Ghosting (11 page)

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 the 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.

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.