SlavFile, Summer 2002
An Interpreted Life: Excerpts on Language and Work
According to an urban legend current in the late Soviet period, someone with a freshly minted teaching degree was hired to provide instruction in English in a school in the tundra of the Far North, attended mainly by children of a native, caribou-tending people. The teacher came from a region far, far away, a subtropical stretch of Georgian Black Sea coast called Mingrelia. He taught; the children worked assiduously. At the end of the year, a commission from the Ministry of Education journeyed out from Moscow to observe. Prompted to demonstrate their knowledge, the pupils chattered fluently. The examiners listened, exchanged glances, took notes. What the children were speaking was not English or any other language known to the examiners. Far from outside influences, the children—and their parents—believed that what they were speaking was English. It did not take much detective work to discover that the teacher, a Mingrelian patriot, had taken the opportunity to increase significantly the number of speakers of his native dialect.
In some way, every decision to study a foreign language is like this. We think we know what language we are studying, but in fact, how can we? All we know is its name and distant, distorted reports of the culture it carries. What we end up learning always turns out to be far different from what we thought we would learn; to know in advance would be a paradox, more so than with other disciplines, for a language is both container and content.
* * *
During my first sojourn in the Republic of Georgia, in 1987-88, when it still seemed that the Soviet Union would last another thousand years, I had an experience that shook me profoundly and deepened the imprint of the Russian language in my mind.
During that time, in that part of the world, such few Westerners as were to be found there were often asked their opinion of Stalin. Sometimes the question was put this way: why is it, the questioner would say, that Stalin is less highly regarded in the West than in the Soviet Union? When I was asked this question, I was usually standing on a small platform before some example of American technology: a car, a computer, some sort of computerized medical instrument. What was I doing here? The platform, the technology, the microphone and I, along with twenty-four other young Russian-speaking Americans, were all components of an exhibit put together by a propaganda wing of the U.S. government that has since been disbanded and folded into another, larger propaganda wing of the U.S. government. There were many such exhibits over the years, the most famous one featuring home design and containing the model kitchen that was the setting for the famous debate between Nixon and Khrushchev.
The one I worked on was organized around personal computers and their role in everyday life in America. It had multiple purposes. The stated purpose was to give Soviet people the opportunity to see examples of American material culture and learn about how we lived. The hidden purposes were to bring Soviets and Americans into contact so they could have ordinary, human conversations, which, according to the thinking somewhere in the U.S. government, would be nearly all it took to subvert the system there; also, to show that our standard of living was higher than that of people in the USSR, another way of subverting the system; to sow the seeds of Western ideas in a wide arc throughout the Soviet Union; to gather information about social trends and public opinion in the Soviet Union among strata of the society who generally did not mix with foreigners and who, like everyone in the USSR, did not express their opinions in any observable way, such as publishing their thoughts freely or voting from among a selection of candidates representing different points of view. Finally, the exhibit had been designed in order to develop a cadre of young American Soviet experts who, thanks to months spent outside the capitals among ordinary people, would have a solid grasp of the way the mass of people lived and thought all over the USSR, knowledge that would serve as a basis for future careers as academia, language services, diplomacy or journalism.
I had graduated from college a few months before landing this unusual job, and one of my last classes in the Russian literature department had consisted of readings in émigré and dissident literature, with a syllabus of works by the major gulag diarists of the Stalin period. I had ammunition both plentiful and convincing, or so I thought, to cite in response to any challenging questions that might arise.
The question about Stalin came up almost every day, sometimes even more than once, and my unconsidered, frank response, that Stalin was a feared and hated figure in the West, responsible for the death and unjust imprisonment of millions, evoked first agitation and then anger, denial and accusations of anti-Sovietism from the little crowd of a dozen or two dozen generally grouped around me. Before answering, I would gauge my strength at that particular moment and my ability to withstand the firestorm that truth-telling would inevitably cause. I began to husband my strength, muting my answer and making it less controversial when I felt I didn’t have the energy to cope with what would inevitably follow. My answer varied according to the day, my mood, whether I had just had a break and was feeling feisty or whether I was flagging after a long day. Dissembling required more linguistic skill than giving a direct, simple answer more congruent with my actual beliefs, but the former resulted in a more acquiescent and friendly crowd. I was learning an important lesson of existence in a totalitarian state, albeit a very temporary, very sheltered existence, that if you hear often and forcefully that black is white and white is black, you first cease insisting on the truth, because it no longer seems worth the trouble, and then you stop believing it, in part to justify your silence.
One afternoon I was asked the Stalin question, at a moment when I judged myself in good form and able to respond to whatever the truth might bring out.
“Stalin is seen in the West as a very cruel man,” I said in my simple Russian, “responsible for the needless deaths of millions and the unjust imprisonment of even more.”
I braced myself for what would follow: the claims that, yes, he had made some mistakes and committed excesses, but that he had been a strong leader; that he was just what the Soviet Union had needed at the time; that the numbers of gulag inmates were inflated, and anyway, if they were in there it meant that they deserved to be; that he had stiffened the spine of the people and won the war against the fascists.
I pulled out names and citations: Solzhenitsyn, his books based on the testimony of numerous inmates and his own experience; Varlam Shalamov, whose short stories came out of eighteen years of internment; Evgenia Ginzburg, author of wrenching prison diaries; Mandelshtam, who disappeared into the gulag system after reciting, to a small group in a private home, a poem that mentioned Stalin’s “fat fingers, like worms.”
The hubbub around me grew and grew until I could not hear any single person coherently, but only isolated phrases. A tall man with pomaded gray hair loomed up before me. He looked kind and wise. He opened his mouth. I waited, sure that he would provide some support, as solitary, brave souls there occasionally did. Perhaps he had even been an inmate himself; he looked just old enough.
“Young lady,” he said, “you look well-educated and intelligent, but you don’t know what you’re talking about. None of what you’re describing actually happened. It’s all pure propaganda. I was alive then. Take my word for it; everything you’re saying is false.”
I could not reply. I would never find out if he believed what he was saying and was in fact innocent of any knowledge of Soviet history’s darker chapters, or whether his remarks were motivated rather by loyalty or fear or some other inner need to deny the horrors. I would never know. But that day came to stand out in my memory, distinct from dozens of other similar days: I learned that day how hard it is for most of us, everywhere, to know and speak the truth. The experience happened to me in Russian, at a time when I was surrounded with the sounds of Russian for months and months, and it tenderized me like a piece of raw meat. It broke me down, making me more receptive to the juices of the Russian language seeping into me, deep into me, until I was not simply immersed, but thoroughly marinated.
* * *
Recently, after a hiatus of some months spent traveling, studying and writing, with funds depleted, I returned to interpreting. The meetings where I would be interpreting, for a federal agency, were to take place just outside Washington, D.C., in a hotel surrounded by suburban sprawl. Nothing around but shopping malls and office parks.
My work has taken me many places: to secret military research sites in Kazakhstan, into courtrooms, backstage at the ballet, up in a helicopter over Alaska, to a wheat storage silo in Iowa, to a locomotive manufacturing facility in rural Pennsylvania. But this assignment boils the work down to its essentials. The meeting will take place in this room only, the Russians and the Americans facing each other across the table embodying my working languages. There will be no need for us to go anywhere else. Everything that has to be said will be said here. On the conference table are the objects the interpreter requires to do her work: pads of paper and pens, both bearing the hotel logo, and sweating pitchers of ice water, the former to preserve the spoken messages as they go back and forth and the latter to preserve the voice. These are all the interpreter has to work with, meaning and voice.
In the past, this kind of assignment, the kind where a bunch of people shut themselves up in a featureless room in a featureless landscape for a week, barely emerging until they have achieved some kind of agreement, the kind of assignment where words like ‘deliverable’ and ‘task order’ fly back and forth in both languages and the meeting participants are divided between those who carry out the negotiations and those who sit silently throughout the week, typing everything into a laptop, occasionally running outside when their cell phones ring, time was, this kind of assignment drove me nuts with its monotony. But now I have a new appreciation for its stripped-down, essential quality.
Perhaps it’s just me, or maybe it’s due to the fact that the subject of this meeting seems particularly arcane (as is often the case, it has something to do with arms control; the arms control guys are the best clients and have been for years, all Russian interpreters agree), but the sentences uttered at this kind of meeting seem to hold very little meaning. The challenge is to heave them across the language barrier without losing an iota of their slippery, empty, ambiguous saying-one-thing-and-then-backtracking-without-abandoning-the-position-entirely quality. The exercise is so engrossing that at times I forget that we interpreters (there are three of us) serve a function that is auxiliary, nothing more, and the purpose of these meetings is not to see how successful we are in getting the negotiators’ hemming and hawing, their diplomatic stalling and hints and pretend fits of anger across the language barrier. There is some other purpose, to which, as non-specialists in the topic under discussion, we are not quite privy.
One of the Americans makes the opening remarks. “Our joint work has been going well over the past eighteen months,” he says, and my colleague Sergei translates into Russian. “We’ve nearly finished with the preliminaries and the first stage. The first two contracts have been satisfactorily fulfilled.” Andre and I are listening to our colleague working, as interpreters like to do, imagining how we would handle the same utterances, and sending him silent thought waves of congratulation when he turns a lovely phrase, prepared to drop our gaze and look neutral if he strikes out.
“Now,” says the speaker with a flourish, “we are, you could say, at the edge of the precipice.”
Andre and I turn slightly toward each other and furrow our brows, then lean in to hear what Sergei will do with this garbled and misleading sentence. The three of us exchange imperceptible smiles. We are all thinking the same thing. If Sergei translates “precipice” literally, the Russians, who are mostly over fifty, and therefore Soviet to the core, will all remember, as one, the hoary old joke:
Question: “What’s the difference between capitalism and communism?”
Answer: “They’re both at the edge of a precipice, but we communists have taken a great step forward!”
If Sergei unthinkingly translates “precipice” as “precipice,” the Russians will be unable to keep a straight face.
Threshold, I think, clenching my fists under the table where they will remain invisible, and sending silent messages to Sergei, who is a magnificent interpreter and does not need my help, telepathic or otherwise. Threshold. Don’t say precipice, Sergei! Say threshold.
“Now,” says Sergei in Russian, “we’re on the threshold of a new phase.” I think I see him wink at Andre and me.
I release my breath and unclench my fists.
“That’s exactly what I would have said,” Andre whispers, barely audible. His chin is nearly against his chest; he’s playing tic-tac-toe on a pad in his lap.