, on a walk around the lake like every other, Audetat kicked a rock along the path and then, for no reason he could pinpoint other than that this idea had been stalking him patiently for a long time and waiting for precisely the right moment to ambush him, Audetat was jumped by an excitement-coated despair that shouted at him that this daily life—all he could ever have hoped for, as a different, calmer, narrower voice in his head enumerated reasons for every morning—was not a reward but a procrastination; the loveliest and lightest procrastination that anyone could ever have invented for him, but a procrastination nonetheless.

He rushed back inside and set out to find something that would quiet the voice that had just grabbed him and shaken him, almost literally.

He knew he wasn’t a poet anymore. Still, while he didn’t know exactly what he wanted to say, he knew exactly how it should sound. He knew the acoustics of his age, he knew the precise echo that greatness made within it, and now, as much as he loved—finally—everything in his life, all he wanted was to hear that sound. He needed that sound to pull him out of where he was now, not because he didn’t love where he was now, but because he did, so much, that he needed to find out if he could make a sound that could compete with it.

“He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about … like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.”

— THE GREAT GATSBY, F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

He must have felt that he had lost the world he’d known, that he had finally defaulted on the impossible price of living so long with one dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is, and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world: material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted about, neither by chance nor design … like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding towards him through the once-familiar trees.

— THE GREAT GATSBY, F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, TRANS. J. C. AUDETAT


The world took a moment to figure out what it was reading. Then another moment.

“At first glance, an English-to-English translation of The Great Gatsby would seem to be the very last thing we need. But The Great Gatsby has already been translated many times since its publication: into film by Baz Luhrmann, into life by Jay Z. In this context, Audetat’s translation is not only the most contemporary, but the most faithful.”18

“As the definitive fable of American success—the real, the imagined, and the imagined-as-real—Gatsby is still inexorably tied to its emblematic author, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, and to its time, the 1920s. This translation of Gatsby is the same book, but with its colors refreshed, its lines reinforced, its themes reshaded. But most important, the novel’s tumultuous and defining romance with the nature of success is now filtered to us not through the experiences of the great literary star of another era, but through the great literary star of ours.”19

“The Gatsby for our time.”20

“The timelessness of The Great Gatsby is not evidence that we don’t need this translation—it is proof that we do. We deserve to read this book as effortlessly as the original readers did, without needing to time-travel back to a place of distancingly different idioms and issues. If you want to read the Great Gatsby in 2013, the way that Fitzgerald intended The Great Gatsby be read in 1925—read Audetat’s translation.”21

“I loved it!”22

“A landmark insult—not only to Fitzgerald and to Gatsby, but to literature itself.”23

“A joke. And not a funny one. F.”24

“The Emperor himself has come before the masses and declared himself naked—and still, people praise his robe?”25

“Has the world lost its goddamn mind?!”26


It was the last thing J. C. Audetat wrote, and the last thing he needed to write. He had now said all he had felt the need to say in his particular life. It was nothing that hadn’t been said before, but he had said it all better than it had ever been said in the language of his own time and place.

Which was, in fact, the only language he knew.

Audetat stayed at his home, safely surrounded with the rewards that the original mischief of the compromises of his artistic journey had brought him, as the buzzing of the many minds he had touched vibrated incessantly and harmlessly about him, around him, and through him, like radio waves, for the rest of his life.

It felt like poetry.


1. Nick Hornby, The Believer.

2. Janet Maslin, New York Times.

3. Harold Bloom, Yale Book Review.

4. Brian Lewis, Men’s Health.

5. Keith Gessen, N+1.

6. Junot Díaz, New York Times Book Review.

7. Frank Rich, New York.

8. Camille Paglia, Salon.

9. Dan Chiasson, Harper’s Magazine.

10. Alan Green, New York Review of Books.