Barnaby, if you’ll recall, himself attended Columbia College but was kicked out five hours before commencement; and though his better sense tells him that everyone who, in the course of his exuberant senior-year prank, was covered with chicken blood or otherwise molested, must by now have forgiven, or forgotten, or at least satisfied his vengeance by contemplating the state of Barnaby’s life; still, Barnaby took no chances—he walked into Columbia’s Faculty House in a false mustache, fedora, and trench coat, and in a thick coat of a cologne that he normally doesn’t wear. (To throw them off the scent, if you will.)

The name of the talk he attended was “English: An Invasive Species?” It was moderated by David Damrosch. After a series of introductory remarks by various personages and the usual listing of prizes, Catalan writer Francesc Parcerisas began. He read a speech that mentioned briefly his own introduction to translation—being asked to translate a book from French into Spanish—and talked, among other things, about the danger of English translations squeezing out other translations, which is a danger Barnaby had not thought of before. If a Hungarian novel has already been translated into English, who will bother translating it into Dutch? It is a fair point. He also said, “We must be careful translation does not become a mark of submission,” also a fair point. (Barnaby would like to mention that the Catalan cultural ministry seems to be doing a hell of a job.)

Then Chinese writer Ma Jian spoke, through a visibly nervous translator sitting beside him, without notes. He made the fascinating point that the Chinese Communist decision to reform the written language—to abandon, that is, instruction in Classical Chinese, and to write in the vernacular instead—put the body of China’s own traditional literature beyond the reach of the average reader, and so the examples that he and other novelists of his generation looked to were translations of European books. This is quite in accord with Barnaby’s experience: on a visit to a Chinese elementary school, he found that none of the children had any but the most banal views of the ancient Taoist classics; he also noted that the two most commonly displayed books in train station bookstores in northern China were Who Moved My Cheese? and former GE CEO Jack Welch’s volume of autobiographical braggadocio. (Of course, Barnaby only noticed these books in particular because he cannot read Chinese.)

Ma Jian also noted that Shakespeare’s plays were first translated into Chinese as novels, and remarked that the history of translation in China was only one hundred years old—that before that the languages of foreigners were held to be like the language of birds. Barnaby suspected that Mr. Ma’s remark about translation had itself been simplified in translation—there were Chinese monks, after all, translating sutras from the Sanskrit in the first millennium, not to mention all the translating into and out of Manchu that must have gone on under the Qing—but he could not stay to ask a question about it, nor even to hear more than three words from the third speaker, Siri Hustvedt, because he had to run out to pursue his own exercise in translation by taking his visiting Japanese friend Mr. Ogura to a Yankees game.

Several years ago, due to an unlikely and implausible set of circumstances, Barnaby spent more than six weeks sleeping on the floor with the Ogura family above their restaurant in a suburb of Tokyo. They graciously took him in and made him at home. This week, Mr. and Mrs. Ogura had come to New York to visit their daughter, who lives here, and Mr. Ogura, a great fan of New York Yankee Hideki Matsui, had asked Barnaby to accompany him to a game. So Barnaby ran out of Faculty House at five-thirty, stripping off his trench coat and false mustache (but not, unfortunately, his terrible cologne), and hurried down to pick up his friend on 44th street and then ride back up to the stadium. Suddenly he was forced to make use of his rusty and desiccated Japanese.

They rode up on a crowded 4 train and poured out—with all the other white people—at 161st street in the Bronx. They filtered through security; when the security guard asked Mr. Ogura if he had a cell phone, and if so, to open it, he turned around to look at Barnaby, and Barnaby said, “Keitai—keitai denwa o misete.” They wondered why this was required, and Barnaby laboriously constructed a sentence about building a bomb from separate pieces. They stopped at the information booth to ask where their seats were, and the woman behind the counter—who seemed to speak perfect English—slowly read aloud to Barnaby the numbers on his ticket. “Yes,” Barnaby, “I can read the numbers; my question is—” “Zis ticket,” Mr. Ogura said, “whear?” and the woman pointed.

As they watched the Yankees get slaughtered by the Blue Jays, they explained things to each other: Mr. Ogura explained to Barnaby that Derek Jeter had hurt his elbow, and Barnaby—by the third inning covered like a baby duck with a fine down of cotton candy—explained what Crackerjack is. “You know the song,” Barnaby said, singing, “Take me out to the ball game,” and Mr. Ogura assented—they play it in the seventh inning; “buy me some peanuts and Crackerjack,” Barnaby said, and a glorious light of comprehension lit up Mr. Ogura’s face. “Aaah!” he said. “Sore wa Crackerjack?” That’s Crackerjack? Then he wanted to know whether they sold it elsewhere, or only at Yankee Stadium.

It was a beautiful moment, and it set Barnaby thinking. (The game certainly was not very interesting—it would be hard to describe the Yankees’ performance without resorting to violent sexual metaphors.) Certainly if he had not studied Japanese, it would have been difficult for him to become friends with a Japanese man who spoke nearly no English; and more directly, if he had not studied Japanese, he would not have traveled to Japan and found himself without anywhere to sleep, and forced to take advantage of a brief acquaintance. This is the obvious virtue of translation: it expands our experience, it broadens our world, it renders more complex and beautiful our notions of humanity. But more than this, it occurred to him, there was a benefit precisely in the imperfection of his Japanese. Mr. Ogura, nearly 59 years old, runs a small restaurant in the suburbs, and has three children; Barnaby is not yet thirty, pretends to be a bohemian, and has no real responsibilities apart from a dead goldfish in his room at his parents’ house. It occurred to him that in the normal course of events, two such men might find some awkwardness in talking or spending time together; but they are preserved from this by the constraints of their linguistic situation. Mr. Ogura speaks slowly and carefully, repeating each phrase until he sees Barnaby nod; and Barnaby, freed for the time from the tyranny of his all-too-conscious English-language mind, falls into no dreamy, deadly complexities; and their shared project of communicating offers a broad and fertile scope for the expression of their friendship. Barnaby was gratefully reminded that such ideas and sentiments as “where is our section,” “do I have to tip the beer guy,” and “the Yankees certainly suck tonight” really are the fundamental building blocks of human life; he was reminded that without empathy and imagination, there can be no communication, but just as certainly, perfect understanding would be not communication but communion—that it is the shared struggle towards mutual understanding that itself constitutes the magnificent human project.

In sum, they had several beers at the game, and then went to the East Village to introduce Mr. Ogura to borscht and have some more beer, and, to make a long story short, Barnaby will not be attending any more PEN events until this evening.