Ghosting Read online

  In Russian the problems are different. Because it is a thoroughly inflected language—the endings of words changing in both conjugations and declensions—it has a particular elliptical quality that is absent in English. A single verb, for example, can be used to make a complete sentence: one word can tell you who is doing what, how many are doing it, whether they are male, female or neuter, when it was done, and even whether the activity was completed or whether it is still going on. Although it is possible to convey all this in English and keep the sense, it is not possible to match it or retain the ellipsis. Does any of this matter? To some extent it does, if only to make us aware that the architecture of any language goes much deeper than its inflections or other distinctive features. In some profound sense a grammar expresses the culture of its people, their way of thinking, their soul—whatever we mean by that. All of this is at stake in the translation process.

  There are other even trickier problems. To take a famous example, the opening words of War and Peace in the original are: “Eh bien, mon prince” followed by long passages in French spoken by Russians as if it were their normal everyday language. The characters in question are aristocrats who converse with one another in French for reasons of fashion and snobbery—something the linking text (in Russian) makes clear. Ironically the discussion is about the possible invasion of Russia by Napoleon and “toutes les atroc-ités de cet Antichrist.” Since French was a foreign language for the Russian reader, it is arguable that every translation should keep those sentences in French. Yet none does. But even if the French were kept it wouldn't have the same connotations for an English readership. The problem becomes even more intractable when translating War and Peace into French.

  To take another sort of difficulty: the first sentence of Doctor Zhivago in translation reads: On they went singing “Eternal Memory.” This doesn't mean very much to an average English reader, but for Russians these opening words evoke the precise atmosphere that the author wants to create. “Eternal Memory” is a funeral chant so well known to all Russians that they can probably hear its haunting tones in their heads. But the English reader has to carry on for a few more sentences before it becomes clear that the writer is describing a funeral procession to a graveyard. The American edition of the book translated “Eternal Memory” as “Eternal Rest,” which is not only wrong but also inapt in a novel where memory is everything and a sense of repose is wholly absent. A few lines further on we are told that some onlookers joined the procession out of curiosity and, when one of them asks who is being buried, he is told “Zhivago.” Again, the significance of the name is lost in English, zhiv meaning “alive” in Russian and ago being the adjectival ending. The answer to the question “Who is being buried?” is therefore “The one who is living.” Pasternak was first and foremost a poet, and his novel is full of allusion and poetic resonance—huge challenges for a translator.

  My own love affair with words took time to get going. As a young child I was always slightly afraid of words and the power they wielded, and it was only when I went to secondary school and started learning Latin and French that things changed. I felt a sense of liberation—though liberation from what exactly is not easy to say. Latin and French involved lots more words, which should have been off-putting, yet somehow the structures were clear and consistent, unlike at home where the rules seemed to lack harmony and cohesion. After a year or two, I added two more languages, German and Spanish, to my list of subjects. Soon my schoolbag bulged with foreign grammars and readers, and with a missionary zeal I took on Russian in my final two years with a view to studying it at university.

  I don't think I had a special aptitude for languages; which makes my focus on them all the more puzzling. Looking back now, I feel sure there was something more complex and desperate afoot, a kind of quest to understand the world, whose secrets might conceivably be revealed through a heap of different-sounding words. This wasn't how it struck me then, but even at the time I felt a degree of compulsion about acquiring one language after another, as if carrying to extremes might lead to the vital clue. There was always a faint expectation—certainly a hope—that I was on the point of discovery, that all would become clear, and that the words spoken by other people in countries I had never been to might be the key.

  My parents were naturally suspicious of all these foreign languages. “You can get too much of a good thing,” said my mother with a shake of her head, and my father disapproved even more. He had served with the Eighth Army for the duration of the war and his hatred of Germans lasted his whole life. The very idea of learning their language was anathema to him. It turned out the Russians weren't much better.

  “But you fought on the same side as the Russians,” I said.

  “That's as may be, but they're a bunch of commies just the same.”

  To be able to translate, it isn't enough to have learned a language, however well you have learned it. There must be a deep connection with the author, followed by a devoted faithfulness. It has to be an act of love, without betrayal. You must try never to overwhelm or compete with the author, but always strive to shape the original text in a form that connects with new readers who are strangers to the original. It is as if you are engaging in a very intense form of reading that involves much more than simply understanding the words on the page—you have to absorb them and live with them a little, after which you turn them into something new, unique but not original, creative but not inventive, a palimpsest of the first creation.

  Translators have to do a kind of disappearing act, and I liked the invisibility. I also liked the solitude that goes with the job. But in the end I decided I wasn't good enough at it and couldn't become good enough. There was a slight feeling of loss each time I failed to translate in the most literal sense—to carry over into my own language. The nature of the task does of course entail losses, but for me there were simply too many.

  To begin with I didn't believe it—a common reaction in those who suddenly step from one world to the next. It feels like a stage set and you'll leave presently to return to reality. Well-meaning friends looked me in the eye and said, he's gone, he's not coming back, but I couldn't accept it. I also didn't allow the children to accept it. Daddy isn't himself—he needs some time on his own, I told them, thinking I was protecting them; though now I know I prolonged their agony and mine. For a long time the pain kept fresh, forming and re-forming day after day into new blisters and boils. It took even longer for the sense of raw panic to die down. When at last it did, and I let the belief seep through, everything had to be faced all over again.

  For the next few months I avoided the editorial meetings in London. The thought of being away from home for even a few days alarmed me, and leaving the children was unthinkable. But regular trips to London were part of the job, and the job was now more important than ever. Eventually I had to go. After the meeting I asked to see Tiger in private. He listened to what I had to say, and when I had finished he sighed, and then said, “Well, it's his loss entirely.” Which was kind and well-meaning, though I was still stuck at the stage of thinking the loss was decidedly mine and the children's. He also told me not to worry, that my job was secure, and that everything would be all right. I was moved by his gentleness and compassion.

  “Don't be sad,” he said when I left. “The worst has happened and from now on it will get better.”

  That evening he invited me to dinner with his family at Mr. Chow's in Knightsbridge—“the best Chinese restaurant in the whole of London,” he said, “where all the stars hang out.” Tiger didn't bother with menus but ordered a magnificent feast straight from Mr. Chow himself. Throughout the meal his generosity and attentiveness were unabating—“Are you comfortable? Have you got enough? Can I help you to something?”—as he filled everyone else's plate and ordered more whenever supplies ran low. Although an emotional man, he wasn't comfortable talking about feelings or painful events, but I could tell he was trying to cheer me up, and to this end he stuffed me with food and crushe
d me with kindness. By the time I left London to return to Scotland I felt pampered and consoled.

  A day or two later Tiger telephoned me at home. “I have been thinking about your situation,” he said, “and how I can help you.” He then spoke in a great rush about his “brilliant idea.”: a book on women that would be “unprecedented” in the world of publishing, “the biggest and best ever.” He was so excited that he was hard to understand. The words tumbled out in huge untamed gushes and, as I struggled to keep up, his sentences would suddenly turn tail on themselves. The gist of it was that he would interview fifty high-achieving, well-known personalities—politicians, film stars, aristocrats, actors and so on—record their thoughts on tape and publish the results. He spoke of his “fabulous connections,” how he was sure that he could get famous women to talk to him, and how he was the perfect person for such a book. “I love women—I glow in their company!” My role would be to help devise the interview questions, to sort out the transcripts, collate the material into different sections and finally put the book together. And to give it some weight, there would be a long introductory section on women throughout the centuries—this also would be my responsibility.

  “It will take your mind off things,” he said. “You will have to work harder than you've ever worked before. But it will make you some money. This book will be sensational. I guarantee it.”

  A batch of twenty-five letters was immediately sent out with a brief description of the project. After paying tribute to the woman's achievements, the letter ended with the honeyed words: “Your contribution to the book will be invaluable. It will also mean that I shall have the pleasure of meeting you.” This first mail-shot resulted in twenty-five acceptances. “Can you believe it?” Tiger laughed with delight. “Not one of them said no!” Predictably, when the magic number of fifty was reached he couldn't bring himself to stop: he was having too good a time. The next target was one hundred, but even that was soon exceeded. Every time he flicked through a magazine or watched a television programme he would come across a woman he just had to interview. His enthusiasm for the undertaking was uncontainable, and it spilled over into every conversation. He described it as a drug and marvelled at his own addiction. “I adore women!” he kept saying. “I admire them.” Once he got to two hundred he would stop—“I have to stop,” he said, “and two hundred is such a nice number.” Whereupon he promptly decided that he couldn't confine himself to Britain—what about all those wonderful women in America and France and Italy?

  Soon his days were measured out in boarding passes and hotel rooms and, as time went on and he became ever more wom-anstruck, he started talking about his interviews in terms of a mission, something he had been called to do. He told the newspapers: “I'm writing about women because I love them. All my life I have loved them.” He could make this love sound like a unique experience, exquisite and ennobling, not granted to ordinary mortals. Women, flattered by his love, seemed to love him in return. Surprise was expressed in the gossip columns that nearly three hundred individuals, many of them sensible with balanced personalities, were prepared to talk about themselves in such a frank way. But those familiar with Tiger's style—a lethal combination of charm and chutzpah—were not in the least surprised. His voice was silkily persuasive, and by giving each woman his complete attention, he managed to wheedle and sweet-talk his way into her interior life. One journalist, bewitched into talking her head off, tried afterwards to work out what had happened to her. “It sounds pathetic,” she wrote, “but he made me feel special, as if I were the only woman who mattered.”

  Almost four hundred letters were sent out, and the refusal rate was less than ten per cent. One of the more interesting rebuffs—in view of subsequent revelations—came on House of Commons notepaper:

  Please forgive me if I do not greet your request for an interview with cries of delight. I must have done a dozen similar ones this year alone. I am not a radical or a feminist, have met no prejudice only encouragement, am happily married and love my job, and I'd much rather discuss the National Health Service or the state of the economy.

  Yours sincerely

  [signed] Edwina Currie

  The diverse list included Marina Warner, Olivia de Havilland, Princess Yasmin Aga Khan, Janet Suzman, Soraya Khashoggi, Doris Lessing, Isabelle Huppert, Gloria Steinem. There were women with names that sounded both absurd and paradoxically grand: Marie-Hélène de la Howarderie, Christine Bogdanowicz-Bindert, Ariana Stassinopoulos Huffington. There were socialites, actors, designers, writers—even a rabbi and a couple of nuns. Most of the interviews took place in the palace dining-room where, after quails in chocolate sauce washed down by the grandest of grands crus, the tape recorder was switched on and the women given enough tape to hang themselves.

  Each interview was recorded on a microtape, about the size of a matchbox, and immediately dispatched by special delivery to Scotland in the smallest jiffy-bag available on the market. The Royal Mail guaranteed delivery before noon, and nearly every day, around mid-morning, the postman would arrive in a van with a tiny package, sometimes several. Everything had to be signed for. After a while I could tell that the postman was desperate to know what the packages contained and why I got so many of them. When we reached around the two hundred mark, he asked me outright, saying that his colleagues in the sorting office had told him to find out. “Oh, they're audio-tapes,” I said. “For playing on a tape recorder.” I could tell he didn't believe me. He obviously thought it too dull for words and knew it would go down badly back in the sorting office.

  True to form, Tiger was in a perpetual state of anxiety about the possibility of tapes getting lost in the post. The agreement was that I would telephone him as soon as a package arrived, but he was always too fretful to be able to wait for the call and would phone me repeatedly throughout the morning. “Is there any news? Has it come yet?” On being told that no, there wasn't, and no, it hadn't, he worked himself up to full-scale-emergency pitch every time. “Oh my God! It must have gone missing! Isn't it? This is a disaster! It's irreplaceable!” I never really understood this behaviour—it was such a waste of everyone's time and energy—and although anxiety was unquestionably part of his make-up, the constant high levels had a touch of artifice about them; they were more a way of imparting to others a proper degree of urgency and respect for the importance of the project.

  “You really have to stop now,” I said when he reached two hundred and fifty. My side of the project was becoming unmanageable. The historical account of the treatment of women in literature and mythology was well advanced, but with all the extra interviews the workload was expanding while the deadline remained the same. Everything was geared to publishing in the autumn of 1987 in time for the Frankfurt Book Fair. “Just a few more,” he said, affecting to be chastened. “I promise I'll stop at three hundred.”

  It turned into a book of biblical dimensions: 1200 pages in all, and weighing in at three and a half pounds. It was wrapped in a cover of dazzling blue—a photograph of lapis lazuli marquetry from the emperor's private collection—and on the back flap there was a picture of the author, tastefully chiaroscuro, by Koo Stark. Tiger had travelled over 35,000 miles, mainly in Europe and the USA, and collected over three million words on tape. This was reduced to 600,000, all in an upstairs room in a tiny village in the East Neuk of Fife. I was helped in this mammoth task by my good friend Norma, secretary in the university Russian department at the time, a completely reliable and cheerful woman, salt-of-the-earth and Old Labour through and through, and not in the least perturbed by celebrity or the orgy of confession that she typed up night after night. We worked for long stretches side by side, often all day and into the small hours. Every so often Norma lay down on the floor between the stacks of paper and fell instantly and deeply asleep. Absolutely nothing could wake her, but in ten minutes she would be conscious again and ready for work. It was like a party trick, and the children sometimes asked her to do it so that they could watch her comatose. They lov
ed to pinch her flesh and check her vital signs, and since she was dead to the world it seemed harmless. As soon as she completed a transcript I edited it and marked up selected passages for inclusion in the various sections: Early Influences, Creativity, Motherhood, Relationships and Sexuality. After that it was a scissors and paste job, quite literally, cutting up cartloads of confidences and sticking them into the relevant sections. Even the children helped with this stage.

  The party to launch the book was held at the beginning of October in the Victoria & Albert Museum. It was a grand and glitzy occasion awash with blue cocktails perfectly matching the book cover and seeming to phosphoresce under the lights. Tiger stood at the entrance beside a blue mountain of books, beaming seraph-ically as his girls floated around in long tight velvet dresses the colour of lapis. Each guest was greeted separately with a personalised effusion, and special guests—the stars of the book—were hugged and caressed and wrapped in love. “You look beautiful tonight. Just amazing. I'm so happy you could come.” Paparazzi clicked their shutters, and reporters queued up for quotable quotes. “It's like the Hite Report,” he told them. “I have unearthed the secrets of women.” He was wearing a fine wool gallabiya trimmed with gold. “Women are softer than men,” he said, embracing a soft young beauty in a Chanel jacket. “Much nicer.” He praised women's qualities—their capacity to forgive, their vulnerability, their fortitude—and he rhapsodised on their bodies. “So much mystique,” he purred. “You know, even their sexual organs are on the inside.” There was a kind of innocence about all this, as if he had just happened on an eternal truth.