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My "Ridiculum" Vitae
A colleague of mine recently astounded me by describing how, as a young man, he discovered he had a vocation to be a translator. But in my case, I never felt any vocation at all for this particular way of making a living. For me, translation was an almost fateful act, attributable exclusively to things beyond my control, and in fact I have always thought of it as like washing other people´s verbal laundry. As with so much else, it wasn't my fault that I became a translator, it was life's.
The villagers here call me el inglé, the Englishman. But as I often try to explain to them, uselessly, the only really English things about me are the passport and the language. Since I only lived in my country during the first four years of my life, I don't identify much with the "hot water drinkers", as a French lady I know, who only drinks wine and strong coffee, calls the natives of Albion. I don't put milk and sugar in my tea either; I like it plain and transparent, like the French.
Not even my surname, Bohme, is English - it's German and means Bohemian. Some medieval forefather of mine must have emigrated north from the ancient state of Bohemia (region of Prague), because these men were called in Germany Böhmen. It has often been said that I could not have been given a more appropriate surname, but, figurative meaning to one side, I consider myself to be neither British nor German, but European and international.
My father was born August Edward Böhme, but later removed the two dots so that the name wouldn't seem so German. He worked during the 30's in an explosives factory in Berlin, but was forced to leave the country and his young wife a few years before the war broke out, for reasons which I have described elsewhere.
After overcoming many dangers, and definitively losing his wife, he managed to take refuge in England. Walking down Oxford Street one day, and wondering - as he puts it - how he was going to pay for his next packet of fish and chips, he ran into his former boss from the factory in Berlin, who had also escaped from the storm which was gathering. Herr Bregman was one of the many Jews who believed that the Nazis would spare them because of their skills, and now my father´s warnings that this time it wouldn't work had proven him right. The recent refugee threw his arms around his former assistant as if he were a lost son, and hired him, right there on the sidewalk, as his translator at the War Office, where my father helped him transmit the formula for a new type of TNT to the English. This was the devastating RDX, which was used to pierce and implode the "impregnable" German fortifications in Normandy.
They gave my father his own office and a very pretty 19-year old secretary. Joan was a typical English girl of those adventurous years, with a small skirt and a big penchant for suave, mysterious foreigners, as my father was, and as, at age 87, he still is. It should be clear, without going into further details, that it is only a slight exaggeration to say that I was born in a translation office!
When the war was over, times being hard in England, we emigrated to English-speaking Canada, where I spent the first twelve years of my life in a state of profound monolingualism, like the vast majority of mortals. It was a sort of verbal virginity, but, like the conventional type, in my case at least, it didn't last long.
My first foreign language was Spanish, which I learned when my mother, metamorphosized as a creator of abstract paintings, "liberated" herself from my disconsolate father and took me to live in an artist's colony in Mexico. And to skip a few pages forward in my fast-moving Ridiculum Vitae, the nomadic existence which we led from then on resulted, some five years later, in our living in New York, which is where, at the age of 17, I did my first job as, not as a translator but as a... conference interpreter!
Well, to be honest, I was given neither a booth nor a fee, but the speaker I translated was soon to become what is called a legend in his own time. It happened that in 1959, the vencedor of the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro, embarked in New York on a lightning tour of the United States. Few people are aware of the fact, but during the first months Fidel was not a communist at all. He wanted to try to get help from his northern neighbours to reconstruct his country according to the precepts of American capitalism, and Kennedy wanted to give it. But due to the large US interests in Cuba which he had expropriated, this support was tragically denied, forcing Fidel to knock on a more distant door. In Central Park, the swash-buckling leader of the Cuban people appeared before thousands of Americans, most of whom were Spanish-speaking. He was a glamorous figure and covered with glory, as well as blood, and I didn't want to miss him.
Fidel spoke in Spanish, and seeing around me an urgent need for translation, I climbed up among the branches of a tree and attempted to interpret the Liberator's speech for a very serious group of Greenwich Village intellectuals (that was where we lived too). The only words I remember were these: "Although we speak different languages, we have the same feelings in our hearts!", but they didn't do him any good. Ironically, the event turned out to be more historic for me than for Fidel.
But before I set out to be a professional translator, 20 more years passed, during which time I practised other trades of a totally different nature. Almost by osmosis, I learned several more languages, one of which was Brazilian (carioca, to be exact) Portuguese. One terrible winter in Paris - as terrible, in relative terms, as were those down-and-out days in London for my father - a person who had been a secretary at a Big International Organization (which I will here call the "BIO") said to me, "Oh, with all the languages you know, you should ask them for some translations to do!"
I always follow the advice of those who care for me, and the next day, on the 8th floor of the BIO, I found myself before a grey-haired Englishwoman whom I felt strongly resembled the forbidding person who was at that time our Head of State. She read my duly filled-out application form with disdain.
"French? We've got more French translators than we know what to do with. And we don't need any Spanish ones either. Come back in six months to sit for the yearly test, if you want...". Not knowing if I would be dead or alive in six month's time, and having always been unlucky in contests and examinations anyway, I was dispiritedly heading for the door when she then said, as if to herself, "Portuguese...".
It seemed that the only translator who knew Portuguese had a cold, and in fact there was an urgent document which had just arrived from Brazil. I left with a sheaf of papers under my arm, walking on clouds. The rate of pay per page which I had seen posted on the office wall was, compared with my teacher's salary, enormous, and on the way home I stopped at the Rue Monge and bought myself a used typewriter to type it up with.
But I was horrified when, sitting on my bed, I skimmed over the 30 pages I had been given. The text was a proposal for the creation of a computer centre in northeastern Brazil, and written in a kind of Portuguese that was quite unfamiliar to me. It was 1981 and few of us had even seen a computer then, let alone used one, and I didn't even know the meaning of words like hardware, software or monitor.
Apart from the technical terms, which were quite beyond me, was the turgid, redundant style of the writing itself, full of objectives, frameworks, programmes and qualitative levels of this and that. My native-fluent Portuguese, learned in the streets and favelas of Rio de Janeiro, was virtually useless to me here, and my heart sank as I saw myself giving my detested English lessons ad infinitum. Then I had one of those strokes of luck which have often helped me out of a fix at the very last minute.
For several weeks I had noticed going up and down the stairs of my hotel a swarthy little man with a Groucho Marx moustache. He struck me because he was always buried in the collar of a large black overcoat, even when the autumnal weather was not all that cold. The very evening after I got back from the BIO, he was talking on the landing with several Brazilian tourists, at which I cocked an ear and realized that he too was Brazilian. I took note of the number on the door into which he disappeared, and went upstairs to get my document, to see if he could help me.
I knew how overwhelmed Brazilians always were when, far from their beloved Brasil, they discover someone who can speak their language and thus relieve their saudades, but this one's reaction surpassed all of my expectations. When he realised I was a virtual Brazilian, and lived alone next door, he was ecstatic, invited me in, fussed over me, made me a cafezinho...
Within minutes I had discovered that Galvão was a professor of statistics from the University of São Paulo on an exchange programme, didn't speak French, loathed being away from Brazil, couldn't stand French food, knew all about computers and would be delighted to spend the next 5 or 6 evenings with me, if not more. Since he didn't speak much English, all he could do was explain, in Portuguese, what it all meant, leaving me to find words from my natural vocabulary that expressed it. It never occurred to me to go out and purchase a bi-lingual technical dictionary, because having become a translator suddenly and without the slightest forethought, and having received a purely humanistic education, I didn't even know that such a thing existed.
We spent many hours at a round table of a brasserie on the Rue des Écoles deciphering the thing as if it were the Rosetta Stone. I did my best to camouflage the fact that the translation was really a desperate improvisation, and handed it in. I waited one week before poking my face in Mrs. Kidd's door again to see if there was something else to do.
By this time, of course, the translation had been revised and corrected by the BIO in-house staff, who had given their verdict. I ran into the Iron Lady in one of the long, winding corridors lined with filing cabinets. She stopped, looked at me rather pityingly and said in her haughtiest accent "Oh yes. Your English is rather ODD", and marched off.
I went home empty-handed, and miserable. She was undoubtedly right, the English of my translation was unprofessional - neither the crisp, authoritative language used by the international organizations nor the clear, expressive English I would normally have used. It was a clumsy attempt to render the repetitive rhetoric of the bureaucrats in Brazil, who had to fill up the 30 pages allocated to their report with Portuguese which sounded as if they were fully aware of all the problems surrounding computers, in order to impress the end reader of the English translation, since the end reader was the one who had to finance the proposal. (In fact, a Brazilian university professor told me years later that the centre, after being built at huge expense, had to be abandoned because the equipment room had been installed in a subterranean chamber which flooded with sea water.)
But my guardian angel stepped in again, and a few weeks later said, "Don't give up - if your translation was that bad they wouldn't have paid you for it. Go back and remind them that you exist". Mustering my courage, I did... and to my delight found another person sitting behind the desk at the English Translation Service. Mrs. Kidd, I was told, had taken her retirement a few days after I last saw her and the new Chief was this Englishman of about my age called Brian, with a beard of about the length of mine, and a vaguely professorial air which made me like him at once.
"I really don't have a clue about what's going on here", he apologised in a lovely Oxford accent, as if I did, but said he had seen my name in connection with a recent translation. He therefore tooj it for granted that I was one of the house's stable of external workers, a technically true fact which I did nothing to elaborate upon. As a matter of course he went over to the bin of documents to be translated and handed me the first one on the pile.
It was in beautifully written French and about something I could understand, the conservation of a war-torn Buddhist temple in Cambodia. I delivered the job well before the deadline date, and to my relief, my work on that and all the subsequent texts which followed - in French, Spanish and Portuguese too - never got a single word of criticism, and even some letters of praise. I suppose Mrs. Kidd simply treated me as she herself had been treated in those fearsome schools the British send their children to, but I think that since she was finishing her own career anyway, she might have relaxed her high standards for a moment to help me get started on mine.
In a few months I had left my job teaching a group of jaundiced white-collar cadres (whom I once told, in an ascerbic moment, that they should think of me "as a doctor who had come to cure them of the disease of not speaking English") and had become a full-time free-lance translator, working with a brand new electric typewriter which clattered through the floors and walls of the Hotel Saint André des Arts, just like the boots of a flamenco dancer. When I went beyond midnight the American girl who lived below me used to shout out the window for me to stop... in English! Paris, c'était comme ça.
And it all wound up, ten years later, with word processors, faxes, modems and other gadgets, among the olive groves of Montefrio, here in the south of Spain. My hermitage cum office is located in a whitewashed farmhouse covered in terracotta tiles and four futuristic photovoltaic panels, making it perhaps the first translation outfit of all time to run on energy from the sun. Here, in one of the most remote corners of the European Union, I work as if I were inside the "BIO" and the Council of Europe, minus the "hassles" of commuting to (and being brow-beaten in) places rife with potential Mrs. Kidds. Telework allows me to receive 5 pages in Spanish from Paris or Brussels after breakfast and upload my English translation to the customer's hard disk before he goes to lunch, without even having taken off my pyjamas.
But I always remembered my beginnings as a "spontaneous" interpreter in Central Park, and knew that I was destined to one day put on the headphones and make my living with a mike. I, who unlike so many public figures, spoke well in public but had never found an audience to speak to, would at last make them listen to me - and pay for it at the maximum official rates!
In the photo, you see the smiling author at last in a booth, although this is not a real congress but, rather, the intensive course for conference interpreters at Cambridge University. I have always stubbornly taught myself the things I needed to know to survive, but this time I felt it would be wiser to learn a bit about swimming before I threw myself off the deep end. The card with the number 12 on it stuck to the window is because the teachers shared out our numbers before each session, to see who would listen to whom.
Going over what I have just written, it occurs to me that some readers might receive an idyllic image of my life as a translator. This would be an error: until I moved on to other more lucrative activities, such as interpreting, I spent half of my time working round the clock to meet deadlines, and the other half watching the clouds drift over the Sierra de Parapanda and waiting for something new to crank out of the fax. Female translators who marry men with steady jobs are better off, but those who have a family to feed live in a permanent state of economic insecurity, and often take on far greater workloads than they can comfortably handle, for fear of leaner days ahead.
I'll give you an eloquent illustration of this: when the Soviet Empire began to crumble, there was a flurry of concern among Europe's translators. We were aware that there was one thing which the Russians did well, and that was to teach foreign languages, going so far as to use hypnosis in order to train spies who could go unnoticed in any capitalist country. The ministries of Moscow were full of translators and interpreters who would soon be out of work and able to emigrate. Surely, we thought, they would invade our free market and compete with us fiercely. What could we decadent, lazy Westerners do to defend ourselves against such a top level threat?
But when the final collapse occurred, we saw that it was a false alarm. The citizens of the former Soviet Union, being used to having the State take care of them "body and soul", are not attracted by the idea of working as free-lancers without a steady salary. To our great relief, we saw that best ones landed jobs in "strategic" organisations such as NATO, and the rest stayed put.
Which just goes to show that freedom, like everything else we chase after, is a relative thing: some need a lot of it, while most are content with... a little more than they had before.
xx
