An Occupational Hazard

One doesn’t normally think of translating and editing as a dangerous profession, but my experience of working in this field for the last fifty years has had a deleterious effect on me, leaving me seriously incapacitated. Reading literature of any kind, and especially if it has been translated into or from any of the language pairs between which I work, becomes a major problem, impeding any pleasure I might otherwise have obtained from reading. I generally do what I can, to the best of my ability, not to read books in translation, and so get a certain satisfaction from reading books in the original.

For example, I decided to buy the Hebrew version of David Grossman’s latest book, ‘A Horse Walks into a Bar,’ the English translation of which has been awarded the prestigious Man Booker International Prize. Almost immediately, however, in the first few paragraphs, I found myself wondering how the translator, Jessica Cohen in this instance, had translated a particular term. The whole book gets off to a rather slow start in which the reader is part of the audience at a stand-up performance, and is drawn into the story of the rather unfunny ‘comedian.’ This gives the reader time and opportunity to think about the way the terms have been translated.

I have never been to a performance of a stand-up comedian myself, though I have seen one or two such events on TV, and have, I suppose, a general idea of how these things work. But that isn’t the point here, as Grossman uses the so-called comedian’s patter and interaction with the audience to display his character, history and psychology. One thought that occurred to me while reading the book was to wonder whether Grossman earns a little extra on the side from writing jokes for stand-up comedians. I’m sure he could do quite well in this field if he put his mind to it. Anyhow, I’m still in the middle of reading the book, so I don’t yet know what the denouement is, if there is one at all. The pace of the narrative is rather slow, there’s little plot or tension, at least to begin with, and it is the language the ‘comedian’ uses which reveals who and what he is.

And there’s the rub. Initially he comes across as a somewhat unpleasant character, someone who picks on individual members of the audience and mocks them for the name they bear, their own or their wife’s physical appearance or their occupation. I guess that’s a standard ploy of stand-up comedians, but it certainly is not one that endears him to this particular reader. The language he uses varies between colloquial modern Hebrew, Yiddish expressions and obscure literary references. At each incident of verbal pyrotechnics my brain stops short and asks ‘how did Jessica Cohen translate this?’ or, worse still, ‘how would I translate this?’

As you can imagine, this does not make for an easy read. On the contrary, it makes the reading experience extremely difficult and troubling, and it is only by dint of a conscious effort that I persuade myself to pick the book up again and read a few more pages. I’ve already made up my mind to buy the English version and compare the two, an exercise which I know in advance will cause me anguish and distress.

From conversations with colleagues in the field, I know that I’m not alone in experiencing what can be called ‘Translator’s Syndrome,’ which is also very much akin to ‘Editor’s Syndrome’ and ‘Proofreader’s Syndrome.’ Are those of us engaged in these professions destined never to enjoy ‘a good read’ or be carried away by the need to find out ‘what happens next,’ as we did in our childhood, before we entered this dangerous field of activity, when we could read a book and thrill to the intensity of the experience?

In conclusion, I feel it is incumbent upon me to issue a warning to anyone contemplating a career in translation (or editing or proofreading). Beware! You are embarking upon a journey that will forever prevent you from enjoying another book! Enter at your peril!

 

Their Finest Hour

 

Since the reviews of the above film were positive on the whole, we decided to make a supreme effort to see it, squeezing it in between two evenings of other cultural activities. The subject was particularly interesting for me because it was set in London during the Second World War, in the period known as the Blitz, when Nazi Germany rained bombs down on the city.

I grew up in London, and lived there until I moved to Israel after completing my university degree. The film is set in 1940, just near the beginning of the war. I wasn’t born yet then, but my parents were living there as a newly-married couple, both of them refugees, and lived through the events described in the film.

And sure enough, the opening scenes showed familiar scenes and sights of war-torn London, buses unable to proceed to their destination because of bomb damage, people huddled in underground stations, which served as bomb shelters, and houses that had been turned in an instant into a heap of rubble, often with people trapped or killed underneath.

The idea is to show how, in a combination of slapdash improvisation and professional expertise, a film depicting the evacuation of British soldiers from Dunkirk served to raise the spirits of the nation as well as to save thousands of lives of servicemen. We hear the call that went out over the radio for anyone with a boat of any kind or size to make their way to the French coastal town of Dunkirk in order to bring the trapped men safely home.

Britain is an island and the British are a sea-faring nation, as has been proved in the past on more than one occasion. Just think of Sir Francis Drake ‘singeing the Spanish King’s beard’ when he led the fleet against the Spanish Armada, or the East India Trading Company, which established the British presence in India and elsewhere to eventually create British colonial rule that extended across most of the known world in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I grew up reading Arthur Ransome’s books, ‘Swallows and Amazons,’ and of course there are also the unforgettable characters created by Kenneth Grahame in his book ‘The Wind in the Willows.’ Thus is a nation’s sea-going heritage preserved and handed down to each new generation of children.

The story of the film within the film focuses on the ‘human element’ aspect of what might otherwise have been a humdrum, albeit heroic, military operation. This takes the form of two sisters, Lily and Rose, who defy their drunken bully of a father to take his small, rickety fishing boat out to sea in order to take part in the rescue.

The facts of the event are not as heroic as they are portrayed in the script of the film on which our characters are working, and a fair amount of tweaking of actual developments and characters are required in order to meet the demands of the actors, producers and politicians, all of whom have agendas of their own to fulfill and objectives to achieve.

Amongst other things, one such demand gives rise to the inclusion of an American pilot in the film that is being made. Apart from being a handsome young man, the pilot has absolutely no acting experience or talent, and naturally this causes considerable difficulty until somehow a solution is found. This and other developments are generally a source of merriment and mirth for the audience in the real world, while the audience in the film that is eventually produced and shown in cinemas during the war arouses the desired patriotic emotions and sense of identification.

Of course, without some love interest, in both the real and the unreal films, no story can be complete, and so it is that alongside the ‘genuine’ emotional attachments that develop between the individuals working on the film, they ‘manufacture’ a romantic connection between the characters they have created.

As the film ends we find ourselves identifying with the characters whose faults and foibles have been portrayed with humour and compassion. For me personally it was inspiring to see how a narrative thread is manufactured out of thin air, facts are manipulated and how the courage and determination of the Britain of seventy years ago once saved the world.

On Writing by Stephen King

Not being a fan of the horror/fantasy genre of novels, I must confess at the outset that I have not read any of Stephen King’s other books. I do know, however, that he is a very successful and prolific author in his particular genre, and that several films have been made of his books.

I decided to download and read this book after seeing several recommendations for it in writing groups I belong to, and it certainly is an interesting read. The man can write, and I breezed through the book in eager anticipation of finding the holy grail of how to get published and attain bestsellerdom that every writer seeks.

The first half of the book is taken up by what the author calls his C.V. It is in fact pure autobiography, and is in itself an interesting story. Growing up in a single-parent, lower-middle-class household in middle America is not the best start in life for anyone, let alone an aspiring writer. Still, it would seem that young Stephen showed aptitude for writing from an early age, and his initial attempts to produce a newsletter or journal provide considerable entertainment for the contemporary reader who knows what happens later.

I’m going on the assumption that Stephen King’s account of his initial failures, abundant rejection letters and repeated disappointments are true. He has a good memory, or perhaps has kept a record (or both), but it gives one heart to see how long it took and how many failures he experienced before he actually managed to get into print (a short story in a magazine). This pattern seems to have continued throughout his teenage years and even into young adulthood, marriage and his early career as a schoolteacher. The initial pages of his first bestselling novel, Carrie, were rescued from the trash-can by his wife, who convinced him to continue with the manuscript. It is also interesting to read how the idea for the book came to him, on the basis of his own experience at school and his work as a high-school teacher of English.

When it comes to telling the reader/ what it takes to produce a good book, Stephen King has some helpful albeit platitudinous advice. Read a lot, write a lot, avoid adjectives and ‘kill your darlings’ are among the prime paradigms on which he has expanded extravagantly, contravening his own admonition to cut wherever and whenever possible. He stresses the need to adhere closely to the rules of grammar, which seems to be stating the obvious, and advocates sticking to the apostrophe s to indicate apposition, even when a word or name ends in the letter s, even though in many cases this is superfluous.

Right at the end of the book we find ourselves once again embroiled in an excessively detailed account of how he was run over and seriously hurt as he was out taking a stroll one day. His injuries, which he describes in considerable medical detail, were undoubtedly horrific and life-threatening, requiring a long and painful recovery process/ Relief came only two months later, when be was able to sit down and start writing again.

I’m not sorry that I made the effort to buy and read this book, though I’ve read too many similar texts to be able to find anything revolutionary and new in this one, at least as a guide to the aspiring writer. It does provide some insight into the mind and workings of someone who has proved himself to be a successful writer, and that in itself is important. At the end of the book is a list of the books Stephen King has read and found helpful, and it is certainly long and wide-ranging. I must admit that I have read only a few of them, and I’m disappointed that not a single book by Virginia Woolf is to be found there. But then, what did I expect?

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P.S. I will be speaking about my latest book, “Chasing Dreams and Flies; A Tragicomedy of Life in France” at the AACI, Talpiot, Jerusalem at 11 a.m. on Wednesday, June 14. All welcome.

An Embarrass de Richesse

A recital devoted to three of Schubert’s last sonatas (D 845, 850 and 890) was too good to miss, so we cancelled our subscription tickets to the symphonic concert that happened to fall on the same date and bought tickets for that evening instead. Sometimes life or fate or the Jerusalem concert programme offers more than the individual can absorb at once, and it is not always easy to make one’s choice. It is at times like these that the rather apt adage about not being able to dance at two weddings comes to mind. True, we would have been happier still had Schubert’s posthumous sonata D. 960 been included in the programme, but hopefully that will come some other time.

The young soloist, Shai Wosner, sat alone at the Steinway grand piano on the stage of the quaint auditorium of Jerusalem’s YMCA communing with Schubert and his music as we, the audience, listened in rapt attention to his phenomenal and sensitive playing. Schubert’s last six sonatas constitute the summation of his approach to music and the world, expressing raw emotion and deep philosophical thinking, as well as intimacy and far-sightedness, and all this enclosed in tuneful melodies that take the listener to heights of rapture and depths of sorrow.

Gramophone, one of the world’s leading music journals, has described Wosner as “a Schubertian of unfaltering authority and character,” while Wosner himself has described Schubert’s last six sonatas as “six thick novels, rich with insight about the human condition” (taken from the programme notes).

Schubert was a great admirer of Beethoven, and was even a pall-bearer at his funeral in Vienna in 1827. He sought to emulate his hero in the sphere of the piano sonata, but his work bears all the hallmarks of his own unique talent, and conveys a very different message to Beethoven’s.

From the very first notes of the first sonata Wosner held the audience captive with his wide range and expressive musicality, bringing the music to life and setting it before us like a delectable feast. Alone with the piano, playing from memory, he took us into a world where nothing existed but the piano keys and his fingers as they skipped and danced over them to produce exquisite sounds. For me personally, it seems that anyone who can play complex music without having to look at the notes in front of him or her must be some kind of genius, and this must certainly be the case with Shai Wosner.

So here we have two geniuses (genii?) working together – one who composed the music a few hundred years ago and another who can produce it for our delight in the concert hall without appearing to make any effort, as if he was born to sit at the piano and produce divine music.

With the magical sounds still ringing in our ears, we returned to the mundane world at the end of the evening, still in thrall to Schubert and Wosner and eternally grateful for the divine world of music.