Les Mis

There was a man in Tokyo, a really old man, who I sat down next to one day in the lunchroom on campus between classes. I opened my textbook and started going over -teoku congugations, and he scooted closer and asked if I spoke English.

His English was stunted but he carefully and enthusiastically explained what he was doing there.

The old man had never left Japan; when he was young, he read Les Misérables in English translation, and he cried. He could feel what the characters felt, he said as he pulled out a worn paperback 5 inches thick and, cradling it in his hands, tipped it so that I could see the title. He had never been so touched by anything in his life.

"Is French book," he told me. "English has different meaning. French has original meaning."

He took French classes for years in order to read the original French version of the book.

The man grinned proudly as he emptied one French-English dictionary and half a dozen notebooks out of his bag and flipped one open, angling them toward me so that I could see the tiny English scrawls. He pointed out the date and page number on the top of each page as he explained that he was slowly translating the book from French to English.

"Very slow! You help me!" He laughed as he said it, a self depreciating and overwhelmed grin hiding his eyes.

I laughed with him, tried to tell him that I'd never read Les Misérables, that my French was probably no better than his, but that I would help him with whatever he needed. He just laughed again and showed me the hundreds of pages of translations, notes scribbled into the margins, page numbers only into the 300's for a fifteen-hundred page book. He'd been translating for years.

He told me more about his project and showed me some magic tricks he could do with hair ties. He taught me how to do them, and gave me two of the ties to show my friends.

I saw him often in the eight months after that: in the library, in the cafeteria, in the commons, always pouring over his monstrous volume of Les Misérables, French dictionary at his elbow.

I'm not sure he remembered me. Maybe he talks to all the foreign girls. I don't know how far he's gotten by now, and I never got his name.