Travelling with a storyteller on a night train from revolution

If I remember, I had to run for the train. Miss it and I’d be travelling through the night, or waiting until the following day. This train would get me there after midnight, but at least well before breakfast time.

I was heading for Hull, in Yorkshire, from London. If I was late, it was probably because this was the time, forty years ago, when I was heavily involved in activism for the far left, and I’d been busy forwarding the revolution. A revolution which, in case you hadn’t noticed, didn’t happen despite my efforts. I was convinced it would, but in a top-down Cult, you can convince yourself of anything.

It was a time when I read quite a few books of Lenin’s. I remember almost nothing about them, just that they were stiflingly boring but had sonorous titles.

Far from difficult to put down
And eminently forgettable

One title I liked was The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky. Few people today have any idea who Mr Kautsky was, and fewer would feel it worth spending thirty seconds on Wikipedia to find out. But Lenin wrote ponderously against him, itself a characteristic of the hard Left: it spends far more time denouncing its ‘renegades’ and ‘traitors’ than its enemies.

When it comes to wiping those backsliders out, I reckon a cruel but effective method would have been to start reading them Lenin’s works. They’d be begging for the firing squad in no time at all. Or at least for a pen to sign any confession put in front of them.

Another title that sticks in my memory is Left Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder. I remember not a word of the contents, but the title remains relevant today: there is something infantile about the far Left, to which I then belonged. But, like St Paul, when I became a man, I put away childish things. Then, however, I saw things as through a mirror darkly, and felt sure, as do so many today who should know far better, that wishing for change yourself was enough to make it happen.

I was on my way to Hull to see a fellow wishful-thinker of the Left. However, since she was also my girlfriend at the time, I don’t think the activity for which we were getting together was exclusively the advancing of socialism. Which was another reason, I suspect, why I was anxious to get there before tonight had become irretrievably tomorrow morning.

In my hurry, I’d taken no reading material with me. Not even Materialism and Empiriocriticism, which wouldn’t have been the best way of passing the time on the journey (what on earth does the title mean, anyway?), but might have been better than just looking out of the window. Fortunately, a fellow passenger in my compartment took pity on me.

“I’ve just bought two books. You can read this one, if you like.”

Practically impossible to put down
and far more memorable than Lenin

It was Nevil Shute’s The Chequerboard. I’d never read any Shute before. I’d probably never even heard of him. But within minutes, I’d fallen for the story and simply couldn’t put it down. In fact, handing the book to the generous passenger when he left the train, was a painful experience. It took me a while – well, I had a revolution to organise and more Lenin to read – but within a few months I found the time to pop into a bookshop and buy a copy of the book, to finish it.

The thing about Shute is that whatever you think of his writing, he was an extraordinary storyteller. And in The Chequerboard he gives that skill plenty of scope: as well as the protagonist’s own story, the framework for the novel, we get the stories of the three men he sets out to track down. They’re finely constructed, compelling tales, a pleasure to read at any time, especially in a train running through the featureless landscape of night-time England.

The kindness of the stranger in my compartment is a memory I treasure. So is my pleasure in reading Shute. I’ve consumed a great many of his novels since then, and re-read several of them many times, though none so much as The Chequerboard.

My daughter-in-law Sheena, knows how much I like the book. She also knows that I’m working to improve my Spanish. So, when she saw a copy of Tablero de Damas, the 1951 Spanish translation, she snapped it up for me.

Found for me by Sheena in Madrid
where she lives with my son and new granddaughter

As she says, there’s something to be said for reading a book you already know, in a language you’re trying to learn: you don’t have to struggle to understand the story and can concentrate on the words. Since they’ve been written by a native Spanish speaker, I’m sure they’re good enough to help me with the language.

Although what gives reading the book additional spice is seeing how awful the translation is: librero (bookseller), for instance, for ‘bookmaker’ (someone who takes bets, for instance on horse races), of ‘cutting corns’ (removing calluses of dead skin) rendered as selling agricultural products.

But that just makes re-reading the book all the more fun. As does the memory of the strange times, and the kind circumstances, in which I read it for the first time. Especially as it was so much more entertaining than my usual reading.

Thank you, Sheena. Thank you, Spanish translator. Thank you, stranger on a train.

And thank you, of course, Nevil Shute.

Lost in Translation? Lives may be at stake

In the grand days of the British Empire – or Empuh – we Engish speakers understood that if Johnny Foreigner didn’t understand what we were telling him, we just said it again, louder. After all, it was in his interests to cotton on, pronto. He needed to grasp our instructions to him before he faced the inevitable consequences of not carrying them out.

Things changed little as the accent of the English addressed to him became increasingly American. In fact, if anything, it was more important than ever that all those blighters, aliens as we liked to call them, learned God’s language because the stakes became even higher when they got into trouble for not knowing it.

The attitude prevails to this day, which is why foreign languages attract less and less attention in the curriculum of British schools. Or American ones, come to that.

Still. At the risk of sounding downright unpatriotic, this business of not knowing the lingo the lesser races speak has, occasionally, been a bit inconvenient to us rulers of the universe (sorry, don’t want you to think that we’re all of us rulers of the universe – I should have said the small number of us who take on the terrible burden of ruling the universe for the sake of all mankind). Take, for example, the run-up to that nasty spot of unpleasantness between the United States and the Empire of Japan. You know, in the Pacific, starting in December 1941. A business both sides could have well done without.

It seems things might have been just a bit helped by a better understanding of Japanese in the months before war broke out. Or, putting it another way, sometimes having a bit of information can be worse than having none at all. And if they’d grasped the language, the Yanks might have been considerably better off. Especially the ones who got killed or injured in said unpleasantness.

The Secretary of State of the time was Cordell Hull. And he had the benefit of code-breaking services that deserved their name of ‘Magic’. For instance, all messages from the Japanese Foreign Secretary Shigenori Tōgō to his negotiating in Washington were being cracked.

But then they had to be translated.

His translators led Hull to believe Tōgō had written to his team:

Well, the relations between Japan and the United States have reached the edge and our people are losing confidence in the possibility of ever adjusting them.

He should have read:

Strenuous efforts are being made day and night to adjust Japanese-American relations which are on the verge of rupture.

John Toland, who describes these exchanges in his invaluable book, The Rising Sun, tells us that many Japanese commentators think the translation errors of the time were deliberate. Toland doesn’t agree: “It is far more likely that the inaccuracies came from ignorance of the stylised Japanese used by diplomats. It is also possible that the hastily-trained translators wanted to make their copy more readable and interesting.”

The errors could be serious. For instance:

Conditions both within and without our empire are so tense that no longer is procrastination possible, yet in our sincerity to maintain pacific relationships between the Empire of Japan and the United States of America, we have decided, as a result of these deliberations, to gamble once more on the continuance of the parlays.

would have been better translated as:

The situation both within and outside the country is extremely pressing and we cannot afford any procrastination. Out of the sincere intention to maintain peaceful relations with the United States, the Imperial government continues the negotiations after thorough deliberations.

Worse still, the sentiment rendered as:

This time we are showing the limit of our friendship, this time we are making our last possible bargain, and I hope we can thus settle all our troubles with United States peaceably.

was really:

Now that we make the utmost concession in a spirit of complete friendliness for the sake of peaceful solution, we hope earnestly that the United States will, on entering the final stage of the negotiations, reconsider the matter and approach this crisis in a proper sprit with a view to preserving Japanese-American relations.

So what ensued was a dialogue of the deaf. Or perhaps deafness wasn’t the issue: we might say that, on the American side at least, what we had a team that was partially sighted – and that was perhaps worse than having no sight at all.

Pearl Harbor: a disaster that might have been avoided
with better knowledge of modern languages?

The negotiations, perhaps inevitably, failed. On 7 December, Japanese forces launched a devastating attack on Pearl Harbor. That started a war that would leave at least 2.5m Japanese dead and 106,000 Americans (in the Pacific Theatre).

And we still think that mastering foreign languages isn’t that important a goal?

My personal version of being lost in translation

I'm working on translation, from French to English, of the proceedings of a conference into the ethical questions associated with aging.

That's the kind of material you can take in your stride in your twenties or thirties. But I'm nearly sixties and it feels a bit close to the bone. What right do older patients have to be admitted to intensive care? Should older people be caring for each other or can they rely on social care? What becomes of human identity in Alzheimer’s sufferers?

For instance, one of the contributors tells the story of a nursing assistant who announced one day of an Alzheimer’s case, ‘Good Lord! Does Joan recognise us? I’ve spent the last couple of months working on the second floor and only came back to the third floor today, and she gave me such a wonderful smile.’

Yes. Heart-warming, isn’t it? The author of the article even referred to the ‘joy’ that comes from recognising, as well as being recognised by, the person inside the Alzheimer’s case. Wonderful. Problem is I don’t see this so much from the point of view of the carer but from that of the patient, thinking ‘bloody woman doesn’t think I recognise her. If only I still had full use of my faculties, I’d soon remind her of the time she cleared away the dinner before I’d finished the chocolate mousse I’d been saving.’

Not sure that feels quite so joyous.

I often think that translation work is like attending a church service, and not just because it’s astonishing how quickly it becomes boring. One of the things that always annoyed me on the few occasions I went to Church, was the unidirectional nature of the whole business. I mean, the priest talks at us. Why can’t we talk back? I always want to stir things up a bit with a question or two.

'What about the Gadarene swine?’ I want to ask. ‘All very well driving them into the Sea but what about the poor swineherds? What were they going to live on through the winter?’

Or the Prodigal Son. I mean, all very well giving him another share of the inheritance, but what about the other brother, the one who stayed behind and kept working to support the family, instead of having the time of his life spending every penny on the joys of the town? Why did he have to give up some of his share for his wastrel brother?

The Prodigal Son - all very well for him
but why did the brother give up part of his share?

But no. In Church, you don’t get to ask. You just have the priest telling you Christ on the Cross is a message of compassion and mercy, where to me torturing someone to death by nailing him to a piece of wood seems to be about pretty much the opposite.

Translation is just the same. Some character pontificates with a few badly chosen quotations aimed at enlivening an uninspiring proposition supported by an unconvincing argument. You want to be able to stick in a note saying ‘I’ve skipped the next two paragraphs – trust me, you’re not missing anything, they're rubbish – so here’s a joke about my uncle Moishe instead.’ Instead you have to translate the drivel into the best constructed English you’re capable of.

I mean, I’ve just translated the deathless words ‘Identity is necessary as a support for social interactions’. It is? And there was I thinking that social interactions all took place between anonymous individuals. If they are individuals.

Must stop. These translations have already worried me enough about getting old. Now they’re putting me in a bad temper, the kind of mood a priest might criticise for not being sufficiently kind to my fellow man. Which is pretty rich, come to think of it, for a priest, considering how many people they’ve burned down the ages. Maybe that’s why you don’t get to answer back in Church.

Anyway, I’m going back to my translations. Even if they do turn me into a grumpy old man.


Postscript

Have you heard about the drive-through daiquiri bars in the US?

Yes, you read that right – drive-through establishments selling highly intoxicating drinks. I was going to say ‘only in America...’ but that wouldn’t be right: the US tends to be even more stringent about drinking and driving, or indeed about drinking at all, than anyone on this side of the water.

No, these bars are in a specific bit of the States, namely Louisiana. New Orleans struck me as one of the most magical places I’d ever been to, when Danielle and I were there not five months after Katrina. And lots of people told us that New Orleans wasn’t really the States. You can't expect a place that eccentric to live by ordinary rules.

Funnily enough, plenty of people used to tell me that New York isn't really America either, and it was the first place I fell for in America. And there are those who reckon that San Francisco isn’t really the US either, and that’s the third member of my Trinity of favourite American places.

Odd, isn't it, that the places I like most in America are ones that aren’t generally regarded as all that American.