Ghosting Read online

  To make the January deadline, we were told we would have to have everything at the printers by 1 December. That gave us only eighteen days. It would take two days for the team to read the manuscript before the translation could even get underway. That left sixteen days, just over two weeks. It seemed impossible.

  But somehow we managed it. Eighteen days of furious cottage industry, midnight oil, loss of sleep, black coffee and increased phone bills. There isn't much daylight in Scotland in late November, so we became like creatures of the night, toiling away in the dark. Every three or four days, we met at my house, usually in the evening after the children were in bed. We all had young children and working partners, so looking after children often had to be fitted around the translating work. During these meetings we made a list of questions for the authors, usually about slang from the brothel or prison, which none of us felt confident about. The authors were both recent immigrants to the USA, so I made long transatlantic phone calls, often in the middle of the night, to try to sort out the problems. The authors also faxed additional pages to remove anachronisms and take account of the latest political events. The whole translation also had to be typed up since the translators all wrote in longhand—it was before the days of personal computers. It was a formidable task, frenetically executed, and we could certainly have done with more time. But we got away with it. Red Square was delivered to the printers on 1 December and the first 10,000 copies were ready by 23 December. The book was published in January 1983 and the story it told made the One O'Clock News. A week later I was interviewed by David Frost on the launch day of the breakfast television programme TV-am— after adverts for washing powder and before Madhur Jaffrey talking about Indian cooking. The paperback rights were sold to Corgi for £25,000, and Kyril Fitzlyon, the distinguished translator of Tolstoy and Chekhov, wrote in his review that the translation was “superb to the point of invisibility.”

  In the dead of night, alarms went off at the palace. The police rushed to the scene but by the time they arrived the burglars had fled. Tiger, summoned from his residence in Mayfair, was distraught. He didn't care about stolen office equipment and other standard swag. The only thing that mattered was that Kaiser, his beloved tiger pelt, had gone. It was an incalculable loss. New Scotland Yard took on the case, but when they failed to get a quick result, Tiger took matters into his own hands.

  “I am going to infiltrate the underworld,” he declared.

  Over the next day or two, notices appeared in the classified columns of the Evening Standard appealing for information about Kaiser's whereabouts and offering a reward for his safe return. Meanwhile Tiger sat by a special phone connected to a tape recorder, waiting for news from the hostage taker, living and breathing every moment of the drama. He made hundreds of calls on another line, his voice alternating between hushed conspiratorial tones and, when it came to the police whom he thought incompetent, full-scale roaring. “My tiger is irreplaceable. I need to get it back! Don't you understand?” Like onlookers at a road accident, his entire retinue stood by, entranced by the ghastliness of it all. It was hard not to conclude that at some basic level Tiger enjoyed the excitement—he thrived on sensationalism, and the case of the kidnapped tiger skin had all the necessary elements. It also gave him a chance to take control. His plan was to outwit the police and tackle single-handed the shady world of gangsters and goons. It was pure theatre. In between phone calls he talked about the mindset of the criminal, telling Gothic tales of villainy and violence among the scarfaces, their wickedness redeemed only by a strict code of honour. It was this last point that convinced him that his “baby” would be returned safe.

  “I know these people,” he said. “They will slit your throat, but they have tender hearts.”

  He was right. The tender hearts soon got in touch and a plan was hatched. One of Tiger's girls—he always called her La Diva on account of her sultry looks and passionate temperament—was to walk up and down Bond Street wearing a scarf in distinctive colours. Contact would be made, provided there was no police presence and she brought with her £1000 in used notes.

  “She will carry the money in her knickers,” announced Tiger, masterminding the operation.

  After parading in Bond Street for about ten minutes, La Diva was whisked off in a fast car and driven to King's Cross station where, in exchange for the thousand pounds, she was given a key to a left-luggage locker in which she found Kaiser safe and well. Tiger and Kaiser were reunited, and both smiled for the cameras. “I have paid a king's ransom for a king,” he told reporters.

  Over the next year or two, the Russian list made good progress. The success of Red Square helped subsidise a number of less obviously marketable writers, mainly dissidents who risked reprisals at home by publishing their books abroad. Others, such as Kornilov, Kuznetsov and Voznesenskaya, had been expelled from the Soviet Union and now lived in exile in Germany. Many Soviet writers were drawn to Munich, the home of Radio Liberty (which broadcast to countries behind the Iron Curtain), and they were usually represented by literary agencies in Western Europe, mainly in France, Germany and the UK.

  Perhaps the most famous exiled writer at the time was Georgii Vladimov. He had an international reputation as both a novelist and a champion of human rights, and in 1969 he had written a book called Three Minutes’ Silence, first published in a censored version in the Soviet journal Novy Mir. It was set on board a trawler and provided a devastating critique, both explicit and symbolic, of Soviet society. Previous attempts to translate it into English had failed because of the almost insuperable difficulties of conveying the richly textured language of the sea together with the trawlermen's slang. Michael Glenny was arguably the finest translator of Russian literature in the whole of Europe—he had already captured Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn and Nabokov brilliantly—and I was thrilled when he agreed to take on the Vladimov. Michael Glenny had a musical ear and he loved words. Their sounds and rhythms together with the power they contained were all elements that he excelled at bringing into English. Three Minutes’ Silence was a formidable undertaking but he was equal to it, and the English translation came out in 1985. Just five years later, at the age of sixty-two, Michael died suddenly in Moscow after a heart attack. He was there to work on the archives of writers who had perished in the camps and he had arranged to receive documents from the KGB, the organisation most feared and detested by all dissident writers. This was an irony that Michael above all would have appreciated.

  Another interesting writer on our list was Julia Voznesenskaya. She had founded the first independent women's group in her country, and as a result she had been sent to a Siberian labour camp. At home she was known as a poet, but after her expulsion she became the voice of those she had to leave behind. Letters of Love was an anthology of letters from women political prisoners to their husbands and children, written on whatever scraps of paper were available in the camps and smuggled out to their destinations. We also published The Women's Decameron, her account of ten women quarantined in a Leningrad maternity hospital, detailing the hardship and grim reality of their lives.

  Naturally enough, most of these émigré writers wrote harrowing tales reflecting their own experience, and after a while the weight of all this misery was quite oppressive. Just by looking at the titles on the list I could feel the load of human suffering. In 1984, however, I was offered a book that was beguilingly different from the others. It was a haunting, magical tale of a young boy's first love and the discovery of something mysterious that threatened both him and those closest to him. It followed the cycle of the seasons and was set on the shores of Lake Baikal, the deepest lake in the world and so beautiful that Chekhov called it “the pearl of Siberia.” Threatened by terrible industrial pollution, it was the perfect metaphor for the tension between old and new values in Soviet Russia. The book's author, Leonid Borodin, was first arrested in 1967 for being a Christian. In 1969 he had gone on hunger strike along with Yuli Daniel and Aleksandr Ginzburg at the infamous Camp 17, one of t
he strictest camps in the whole country, reserved for those who were feared for their ability to influence other prisoners. In spite of all this, Borodin continued to believe in the incorruptibility of the Russian soul—for him even the prison guards were not by nature bad men. This gracious faith shaped his novel and gave it a dreamlike quality. When I finished reading it, I decided not to give it out for translation but to work on it myself. In Russian the book was called God Chuda I Pechali, which became in English The Year of Miracle and Grief, a title that in some measure was to foreshadow the next part of my own life.

  On a Monday morning in November 1985, I drove to Edinburgh airport to meet my husband. He was returning from Australia where he had spent two months on an academic fellowship. It was a clear day, the sun was low in the sky, and as I drove through Fife towards Auchtermuchty the curve of the Lomond Hills was a huge green dragon on the horizon.

  On the way, I had dropped the children off at their primary school. They were madly excited at the prospect of their father coming home. Jonathan, aged seven, had been promised a boomerang and couldn't stop talking about it. His sisters, five and nine years old, chose bright yellow ribbons for their hair to mark the special day. Two months is a long stretch in the lives of young children, and at the start they had found it impossible to imagine the size of so many days and weeks lumped together. To help them get the idea, I acquired a huge roll of paper from a local mill, cut two pieces measuring ten feet by six, stuck them together for extra strength, and bound the edges with strong masking tape. With the help of a long ruler, felt tip pens and six small hands, the sheet was divided into sixty squares, each square representing one day and marked with the date and the day of the week. The children all liked the idea of filling the squares with “something for Daddy”— a poem, a picture, an account of something that happened at school, a message or a short letter that he could read when he got back. I said it could be a sort of diary, a record of what they had been doing or what they had been thinking about when he was away. In a way it would be like speaking to him. I told them they didn't need to do something every day, just when they wanted to.

  The huge paper sheet was pinned up in the kitchen. It stretched from floor to ceiling and took up nearly the whole wall. I explained to the children that for the first few weeks they would have to stand on a stepladder to fill in the squares, but as time went by they would be able to reach without the ladder, just by standing. When they could sit or kneel on the floor to fill in the squares, it would nearly be time for their dad to come back. The wall chart looked intimidating at first, very white and empty, but soon it began to fill up. And as the weeks passed it was transformed into a wonderful specimen of modern graffiti art. There were complex compositions in bold leaning letters or soft curly script, thoughtfully decorated with polka dots or crosshatching; and every so often, great surrealist splashes. Emily, the eldest, filled some squares with more abstract pieces that reminded me of the paintings of Mark Rothko—indeterminate shapes in muted, tender colours.

  I arrived early at Edinburgh airport and sat down to watch the comings and goings. You are allowed to sit and stare at an airport without being judged a snoop, without feeling that you have to look away. You can even feel a kind of closeness with complete strangers. It's interesting to try to spot the different types of journey—you can easily tell the short business trip from the six months abroad, for example—and after a while you become expert at it. With young lovers, the length of separation is more difficult to judge; they kiss and embrace at the edge of a volcano, thinking themselves free and outside the rules, not yet doubting their ability to stay true. Young people can still bear the weight of love.

  Observing men and women meeting and parting can tug at the heart, but you often see the best of people at this time, the moments when they are saying goodbye to one another, or else waiting for someone to arrive. Their faces tell a particular story—you see the precarious happiness in their eyes. The emigrations are unmistakable: there are usually elderly relatives in attendance, not knowing quite how to fill the last moments, trying to hold onto something before it slips away. The women touch their hair, the men hitch up their trousers. There are lost continents in these partings.

  After an hour or so, the information screen said the plane had landed, and I made my way to the arrivals gate. The prospect of seeing my husband again made me light-hearted and lightheaded. It was long before the days of electronic chatter, and telephoning Australia was still quite expensive. It had been a long time, without much contact, and we weren't very good at being apart. Up till then we had been separated for only a day or two at a time. Over the weeks we had written long, loving, missing-you letters—I have them still—in which we had vowed never again to be apart for so long.

  Which was only one of the reasons why it was unthinkable, inconceivable, incomprehensible that just a few minutes after he arrived—at the edge of the luggage carousel, during the ding-dong chimes of information announcements, with passengers grabbing their bags, and an airport cleaner sweeping around us, and people watching as I myself had watched only minutes before—he declared that we were to be apart for ever. When he walked through the doors towards me he had looked uncertain, exhausted and, before our first mad hug, I thought—I think I even said—you're home now, the long journey's over, everything's fine. But it wasn't fine: he had met someone else, he had fallen in love, he could not, did not want to, live without her; he had come back only because he had a return ticket and because his job was here; he was sorry, it was awful, but he would not be staying; he would be giving up his job and applying for work in Australia.

  My husband had never learned to drive and St. Andrews was fifty miles away. How did I get us back safely? I remember only two things about the journey home: a buzzing in my head, and every so often a sourness, bitter as bile, surging into my mouth, forcing me to gag and swallow. I was driving not under the influence of drugs or drink, either of which might land you in prison, but under the influence of something much worse, but for which there was no name, at least none I can think of, and no law against.

  Over the next few days the marriage was dismantled, not systematically or by process of natural atrophy, but randomly and with head-splitting cracks followed by great chunks of falling masonry. During lulls, the two of us, the talking wounded, slumped at the kitchen table. Just a few feet away the children's graffiti creation, thick with love, stood its ground—the writing on the wall.

  He moved out on 13 November. The newspaper on the mat that day told of a volcano erupting in Colombia, burying 20,000 people from four villages in the foothills of the Andes. The sudden end of a marriage has no narrative integrity: it is the muddle following a natural disaster, or a violent derailment. It seems to take place in the murk, and the murk is lit only by moments of bittersweet poignancy. It feels like the death of love; and all that remains is the mourning of it.

  Translation is perhaps a metaphor for what is a basic human need: conveying in words our experience of the world. Whether it's the birth of a baby, the sound of rainfall, the getting and losing of love—we search for ways of expressing these happenings in a language that can be understood by others. In that sense we are all translators.

  Cervantes compared translation to looking at Flemish tapestries from the wrong side. I suppose he meant that, while it's possible to make out the general shape and colour of the pictures on the front, a lot is lost and obscured by all those dangling threads. Cervantes was right, but he has not given us a reason not to translate, because even the wrong side of the tapestry can be worth seeing.

  For those who translate for a living, from one language into another, the difficulties are immense. Translation is so much more than mere words. Such a lot is bound up in any language—the way sentences are arranged, the order in which ideas unfold, the cultural nuances and so on—and each language has its own particular appearance, its own structure, its own texture and rhythm and flow. In the end, of course, it does come down to words, and t
he best translators have an abiding love affair with them.

  It's noticeable that when reviewers praise a literary translation they generally call it “smooth” or “unobtrusive,” often criticising passages that sound “foreign.” It is an odd idea this, judging the translation of a work that started life in another country in another tongue according to its concealment of foreignness—as if it were the translator's job to turn Murakami or Dostoevsky into John Bull. The idea seems to have come about because we tend to assume that a text that doesn't read naturally in English must be a bad translation. Which isn't necessarily the case, partly because some literary texts can sound “foreign” in their own language, and partly because a translation into what is generally known as “good English prose” might easily have ignored or lost the integrity of the original work.

  Ideally, of course, the translated work should be able to engage the reader in much the same way as the original, to replicate the author's vision and the particular spirit of the work. But this is a formidable task, and sometimes impossible, particularly in those languages that belong to different groups. In Japanese, for example, the sound of a word often imitates its meaning, but this apparently extends far beyond the plops and kerplunks and cock-a-doodle-doos that we have in English. In Japanese the whole of the natural world—the seasonal changes, the different kinds of rain and wind, the sun and the stars and the oceans—all of these are represented by sound. For instance hyu-hyu is a light wind, pyu-pyu blows a little stronger, and hyu-hyu is stronger still. The translator will be able to get round this with the help of breezes and gales, but the onomatopoeic element is lost. More strikingly still, the Japanese also use sound to express their emotional lives: they tremble buru-buru, they weep shiku-shiku they laugh gera-gera, and their hearts pound doki-doki. Every shade of feeling has a corresponding sound association, which even the best translator will struggle to render into English without some of the vividness vanishing.