The Depravity of Anonymity

Arriving in Frankfurt, I feel like an alien. The only word I am capable of uttering in German is ‘mayonnaise’. Even when I am addressed in English, I continue to stare helplessly. What has happened to me? Have I not travelled in so long, at least to a country whose language I do not speak? Here everyone smokes and everyone rides a bicycle. Outside the railway station (is that the meaning of ‘Hauptbahnhof’?) there is a shop: WOS – World of Sex. I came (for the book fair) expecting culture.

Meanwhile a tram goes by, dressed up as a restaurant, so that the unassuming passengers look like diners. If I was an alien (and as a translator I am), I’d be in a state of shock (and I am). Everything seems designed to take my money. I go down to the lavatory in McDonald’s to find a man with a table. ‘I have to pay?’ I ask, using intonation instead of the usual auxiliary. ‘Any amount!’ he replies cheerfully.

A little further away from the station and I reach Moselstrasse, which is full of sex shops, starting with Dr. Müller’s Video-Show and Blue Movie Kino Center (why blue?). WOS was just the tip of the iceberg.

I am grateful for the sight of a florist’s – something natural. Old men look at me awry. Young women project their breasts provocatively. I have reached the Dolly Buster Center. Is the whole of Frankfurt a brothel?

By Gallusanlage I seem to have emerged into normality. An open thoroughfare, some trees, a drunk, a large euro sign, tall glass buildings which must be banks or departments of health. Well, it feels like normality. Lots of bikes. Bikes on the pavement, bikes jumping lights. Bikes for hire… can you just take one? I realise I’m standing in the middle of the cycle lane, watching an old lady complimenting a small child’s mother. There are glimmers of humanity, which remind this alien what life might once have been like, I suppose, in the briefest of interludes between Primitive Man and Primitive Man II. Even schoolboys seem obliged to text on their phones and drink Starbucks coffee. Coffee? I didn’t drink coffee until I went away to university.

After the depravity of the railway station, I am beginning to enjoy my otherness. I take a risk and dive into St Catherine’s Church. A bubble. Isn’t this what ‘other’ means? Lord, have mercy. I light three candles. ‘Alien’ might mean ‘alone’; ‘alone’, ‘all one’. A post-middle-aged man quietly recites prayers in German. The candles on the tray form a pool of light. ‘What does “belong” say to you?’ my wife once asked me. ‘“Alone”,’ I replied, ‘and “noble”.’

Life Is Lost So Easily

We had just returned from opening a bank account. A cat lay on the road, kicking the air as if in an attempt to escape the ground. Its back was broken and, mercifully, it died moments later.

When you decide to make a change for the better, angels appear to you out of the blue. We had to buy a bed and had just received delivery at the door of the warehouse, from where we wheeled our new acquisition in the direction of the car and wondered if we could get away with the boot being open on the ride home. We’d already spotted some traffic police, who had pulled over a Range Rover with British number-plates and a stocky Bulgarian in the driver’s seat trying to reason with them. Traffic police in Bulgaria are like briars, they’re everywhere, especially when the boot of your car is open. My wife was in favour of paying twenty euros for the official transport to take the bed home, but I figured a two-metre bed, like a human, should be able to fit inside the car and wheeled away. Once at the car, we shunted the bed in until it touched the rear of the front seats and set about trying to tie the boot down with a piece of string our son had magically turned into a tangle. Twice the boot pistoned open and, prior to the third attempt, my wife consulted a man in a neighbouring Lada (Bulgarians are very prone to exchanging opinions, unlike the English, who will do their best to complete the task in hand without being noticed), who said not to worry, it wasn’t illegal and the police wouldn’t stop us. He jerked his head skywards, which in Balkan sign language means ‘no way’, and resumed his silent conversation with the girl in the back, his daughter or granddaughter no doubt. But when he saw we were making a hash of things and he could be of help, he got out, opened the boot of his Lada and produced a bungee cord, which he proceeded to fit with greater mastery than our own. I read the tattoos in the kindness of his eyes and thanked him.

We rode away, making sure to avoid the corner with the traffic police, but of course there were more round the next corner and the car in front slowed down to turn left, causing us to slow almost to a halt right next to the second set of policemen, who fortunately were previously engaged and so fooled by my blank look, which said there’s nothing wrong with us and no, that’s not a bed sticking out of the boot. The rest of the journey was uneventful, despite speeding down the middle lane of the main thoroughfare into Sofia centre, cars overtaking right and left, buses blurring the dividing line between their lane and ours.

He was not the only angel to come to our aid in the face of oncoming change. Suffering causes two reactions in people: they will either do all they can to avoid you suffering the same or inflict their own suffering on you. As the poet Ivan Teofilov commented to us over blackcurrant juice and cakes the other day while swirling a glass of whisky and reminiscing about taking part in the Edinburgh festival back in 1969, when my wife and I were one and still couldn’t walk on to the stage, life is lost so easily.

THE CHURCH IN THE MOUNTAINS

for E. and S.

We descended out of the mist and saw the hut below us, an orange shack and four multi-coloured tin bungalows perched on the grass. In the hut, we were met by two boys, one jangling metal and the other with a nervous laugh. Their stoned gaze made me fear for our safety overnight in a place so remote our cry would be another high-pitched call the wind swept far and wide.

After a four-hour, 5000-foot descent through snake-infested, brushed-back grass, we entered the church of the monastery, our final destination. The wood carvings glowed golden in the candle-lit dark. A sign showed numerous articles not allowed in the sanctuary of the church, including our backpacks, which, after buying candles, we were asked to deposit in front of the church. I waited outside.

In the hut, we fell into conversation, languages combining and colliding to reveal a painful past: an ugly neighbourhood, broken relationship, impossible return. Tea was served, which made my nerve-ends jingle. I wondered if it was drugged. Later, when the lion espied through binoculars a gaggle of Middle Eastern youths descending the valley, I felt we had been saved, its scent diverted to meatier, easier prey.

As I waited outside the monastery church, my camera open, a monk trundling crates of bottled mineral water drew a line one foot from where I was standing. I could take photographs on the other side of the columns, he informed me, but not where I was. I wondered how many crates he had already carried, bottles containing water that splashed off the mountain behind.

In the hut, we were no longer alone. The boys set about preparing our supper: lentil soup, cheese omelette, fresh salad and a grilled pepper that had been skinned and sprinkled with cayenne and garlic. We asked them how at 7000 feet, with no discernible road, they had such products. They brought them up from the nearest village. And how did they cook such delicious food? Using Calor gas. We didn’t ask about the clean sheets, the bathroom they were building. As night folded in, the water turbine kicked into action, providing a gentle glow through which we saw the others as in The Potato Eaters, everything turned to shades of brown.

The monastery reception was closed and no one answered when I dialled the mobile phone number listed on the wall. A young monk finally turned up, produced three sets of stapled paper: name, sex, address, purpose of visit, serial number. I thought I had completed mine when he pointed to a second slip of paper on which I affirmed I had come to bow my head at the altar and would like, in return for overnight accommodation, to contribute (minimum 10) leva. I knew the going rate for a foreigner was 30, a resident 12, and, having lived for over five years in the capital and agreed this on a previous visit, was about to write 12 when he asked if my passport was Bulgarian. No. Did I have a residence permit? It was in Sofia. Then I would have to pay as a foreigner. I refused and stormed out.

In the hut, now that everyone had eaten, the boys served themselves, picking at their food but mostly smoking and enjoying the conversation. They drank rakia from a mineral water bottle, which they handed around. When we thanked them for the food and their hospitality, one laughed, the other said it was what they were here for. Later we too gazed at the Milky Way, our upturned lamps answering the stars’ twinkle. I slept worst of all that night. Tomorrow we would sleep in a soft bed next to the monastery, a drunken waiter whirling like a dervish and demanding baksheesh. When we set out from the hut the following morning, one boy had disappeared, the other rested in the sunlight, proud as a mountain cairn.

Hu

I came late to Walt Disney and am enjoying the experience now that I have (thanks to my one-year-old son). I am struck by the quality of the singing, the weakness of good characters that causes them to make basic mistakes (such as leaving someone unattended), the sense of a paradise lost for which we need to find our wings. My wife’s favourite is Sleeping Beauty, in which the young Princess Aurora confides in her animal friends that she has met someone “once upon a dream”. The owl asks persistently, “Hoo? Hoo?”

In a recent article about the line, I made reference to the Sanskrit word hu, which is the root of our word God and means “invoke the gods”. A bit like the owl crying “Hoo? Hoo?” It also sounds the same as WHO, which I explained refers to Christ, the Being, the One Who is.

This word hu is an extraordinary one, and not only because it contains my favourite letter, h. I think of it as the primal word. Speech is made up of three elements: breath, water and flesh. If you have not breath, you are dead, in short. And if you are dead, you cannot speak. So breath forms the basis of all speech. It is represented in our alphabet by the letter h, which curiously in some languages (such as Spanish) is not even pronounced and in certain dialects (such as Cockney) is dropped.

But breath on its own is not enough to form a word. I cannot just breathe out if I want to address someone (they would think I was strange). I must add voice, by which I mean a vowel. Try it. Open your mouth. Begin by breathing out. Then add voice. You have sound.

If you carry on adding voice, you will find that water collects in your mouth. This is because vowels are water. They flow. And the interesting thing is that they are not pronounced from the throat to the front of the mouth in the same order they have in the alphabet. In fact, the first vowel sound to be produced from the throat is u. So the first word we can possibly make is hu. The root-word for God.

We read at the beginning of that most remarkable of books, Genesis, that “a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. Then God said…” (Genesis 1:2-3). The two elements of breath and water enabled God to speak. This is why I refer to hu as the primal word and the sound of creation. No surprise, then, that it means “invoke the gods”.

But I would get a sore jaw and start dribbling if I only produced voice and did nothing to stop it. And this is because, after h and the vowels, there is a third element to language: the consonants. How do I stop my voice? With my lips or tongue, i.e. with flesh. This is how I form the consonants.

We again see a correlation with the Creation account in Genesis: “a stream would rise from the earth, and water the whole face of the ground – then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being” (Genesis 2:6-7). Here, in the creation of man, we see the third element at play: the dust of the ground, or flesh.

What is extraordinary is not only that the elements of speech and creation are one and the same (as you would expect when you consider that Christ is the Word and “all things came into being through him”, John 1:3), but that these three elements have one word that unites them all.

BREATH. WATER. FLESH. Different? Take the h away from BREATH. WATER-BREAT. The sounds represented by the letters b-v-w are almost identical (think of Spanish and German).

But how do we get from BREATH and WATER to FLESH? For this you need to know that the fourteen simple consonants are divided into seven pairs, one of them being l-r. Another is f-v, which makes it easy through v to connect f with b and w. Now all we need to do is take one step in the alphabet from t to s, and BREATH (without a) becomes FLESH.

Using the same rules of phonetics and the alphabet, we will see that one word is common to all three elements: FATHER.

(By the way, h + 5 vowels + 14 consonants leave 6 letters from the alphabet: the semi-vowels j and y (i) and w (u). And 3 letters that seem to be doubling up: c (k or s), q (k again) and x (ks).)


See also Jonathan’s article WHO AM I

Orthodox Lent

Orthodox Lent began this week, Easter being a week later than in the Western calendar. I have never understood this disagreement within the Christian church, between Catholics (and Anglicans) in the West and Orthodox Christians in the East, whose head (primus inter pares) is the ecumenical Patriarch in Constantinople (modern Istanbul). The truth is the truth, so why do we have to disagree over it? The only dogma I espouse is its reverse: am God.

Anyway, in the middle of Sunday lunch, my mother-in-law, who had set a splendid table, abruptly stood up and asked forgiveness of us all, in turn forgiving us for anything we might have done. What was going on? I thought to myself. Mothers-in-law weren’t supposed to be like this. They were supposed to torment you mercilessly, not ask forgiveness! I felt a little light-headed. Of course, after that, there was an argument about someone’s birthday and my wife and mother-in-law disagreed over something I had the impression they actually agreed on. But the grandeur of asking forgiveness and being forgiven stayed with me.

If translation has taught me one thing, it is that I am not original. Nothing begins with me. I said this to my mother-in-law, who claimed that to be a good translator it was not enough to know the language you’re translating from, you yourself had to be creative, a writer. I answered that I thought the opposite was the case, meaning I agreed with her. Apart from the fact I would argue it is much more important to know the language you’re translating into (which perhaps you can only truly know when you’ve learnt another language), I believe writers are translators, writing down experiences, impressions, even stories, that come to them.

If we can believe this, that we are not original and our purpose in life is to be translators, then we don’t have to fight over things anymore and a huge weight is lifted off us. This is really what my mother-in-law was doing on Sunday, I think. Translating forgiveness.

Translation and Virtue

I am interested in the idea of translation and virtue and whether there is any relationship between the two. Do you have to lead a good life in order to be a good translator or is it immaterial what kind of life you lead? To understand this question better, I decided to enlist the help of some colleagues in the field of literary translation, and this was their response (thanks to them all):

Peter Robertson, UK:
I have never believed that translators can lay claim to virtue more than the practitioner of any other craft. The definition of what constitutes virtue is necessarily moot, but I am thinking that the writer – and I believe that any accomplished translator is a writer by definition – could be limited by going down too virtuous a path. After all, it is part of any gifted writer’s stock-in-trade to have a deep understanding of the sum total of the human condition, and that includes the tendency to depravity.

John Deane, Ireland:
Yeats suggested a choice, between the work and the life. But I think there is only one choice: the work. The life will look after itself… or not. Translation is an art as well as a skill and is work! But you can find a rapscallion do the work and live a weird life outside the work. Better, of course, to have work and life one and virtuous, but the impossible can be difficult to achieve. Simone Weil believed that a great work cannot come out of a wicked life, but I know some…

Nicholas Caistor, UK:
I’m not sure that a translator has to live a “good life”, but the virtues of a good translator are patience (you have to put in the hours at the computer), humility (you always have to remind yourself it is not you who is writing the thing) and determination (you have to derive pleasure from wanting to make something as good as you can).

Dimitris Allos, Greece:
We can draw some conclusions on this only if we consider the premises on which the translator bases his work: an excellent knowledge of the languages he uses together with an advanced philological culture, a feeling for the text (namely the ability to enter the different roles the text proposes), respect for the author (in other words the modesty not to overshadow the author’s presence with his own ego) and, last but not least, the patience and responsibility to dedicate to the translation all the time it needs. All these things are equally necessary to achieve a good result. Theories that underestimate the value of any of these are simply a cover for irresponsibility.

Jean Boase-Beier, UK:
If you believe there are universals of right and wrong that transcend conventional systems, then you probably have to aspire to the right in order to be good at anything. I have just been reading John Gray’s Straw Dogs, which ridicules the idea that the right and the good can ever be the same; for him, that is a myth that depends on the idea of a God. Notwithstanding this, translators assume some things are universal, so why not ethics? And translators have to be ethical. So if virtuous means being ethical (and there are indeed ethics which go beyond the local and specific), then, yes, you’d have to be virtuous in the sense of behaving ethically. Otherwise you’d be a bad translator.

Kiril Kadiiski, Bulgaria:
Translation and virtue are two linked categories that often don’t depend on each other. Good morals (to which category human virtue belongs) are not enough to give rise to great works (to which literary translation belongs). Example: countless well-mannered graphomaniacs. On the other side of the coin: Villon, Verlaine, Yesenin, the Beat poets. However, faithfulness to the ideas of the author being translated, the lack of any manipulation of the text with a view to your own understanding of things or, even worse, the pursuit of political aims, can be described as virtue and put on a level with translation.

It seems to me that translation (by which I mean all human activity) is a spiritual act in which the Spirit works through us. As the Bulgarian critic Vladimir Trendafilov said to me, we have to be open in translation, to be passive. The question is: will the Spirit reward those living a good life? On the one hand, I think not: our salvation depends not on our righteousness, but on God’s righteousness (and God’s perception of our virtue may be very different from our own or someone else’s). On the other hand, there is no denying that once we turn to Christ (the Word), our eyes are opened to things we didn’t see before (about ourselves, about the world around us, about language) in an experience that for me was akin to passing through the sound barrier. Language fell apart in my hands and was reconstructed. To go back to my old ways would be to sully that gift; forgiveness of sins is not a reason for sinning. As my wife, the Bulgarian poet Tsvetanka Elenkova, pointed out, some of the best translators in the past were monks striving to lead a virtuous life (and write is surely close to virtue).

Who Am I

I think a lot about the line as the rain falls outside my window. We are specialists in the line and we draw them all the time. Lines around personal space, lines around property, lines around countries. You are generally punished if you try to cross them against another’s will. I write about the line because it seems to me the translator is constantly trying to cross the line. In fact, I often think of the translator as a terrified prisoner standing in no man’s land with his arms raised, striving in vain to talk sense to both sides, who are intent on continuing to fire at each other, God knows why.

The line. English is the only language I know where the ego or self is also a line: I. And of course the line is also the number 1. When God created the world, we lived in the era of A, the first letter of the alphabet. God (AM) created individual creatures (the indefinite article, an), in fact he created a man: Adam. He brought all the creatures to Adam to name, so that they would mean something. But egged on by the woman, who in turn was provoked by the snake (an erotic wriggly line), instead of saying amen to that, Adam said mine; instead of bowing to AM, Adam said I’m.

We went from the era of what to why (the line), from A to I. What do we do with the line now that we’ve got it? Funnily enough, my little son’s toy drum suggested the answer to me. In the lid of the drum are three holes in the shape of a circle, a triangle and a square. He has to fit these three shapes into the holes and the drum plays a tune when he’s successful. We can turn the line into a circle, as the rain in the sky (a straight drip) becomes a round drop when it hits the ground. This is equivalent to counting down, from 1 to 0. Alas, at school we only teach our children to count up from 1 and it takes them the rest of their lives to find out that the answer was just behind them.

We can also make reference to a third point, the source, and draw a triangle. This triangle is represented by the letter A.

Or, as I have already mentioned, we can draw a line through the I and make a cross sign (the Cross represents the I deleted), which also happens to be a plus (as Christ said, Those who lose their life will find it). The cross sign corresponds to the square.

So you end up with a circle, a triangle and a square: three shapes drawn with one, three and four lines (not two). What is extraordinary is that these three basic shapes spell a name we are staring at every time we sit down to do some mathematics (or to play with our son). I have already said the triangle is A, the cross is a plus sign and the circle is O. So the three ways of getting away from the line (or ego) spell another name of God, A + O: Alpha and Omega (present in the middle word, AND or A ’N’ O).

This progression from A to I to the O of recognition – which is the progression of the Greek alphabet (compare the Roman alphabet, which counts up from I to Z) – tells us the real question word is in fact not what or why, but who.

Who is truth? Pilate should have asked Jesus in John 18. Then he might have got an answer: I am (A I O again, the O is the Greek omega or w turned upside down). WHO is Christ’s name in Greek – O WN (written O WH in Slavonic countries), which means “the Being”, “the One Who is”. It is pronounced the same as hu, a Sanskrit word meaning “invoke the gods” and the root-word for God. WHO combines with EL, another name of God in the Old Testament, to spell WHOLE.

By denying the I, we come full circle.


See also Jonathan’s article HU

A Classical Education

Children in Sofia often go to a secondary school devoted to one particular language. In a country of under 8 million and a certain amount of emigration, it’s important to know foreign languages. So there’s the French School, the German School, the Italian School, the Russian School, the Spanish School, the Classics School and the English School (popular but apparently poor on discipline). Here pupils devote much of their first year to acquiring skills in their chosen language (4 hours a day) and then go on to study other subjects in that language so that they leave school with reasonable fluency in their adopted mother tongue.

I have been interviewing candidates from some of these schools in English. The most inventive, surprisingly enough, were those from the German School, but I was struck by a fifteen-year-old candidate from the Classics School. When asked about advertising, he described it as “useless”, aimed at promoting the product and not at informing the consumer. When asked about his favourite mode of transport (others answered plane, car…), he replied that he preferred to travel “on foot” since it was generally more reliable. And I noticed that, unlike the other candidates, he seemed to be able to observe everything that was going on around him, including the building across the road. It seems to me these are the traits of a student of these so-called dead languages (apart from good grammar): detachment from the world, detachment from time – and peripheral vision.

Bulgarian Poetry Reading

I recently attended a reading by Bulgarian poets in room 65 of Sofia’s St Clement of Ohrid University, which was to commemorate a similar reading that took place in the same room in 1989, at the time of the (much lamented) changes. Each poet was given a five-minute slot to read a poem or two, which meant after an hour we had only got through about six or seven poets, each of whom had read poems dating from the 1980s plus some of their more recent work fresh off the pages in front of them. Give a poet a microphone and an audience and most feel the need to introduce themselves, introduce the poem (despite the maxim that a good poem needs no introduction), and the compère was left struggling to move things on at the pace he’d intended. But the image that has stuck in my mind is that of the three poets who attempted to recite their poems off by heart, from memory, without referring to the (visible or invisible) page in front of them. Without exception, they ground to a halt halfway through the poem and started gaping as they struggled to remember the next line. Some of the audience threw up their arms in consternation. One poet even substituted the words “I don’t know what” for the words that had gone missing. Which makes me wonder how far we are in control of the words we bandy about daily and sometimes inscribe in poems. Poets like fish, gaping. Waiting for the words that don’t come.