Hidden Identities and Translation in David Treuer's Novel

The Translation of Dr Apelles is a text within a text, a love story within a love story. It is a story of hidden things: hidden books, hidden identities, hidden pasts, and hidden meanings. Things appear one way, but realities exist beyond the limits of their appearances and in opposition to their surfaces. David Treuer uses these hidden things and the concept of hiding to accomplish revelations and contradictions that enrich the depth and development of his characters.

In The Translation of Dr Apelles, David Treuer provides the reader with two stories. One is the story of Dr. Apelles, librarian and translator — his work life and his personal life, his past and his present. The other story is contained in the text Dr. Apelles is translating, which relates the tale of Bimaadiz and Eta, nineteenth-century Native Americans. Both stories can be read as love stories, although the first seems very ordinary and unexciting compared to the adventures lived by Bimaadiz and Eta. The nineteenth-century lovers are suckled by wild beasts as infants, roam the wilderness together for weeks on end, and grow up to be the most admired and most desired people in their community. They enjoy a great friendship that becomes love. They appear to be archetypal and mythological beings who survive traumatic events that threaten their lives, their people, and their love. Their love has to overcome a great many obstacles.

Compared to Bimaadiz and Eta, Dr. Apelles and Campaspe are rather plain, normal people. He is an unassuming middle-aged man who lives a very regimented, closed life, and she is a woman in the prime of her youth and beauty whose life seems less than exciting. These two people may be archetypes of some kind, but they are not mythological or larger than life the way Bimaadiz and Eta are. Dr. Apelles and Campaspe appear to be the opposite of the other pair. Their lives seem small and lost in the world they inhabit.

However, the story of the contemporary characters is more realistic than the story Dr. Apelles is translating. The author takes the reader into the small world of Apelles and Campaspe and illuminates the true size of their lives, revealing the complexity of their thoughts, feelings, hopes, inhibitions, fears, and desires — all working at cross-purposes inside them. These twenty-first-century lovers have a great deal to overcome to be together, despite appearing so plain, simple, and ordinary in contrast to Bimaadiz and Eta. Bimaadiz and Eta's tale is compelling on the surface with its adventurous scenes, but it is simple in comparison to the other story. As Treuer writes, "Simple feelings only occur in stories" [194]. Apelles and Campaspe are real-life, sophisticated characters with whom the reader can relate. Their story is in a language and a context familiar to today's audience, making it ultimately more compelling than the historical, more mythological tale.

The situation of Dr. Apelles's life is reflected in RECAP and his work there. RECAP, the Research Collection and Preservation facility, is where a consortium of large libraries has decided to store little-used or completely ignored books, with the idea that someday these books might become important or useful. Dr. Apelles works as a sorter at RECAP. All day long he handles books just long enough to size them up and get a sense of what they are about before placing them into storage boxes from which they very likely will never emerge again. The process of receiving, sorting, and storing the books at RECAP is highly structured and regimented in order to prevent contamination of the collection. Even the comings and goings of the employees at the facility are meticulously controlled and observed so that no breaches of security or protocol occur.

Dr. Apelles lives his life the way RECAP conducts its business. He has his daily routine of rising in the morning, walking to the train station, riding out to the countryside to the RECAP complex, and sorting books without taking breaks. Then he takes the train back to the city, dines in the same restaurant, has his one beer, goes home, and reads a bit from one of his journals of translation scholarship before sleeping in his queen-sized bed. This routine he breaks every other Friday when he goes to the archive and works on his translations, carrying his pencils and having the same brief conversation with the reading-room librarian every two weeks.

Dr. Apelles interacts with people the same way he sorts books at RECAP. As a long-time resident of his apartment building, he knows a lot of basic information about his neighbors — their names, their ages, the ages of their children, their occupations, and their habits. This knowledge gives his neighbors a kind of comfort and lends Dr. Apelles a certain respectability, but it is all superficial. He does not really know them. He is not involved in their lives beyond brief exchanges in the hallway and the lobby, and they do not really know him. Apelles is himself like a book kept in RECAP.