Art: If one pauses in a novel by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and, relishing the sound - the steady surf roll - of the majestic English prose, recalls similar sounds from other novels of Marquez, one slowly realises that there is another hand at work. That hand, of course, belongs to Edith Grossman, the alchemist who renders the Spanish of the master into the English we know and love.
Can a translator - an interpreter, as it were, of an original work - not only faithfully interpret the original but in fact improve on it? And if so, does the translation, the improved work, then deserve to stand alone, trumping, in a way, the writing it has interpreted? Does the hand behind such interpretation deserve equal, or in some cases, greater recognition? Are there not two great artists at work?
I haven't read the original versions of the novels of the Irish-based, French writer Michel Houellebecq - Atomised and Platform are the two I have read and admired - but I am grateful for the considerable talents of Frank Wynne, the translator who has delivered to the English-speaking world the means to appreciate one of the most inventive novelists at work today. Wynne, as pre-eminent interpreter of a talented artist, is thus ideally positioned to explore the logical next step to translation and interpretation: forgery.
Of the 35 extant paintings generally attributed to Johannes Vermeer van Delft, several of which are disputed, only two are in private hands. This makes it highly unlikely that a Vermeer will come to auction in the foreseeable future. Such inaccessibility makes the value of Vermeer almost incalculable.
Vermeer is generally accepted as the greatest Dutch master. During his relatively short lifetime - 1632-1675 - his most extraordinary achievement was the way in which he recorded the eye's experience of the soft play of daylight on varied shapes and surfaces. "Vermeer's skill was in combining few colours, mixing little and using layers of lakes and varnishes to build up the illusion of life", explains an art teacher to his young pupil, early in I Was Vermeer. The Dutch master's reputation slipped into obscurity after his death and only re-emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century, when his sometimes almost "photographic" style was championed by a number of Dutch and other critics seeking a refuge from Impressionism.
One young pupil who listened in awe to how Vermeer ground lapus lazuli to make ultramarine - "the colour of genius" - was called Han van Meegeren. Born in 1889 in Deventer, Holland, Han was destined to be a painter. Despite the wishes of his schoolteacher father, who made the boy repeat the mantra Ik weet niets, ik ben niets, ik kan niets (I know nothing, I am nothing, I am capable of nothing), Han enrolled in the faculty of architecture at the Institute of Technology in Delft, the cradle of the Dutch Golden Age and the town of Vermeer.
With prodigious talent, an unshakeable belief in his own genius and an utter disregard for convention, Han van Meegeren set out to conquer the world of art. However, his desire for the good life, and particularly for beautiful women, brought out another trait in Han: he was a pathological liar who would stop at nothing to fund what he wanted. He found that his skill at copying other artists - at interpreting their work - was on a par with his own skill as an original artist. The next logical step, when the money ran out, was to actually paint a piece and flog it off as an old master. The master Han chose was Vermeer.
" if restoration is the handmaiden to Fine Art, she is also the midwife to forgery," says Wynne, who writes with a sure talent for pace and telling detail. Han was an accomplished restorer. In the mid-1930s - in this book it is sometimes unclear in what year the action is taking place - Han, endeavouring to create a lost Vermeer masterpiece from scratch, happened upon a recent discovery that was to solve everything. It was called plastic. Up to then, new paint could not be hardened like 300-year-old paint; alcohol testing found the forger out. But plastic changed everything. Han mixed his paint with liquidised plastic and painstakingly created Die Emmausgangers (The Supper at Emmaus), which he sold as a long-lost Vermeer for an amazing half a million Dutch guilders to the Boijmans Museum in The Hague. The new Vermeer was a sensation and soon became the most viewed picture in Holland.
I Was Vermeer is as much an exposition of the herd-like instincts of art critics as it is a study of the art of the forger. Han's genius was not only to create a Vermeer indistinguishable from the real thing, but to also invent its provenance, thus sucking the critics into seeing what they wanted to believe. Although he became a rich man, dashing off a succession of inferior "Vermeers" and earning in one year the equivalent of $20 million, Han van Meergeren was a flawed genius, caught between his need for money and his craving for recognition as an artist.
The subtitle of the book is "The Legend of the Forger who Swindled the Nazis". Wynne, who has written an absorbing page-turner, describes the moment in Nuremberg, when the jailed Göring, who had swapped dozens of authentic Dutch masters in order to get his hands on Han's "Vermeer", Christ and the Adulteress, learned that his purchase was a fake:
"[The former Reichsmarschall] looked as if for the first time he had discovered there was evil in the world".
Peter Cunningham's most recent novel, The Taoiseach, is published by Hodder Headline Ireland
I Was Vermeer By Frank Wynne Bloomsbury, 276pp. £14.99