William Boyd - Bamboo - Essays and Criticism

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

“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 well: 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.

1986

London is too big, too sprawling and attenuated, to be encompassed or defined, to be fixed on the page in one or many identities. The city spreads itself out generously, expanding north, south, east and west from its brown river looping lazily through its shallow limestone valley. I live near its centre, a hundred metres from the Thames in Chelsea. I have friends who live in Hampstead and Crouch End to the north, Barnes and Richmond to the west, Streatham and Tooting Bec in the south, Greenwich and the Isle of Dogs in the east, but they feel so far away, as if they were inhabitants of other towns, in other counties. If I were to visit them, for example, for lunch or dinner, I would think nothing of allotting an hour or more for the journey, or even longer, depending on the time of day. These are vast distances for a city dweller and they affect our perceptions of the place radically. To a very real extent it is quicker for me to go to Oxford than it is to Stoke Newington in north London, easier to travel to Cambridge than visit a colleague who works on a newspaper in Wapping in the city’s east end. Oxford and Cambridge, provincial towns a hundred kilometres away, feel more accessible than districts of the city I inhabit. What does that tell me about London? What kind of Londoner does that make me? And I am not alone. No matter where you live in the city the same sense of isolation, the same alienation from other areas of the place affect you. We live so close and yet we feel so far apart, with such a long journey to make from district to district. And with these fraught trajectories across the city it is no wonder that we draw in on ourselves, create zones and parameters, homelands and reservations, beyond which we are reluctant to go. If Los Angeles can be defined as ninety suburbs in search of a city the same can be said of London too. There is no one London, there is no one place, one entity, it is a congregation, a plurality, the sum of its many and disparate parts.

Broadly speaking, the city is made up of two dozen or so villages, each geographically distinct and each with its own character. When I spread a map of London in front of me and look at those areas I know well, where I regularly frequent and visit, I am astonished at how much of the place is still terra incognita. I live in Chelsea, I know the neighbouring “villages” of Fulham, South Kensington and Knightsbridge well, very well indeed. A little further beyond and things begin to grow hazy: Hammersmith and Belgravia, Pimlico and Westminster, Notting Hill and Bayswater, Mayfair and Bloomsbury are familiar but I can easily get lost in them. I look at the map and I see I have barely strayed beyond London’s south-west quadrant. To the south, just across the bridges over the river, lie Battersea, Wandsworth and Clapham — barely explored. To the north, north of Regent’s Park, lie places that are wholly alien and strange. From time to time my work takes me to Camden Town. And beyond Regent’s Park, north of the great railway termini of Euston, St Pan-cras and King’s Cross, I feel I cross an invisible boundary. Here in north London the buildings look darker, sootier, in less good repair. The streets seem more narrow, the people scruffier, the pavements littered and soiled. Yet I have travelled barely two miles from my home. It is not so much that I have crossed a topographical frontier, it is more of a psychological barrier that separates me from these other areas. I feel different here in north London, just as I do in the east or south of the river, and because I feel different everything about these places — the buildings, the denizens, the atmosphere — is subtly altered as well.