I have done all my writing in Oxford. My first novel and my story collection were written here, and, so it seems, my second novel will be too. But none of them has been about, or set in the city. Just why this should be so, I’m not exactly sure, because generally the place has a strong inspirational effect on writers. It’s not so much a question of prudence but is rather, I think, a lack of curiosity. Perhaps it’s also because when I started to write the rush of blood to the head that Oxford supplies had more or less spent itself. And again, the things that make Oxford special — its attractions and advantages — are so self-evident, have been so frequently described, eulogized and written up in all manner of ways that it doesn’t take all that long for Oxford to seem terribly familiar. It’s the Manhattan syndrome again: everything you expect of the place is here, right down to the last cliché. A deadening air of predictability settles over the city. Some views and buildings retain the occasional power to enchant, but — with rare exceptions — most of the people you meet about its streets can be categorized with a frightening swiftness, to such an extent that latterly what have come to engage my attention more and more are the exceptions to its magic lantern image. There are the glue-sniffers in Bonn Square; there’s the Madam who controls the tarts in Jericho, the witty nutters patrolling the coffee bars cadging money off terrified tourists (“If I wasn’t mad,” I heard one bellow at a horrified couple, “how would you know you were normal, eh?”); and the thirteen shabby drunks I once saw — including a gap-toothed young woman — passing round a sherry bottle in unconscious parody on the Radcliffe Camera lawn …
Two or three months ago I was walking down Brasenose Lane — the alley that cuts between Turl Street and Radcliffe Square. There’s nothing special about this featureless passageway. At the Turl Street end people park motorbikes in it and your hair is likely to be ruffled by gusts of Mazola-laden air from the Exeter College kitchen extractor fans. A bit further down it gets cool and dark where it’s bounded on one side by the high walls of Exeter’s garden and on the other by Brasenose and is overhung by thick plane and chestnut trees. I quite like Brasenose Lane, it’s badly lit and at night can be quite spooky and evocative. During the day it acts as a kind of shadowy prelude to the more evident splendours of the Rad-cliffe Camera, the Bodleian, All Souls and the University Church which confront you at the end of your gentle descent from the Turl. On this occasion I was about halfway down when I spotted three soggy heaps huddled together at the foot of the Exeter garden wall. They were three derelict drunks — Oxford has a sizeable population — sleeping off their midday soak into oblivion, cider and sherry bottles scattered about like shell cases round a gun emplacement. One of them saw me coming, hauled himself to his feet and lurched towards me. “Hey. Hey, peace man,” he yelled, weaving up, an exceedingly filthy Scottish hippie, bombed out of his skull, about twenty-four or twenty-five. “Hey, man,” he breathed. “Ah’ve written a pome. Wantae read it?”
That’s what annoys me about Oxford, I suppose. Even the drunks have pretensions.
In the end one has to say that few places and few communities can be so entrenched in their own ideal projections as Oxford. In Journey Without Maps Graham Greene remarks that
When on rare occasions beauty and magnificence do coincide, one gets a sense of theatre or the films, it is “too good to be true.” I find myself torn between two beliefs: the belief that life should be better than it is and the belief that when it is better it is really worse.
Auden sensed something very similar about Oxford, I think. Those “Stones… utterly satisfied …,” and its population,
Mineral and creature, so deeply in love with themselves
Their sin of accidie excludes all others
We exclude all others at our peril. Perhaps what unsettles me about living in Oxford is the feeling I receive that its inhabitants, or more specifically, the academic community amongst whom I work, sense and savour the beauty and magnificence but, ultimately, don’t make the vital final qualification, and are content enough to live on with the sin. Perhaps it’s time to leave.
1980
Being Translated
“Goodbye. I your new translator am.” The old joke about encountering your translator for the first time is both irrelevant and, curiously enough, often eerily correct. I remember meeting one of my translators at a British Council do somewhere abroad and he was virtually monoglot. We stood in a corner trying to talk to each other about whatever novel of mine he was currently translating and I could barely understand a word he said, so thick was his accent and wayward his syntax. Yet he was regarded as one of the country’s finest translators and by all accounts had done my novels proud. Of course, what is most important in a translator is not his facility in your language but in his or her own. Also, I suspect that, initially, few authors worry a great deal about accuracy or style. The thrill of being translated is simply having a new copy of that familiar old book; of seeing that title transformed into something quite bizarre. Indeed, different alphabets do even more to satisfy this particular urge: Japanese, Hebrew and Greek versions can be relished and savoured quite uncomplicatedly.
However, as you get closer to home, I have to admit, worries start to intrude. My novels have been translated into twenty languages. I suppose that in at least half of the cases I have had absolutely no communication with the translator. And perhaps this is just as welclass="underline" you can then repose all your trust in the professionalism of your publisher, confident that he would not employ someone merely desperate for cash. But once the translator makes contact your sanguinity can be all too easily undermined. My Norwegian translator, for example, actually concluded one of his letters to me thus: “Hey listen, man, if you’re ever in Oslo and short of bread you can crash in my pad anytime.” After I stopped laughing I started frowning. If this was his idea of English, how was his Norwegian? I conjured up images of a superannuated hippie sitting cross-legged on a mattress in an Oslo squat blithely grabbing at the wrong end of every textual stick in my novel. Luckily we fell out shortly after that. He berated me with some vigour over what he regarded as my thoughtlessness, not to say selfishness, in writing a novel as long as The New Confessions.
One of the first languages my novels were translated into was Dutch. Now, I cannot speak or read Dutch, my translator never made contact and, duly, the novels appeared. Because every Dutch person I had ever met spoke perfect English this was one set of translations that I never wondered about. But then, when A Good Man in Africa, An Ice-Cream War and Stars and Bars had been translated into, respectively, Gewoon een Beste Kerel, Gewoon een Oorlogie and Sterren, Strepen en een Gewoon Englesman, I began to worry. What was this “Gewoon” business, for Heaven’s sake? Did they think I was writing some kind of serial novel? To this day I’ve never dared ask.
Most of the time one hopes earnestly for the best, trusts to luck and tries to suppress those horrible suspicions. That Bulgarian edition of A Good Man in Africa with a naked black lady spread-eagled across the endpapers… Someone completely mystified by the expression “Tal-lyho!” and asking for an explanation … what, no dictionary to hand? And if “Tallyho!” was such a poser what in God’s name did he make of “Haughmagandie”? So why wasn’t he asking about it? And so on. But these instances are rare. On the whole I have exceptionally good relations with my translators and in the case of my French translator, Chris-tiane Besse, I have a co-worker whose diligence and attention to detail are second to none. And in French, at least, the rewards of the new text can be appreciated. When one reads, for example, sentences like, “Le lendemain matin, la véranda craque sous les pas, couverte comme elle l’est de leurs cadavres coriaces. Des lambeaux délicats et chatoyants d’ailes abandonnées gisent dans les coins,” the frisson of surprise and pleasure is genuine and acute and one realizes that a different language need not imply a loss and diminution of effect and how even a scrupulous literality can be transformed by the skill and art of a real expert.