Alison Anderson's Blog

When I travel, I like to be a flâneuse, to walk and wander somewhat aimlessly, to soak in the atmosphere, sit in cafés on squares and observe both the tourists and the locals, and let things happen; not for me vigorous hikes or organized tours or even the audio headsets. So I generally travel alone, as this aimlessness is deeply frustrating to others who prefer a planned agenda, with lists of things to do and see.

On my latest trip I decided to go to Stockholm, because I had not been there in fifty years, and couldn’t really remember much about it, and also because I imagined it to be a good place for the solo woman traveler: safe, efficient, woman-friendly. I booked a room on a floating hotel, which also matched my state of mind: even if the ship would not be leaving port, I would have that illusion of traveling onward, a comfortable mixture of drifting and destination, and indeed there were a few windy moments when the ship rocked ever so slightly, and I felt a momentum in my thoughts.

I made some plans nevertheless, to structure my flânerie, allowing for the forecast of sun and wind. I returned to Skansen, the outdoor park and museum, a perfect place for ambling and daydreaming; I remembered it as magical from fifty years ago and it was unchanged, as far as I could tell; only the season was different. Small children in bright pink reflective vests followed their teachers while magnificent geese waddled everywhere, very much the rulers of the place. There were views onto the water and the city in an early spring sunshine; young fathers on paternity leave congregated in the café for their children’s snacks, strollers and baby carriages neatly parked in rows at the entrance.

I took the tram back to the city center and got lost, almost sorry to be trapped among modern architecture and massive construction sites after a long morning in nature and an illusion of a simpler past. Finally I found Drottninggatan, the main pedestrian shopping street, which I knew would lead me back down to my island and hotel. Another perfect causeway for people-watching and drifting on impressions: while many of the shops were the familiar chains you find everywhere, and I could have been anywhere, therefore, I knew I was in Sweden and that its reputation went before it; I saw nothing to refute that, only people going quietly about their business, no shoving, no rushing, a sense of reserved friendliness and helpfulness, if help were needed.

This impression lasted all through my three days in Stockholm. I went out to the Waldemarsudde museum, which was filled with flowers and eager pensioners, like myself, gathering for lunch at the museum café; this was their favorite place, they assured me, I must come again. As at Skansen there were views onto the city and a walk by the water to the tram; all conferring a sense of well-being, along with the bright, low-angled sunlight; even the brisk wind was intermittent, bracing. I found myself again in the modern center, did some shopping, wandered slowly back down Drottninggatan to the old town and my boat.

The last morning I was very tired: all my walking had caught up with me and I was sorry my plane was so late in the afternoon. One last short hike up the hill to the square by the Nobel Museum; a café armchair in sunlight. Local children were on a sort of scavenger hunt with their class. I eavesdropped on passing tourists and heard Dutch, Spanish, Finnish, German, Greek, Arabic. I left regretfully; the sunshine, the unassuming hospitality, the ease of being a woman alone. Or a woman, full stop. Astrid Lindgren, Greta Garbo and Birgit Nilsson on the bank notes. All those young fathers doing their share – I had seen more of them during my walks. This is how society is changed, I thought. By example. Quietly, slowly. Small things like a country’s currency; larger ones like paternity leave. (The Nobel Museum is not exemplary, but then it is global, and it is a reminder of what remains to be done.)

By half past two I knew my flight was delayed; I attributed it to the low-cost carrier and the late departure from notably erratic Geneva airport. I sat and watched a small team of construction workers rearrange a corner of the area where my gate was located. A ginger-haired young woman in a reflective vest and sturdy hiking shoes was sticking squares of green striped carpet to a dusty floor. The men were mostly standing around, apart from one who was drilling panels into the wall. Their conversation was desultory, calm.

Finally I went to stand in line; the other passengers were getting edgy, impatient. A frazzled French mother was doing what she could to calm her tired young son; she had another toddler in an airport stroller. In answer to the son’s pleading she explained that the flight was delayed, then out of the blue: “It seems there’s been a glitch, there’s a truck that ran over some people in the center of town, we don’t know, maybe it was an accident.”

She didn’t want to frighten her son; I could appreciate her hope, which I shared, that it was an accident. I checked my tablet: the BBC reported a lorry clearly targeting pedestrians on Drottninggatan then slamming into the Åhlens department store on the corner. Three people were reported dead, at that point.

With hindsight, it was as if no one knew, apart from the French mother and me. Ground crew were smiling and calm, passengers no more irritable than anyone who has been waiting for two hours would be. I felt calm, even numb, as yet unaware of the resonance of the event, but anxious to know, and to let others know I was at the airport, about to board.

We finally took off; I was next to a Swedish woman and her son; she spent the entire flight reading fashion magazines; he played games on his phone. Most of the passengers seemed to be Swedish families on their way to the Alps for skiing or tennis. Some were fidgety, moving around the cabin to talk to others they knew. I gathered some were speaking about the incident, but they didn’t seem distressed. The view of the Alps was among the best I’ve ever seen, in a late afternoon rosiness. Stockholm seemed very far away.

But as I reconnected with the world in Geneva and messages started coming in, I felt an immense sadness. For those who had died, their families, the injured. And yet again, to a degree, for a country’s loss of innocence. But I also felt a doomed nostalgia for those three sunny days where I’d wandered in an illusion of a kinder, better world—of course I had known all along, reading the news from Syria or Washington, that there is no such place—but briefly, Stockholm had been that place for me. A part of me was sorry not to be there still, perhaps inconvenienced, trapped in the city without transportation or a place to stay, but also given an opportunity to know it even better, in a different and deeper and more meaningful way. As it was, place and time had ordained things otherwise, and I am grateful for that. But even now I keep wandering along Drottninggatan as it was on Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon, and I am frustrated, half-blind, as if I had lost, or missed something in my aimlessness.

I’ve never been one for pilgrimages, or trips organized around a certain goal, or travelling for the sake of getting somewhere; I’ve always been, rather, something of a drifter, choosing my restaurants and lodgings and sometimes even villages or islands on a whim, an instinct, a desire to flee the crowds and insinuate myself into a landscape not as a tourist, but as a visitor or traveller.

For the first time in many years at the end of May 2010 I broke my own self-imposed travel formula by joining a tour of Crimea that focused on the life of Anton Chekhov and the years he spent in Yalta and its surroundings, led by a congenial Chekhov scholar and followed by an equally congenial mixture of people of all ages and backgrounds who had one thing in common: a love of Chekhov’s work and a curiosity about the world he lived in, some of which, we discovered, is still very much alive in its way. The tour came about as part of a campaign to save Chekhov’s “White Dacha” in Yalta, where he lived the last years of his life, and which has been  suffering from a severe lack of funding since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Yalta Chekhov Campaign, based in Great Britain with both Chekhov scholars and admirers and theatre people behind it, is raising funds for vital repair and maintenance on the Dacha.  (My fellow participants from the tour know who they are and I won’t go into a lengthy description of this part of the trip here but, rather, also provide other readers with the link to the excellent agency in Britain that organized the tour and encourage anyone who’s interested to write and enquire about subsequent tours) What I did promise however to my fellow travellers was a description of the trip that I went on after I left them, where I journeyed by rail overnight across nearly all of Ukraine from the south due north to the town of Sumy, where Chekhov spent two summers as a young man, before he became the famous playwright we all know from the portraits with his pince-nez.

My interest in the Sumy summers came from Chekhov’s own descriptions in his letters. He was twenty-eight years old, unmarried, with a family who were both a great support and a considerable burden:  the best way to please everyone and stay cool, literally, was to get out of Moscow for the summer and rent a dacha on a country estate. The estate was Luka, a few miles outside of Sumy; in those days Ukraine was part of the Russian empire and this was a lush, verdant landscape of gentle hills and winding rivers The family who owned the estate were the Lintvaryovs: mother, three daughters, two sons. The two families became instant friends and their own friends and acquaintances drifted in and out of the main house or the dacha as the summers progressed; there was fishing and swimming, music and recitals, not to mention conversation There were dramas, including a birth, a marriage, a death, and not a few affairs of the heart. Chekhov describes his time there better than anyone else could; my own interest is in the Lintvaryov family and their interaction with their soon-to-be-famous summer guest. I wanted to see as in Yalta what was still alive of that time.

In 1960, the centennial of Chekhov’s birth,  a small museum was created in the building that had been the summer dacha; from 1919 until then the estate had served as a school. The dacha-museum is well-kept and visited regularly, despite the loss of Soviet funding. I was a bit of an oddity there, as a foreigner; nearly all the visitors, I was told, were Ukrainian and Russian. The day I visited I joined the tour of a small group of medical students from Sumy, which seemed appropriate.

There are five rooms open to the public: the entrance is a display room with photographs and historical information, a few precious artefacts like Olga Knipper’s evening bag and one of Anton Pavlovich’s pince-nez, donated by his sister. The first room to the left is devoted to Chekhov’s brother Nikolai, who died of tuberculosis the second summer and is buried in the local cemetery. Behind that room, overlooking the garden to the rear, is where Anton Pavlovich stayed; a simple reconstruction of the way the room must have been, with a writing desk by the window, a day bed in the corner, and a small table with medical instruments that were of great interest to my fellows on the tour. The other room to the right of the entrance was where Chekhov’s mother stayed, and directly opposite the entrance was a dining room with a piano where the family entertained.

That’s a rather dry description of a place that in fact is very much alive, full of the spirit both of the era thanks to a tasteful arrangement of antiques that had belonged either to the Lintvaryovs or to Chekhov’s sister Masha, or were donated by well-wishers and of the writer himself. Like my companions in Crimea, the women who look after the museum in all senses of the term Lyudmila Nikolayevna, the curator; Anna the guide, Alla the caretaker—share an ongoing love of Chekhov’s work and a curiosity in those who come to visit. They refer to their famous ghost, in fact, as Anton Pavlovich, as if he had merely gone down to the river to fish for a while and would be back after sunset with a basketful of crayfish.

They are also very proud of their literary club, which meets at the museum for recitals, lectures, and performances. This is how we keep the intellectual life of the city alive, said Lyudmila Nikolayevna; our local intelligentsia is continuing the tradition begun here so long ago. They adopted me, when they found out how far I had come, and why I was there. I was taken to the back room (which had been Masha’s, and will again be someday soon) and plied with tea and biscuits and questions and more information than my poor head could retain; thankfully there are small guidebooks available and my old camera cooperated.

But for every painstakingly preserved teacup or garden hat or desk lamp in the Chekhov museum, there is an indescribable quantity of elegiac emptiness and absence in the old house across the street that had once been the Lintvaryovs’, a crumbling old brick building where the regulation waist-high green paint of its last incarnation  as a school is still visible on the walls through the gutted windows. The school was closed in the early 1990s:  the building that had survived two world wars, a revolution, Nazi occupation, the Red Army and hordes of schoolchildren has not survived twenty years of tight-fisted capitalism. Efforts to raise funds or interest the government have failed, thus far; Lyudmila Nikolayevna said even an article in the New York Times was unable to rouse any emigrant, or other, philanthropists from their apathy. Anton Pavlovich, in one of his letters, mentions his desire to create a writers’ colony in Ukraine the old Lintvaryov estate would have been the perfect place.

Although I am not altogether sure it is what Anton Pavlovich would have wanted in the end, in this day and age. Too much of present-day writing or being a writer is about being published, getting in print, being picked up by the media all things Chekhov avoided and disliked in his lifetime. Still, if it were to save the Lintvaryov estate, and the memory of the people who created such a wealth of memories and happiness for Chekhov in his youth it might not be too high a price to pay after all. Certainly there is something there of the summers of 1888-1889, still: the river for fishing, picnics, swimming and swinging out on tarzanka lianas; the bucolic village of Luka, with its country church and jovial priest. The local people of Sumy do not mind that they are so far from the cultural centres of the world; they know what they have to be proud of. Anton Pavlovich wrote, in one of his letters, Abbazia and the Adriatic are marvellous, but Luka and the Psyol are better. His descriptions are filled with the nostalgia of knowing a privileged moment of youth that is all too evanescent; something of his Luka lingers not only in his stories and plays, but also in present-day Sumy.

June 2010

In the spring of 2010 I was on a train from Simferopol to Sumy, in Eastern Ukraine. I didn’t see much of Simferopol it is the capital of Crimea, but it is inland, a town of administration, big buildings and airports and train stations, not a place where tourists linger. I had just spent five days with a British tour of southern Crimea, viewing the well-known historical treasures in the region of Yalta, the spectacular scenery. Then the tour abandoned me, as planned, to return to London, and I stayed on, feeling vulnerable, adventurous, very much alone with my limited Russian and my eagerness to explore, to be no longer the tourist but the traveler.

The train was old, Soviet-era, seemed to hold together with layers of paint. I had the compartment to myself; our guide had explained this was the only way to make a reservation from outside Ukraine. I looked forward to the long, overnight journey – Sumy is in the northeast, beyond Kharkiv – and to the solitude, after five days with ebullient, gregarious fellow travelers.

A short while after we left Simferopol a young man came into the compartment. I was reluctant to talk, given my rusty command of the language, and I was worried about how long he intended to stay; but after a few awkward minutes he asked where I was going, heard my accent, was intrigued, and the conversation began.

He had come from Sevastopol, where he was taking a course, learning to be a sailor, and was heading to Dzhankoy, a town in northern Crimea, which was where he was from. He told me he had an uncle in Saint Petersburg, and was hoping to find work through him once he finished his course; prospects were bleak in Ukraine, he said. He was discreet, thoughtful, serious, almost shy. Blond with blue eyes. He condemned the government (Yanukovich had been elected four months earlier) for their corrupt extravagance, for their ability to spend $50,000 on their official vehicles when the average Ukrainian was earning $200 a month. I missed some of what he said, tried to answer his questions about California or Switzerland. Before he left the train, perhaps forty-five minutes or an hour later, he told me his name was Andrei.

When I was younger I had many such encounters with strangers on trains, but they grow rarer as you get older, and the opportunities don’t arise as frequently; people on planes don’t like to talk. And how often are you on a train from Simferopol to Sumy¦ (The following year, the same tour operator with whom I had visited Yalta tried to organize the same journey to Sumy“ and their train was cancelled.)

It’s not that Andrei and I had a deep philosophical conversation, or that there had been any kind of special connection, or regret when he arrived in Dzhankoy. I was actually relieved to have the compartment to myself again; the provodnitsa came in soon thereafter to make up my berth, and I fell asleep to the comforting lull of train tracks, waking now and again when we stopped in a major town.

But I haven’t forgotten him perhaps because it was such a rare, unexpected encounter. And now it seems to contain so many elements of the terrible, tense situation unfolding in Crimea the young Russian-speaking Ukrainian with family in Russia; the connection to Sevastopol; his youth, ripe for military picking.

I wonder where he is now. Perhaps safely on his uncle’s ship, ferrying Russian goods to China or Western Europe; perhaps standing in line in a recruitment office somewhere in Ukraine, about to be issued with a uniform and a weapon. Or perhaps still in Crimea, one of those polite, anonymous pro-Russian militia who have occupied government buildings, surrounded the airports, the Ukrainian bases. I would not recognize him, but I wonder which side he is on.

If we could continue the conversation, I expect he would tell me that Crimea is Russian, is Russia. I might agree with him up to a point, but say that there is a problem with that, that legally Crimea now belongs to Ukraine. Is within Ukraine’s sovereign, inviolable borders. Perhaps there could be a referendum, let the Crimeans decide for themselves? Would he say, who are the Crimeans? Would he tell me only the Russians, because historically Crimea belonged to Russia from the time of Catherine the Great until 1954? But wait, I would say, what about the ethnic Ukrainians, and the Tatars: minorities who must be allowed their say, and their guarantee of security; he might reply that they no longer belonged there, because they supported the new government in Kiev/Kyiv. On the other hand he might see the possibility of peaceful continuity, of remaining an autonomous part of Ukraine, with respect for both the original inhabitants (the Tatars) and the newcomers (the Russians and the Ukrainians). He might testify that he has always been well-treated as a Russian speaker/ethnic Russian in Ukraine and that there is no reason why that should change; or he might argue violently, along with Vladimir Putin, that the current government in Kyiv/Kiev is not legitimate, that it is made up of fascists and, according to the Russian media (perhaps his uncle is watching television in Petersburg and has been calling to warn him) that Russians are in danger not just in Crimea but all through Eastern Ukraine; this was, after all, Putin’s pretext for invading Georgia.

Would Andrei agree with me that Putin is just looking for a pretext to enlarge the borders of his empire? That the media in Sotchi inflated his ego and made him more power-hungry than ever, and he knows he can do what he likes with impunity? Or would he say I have misunderstood, that Vladimir Vladimirovich is a great leader who has restored pride to the Russian people and made Russia a great nation again?

Would he listen if I said, How proud will you be if every country on earth turns against you now? Would he fair enough throw the long list of my own government’s sins back in my face for Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Vietnam? Is that ever a valid argument for justifying incursion into another sovereign country?

We could argue the differences and similarities between autocracy and democracy all the way to Sumy. Between nationalism and enlightenment. It wouldn’t stop the guns, or even necessarily further understanding. No train ride is long enough for that.

But I would like to take that train ride again someday, or at least to know I can take it. Above all, I would like to know that Andrei, and millions of young men like him, will have other prospects in life than those Vladimir Putin is offering them.

March 2014

Wandering through the halls of the National Gallery of Scotland in Edinburgh some years ago, I came upon a little-known work by Lucas Cranach the Elder, a 16th century German painter. Was it the title of the painting that captivated me An Allegory of Melancholy or the painting itself, so modern, almost surreal, in its juxtaposition of strangely discordant elements?

Let me start by explaining that I like the word melancholy, even though its Greek etymology is black bile, hardly an attractive notion. One of the four humors: I cannot see myself as choleric, or sanguine, or phlegmatic, so I’ve always opted for the melancholic side of things. Melancholy has a bad rap, especially in these days of enforced cheerfulness and tooth whitener smiles. The word melancholy is onomatopoeic to me, something about its consonants and rhythm suggestive of languor, gentle sadness, nostalgia. Sitting alone on a veranda watching the sun go down, missing some one, but gently.

The other day in my Russian lesson in the middle of a poem we came upon the word toska, which is basically one of those untranslatable words with a wealth of emotional associations. What does it mean, asked my teacher (that’s her job), and I came up with a number of synonyms: sadness, unhappiness, melancholy, even though we both knew it wasn’t quite any of that. It’s more a kind of mournful yearning, nostalgia, homesickness, self-absorbed longing, words I don’t know in Russian. And any Russians reading this will tell me it’s not quite that either. My teacher, who is something of a good-natured, bawdy cynic, scoffed and said, Nowadays they call it depressia. I nodded and agreed: take the smile off your face and you’re depressed. Stuff poetry and untranslatable Russian words, and toss nuance out the window.

Dear reader: don’t buy it. If you think you’re feeling depressed, you may simply be going through a bout of old-fashioned melancholy. Enjoy it: you’re in good company. Eastern Europe and the Balkans are famed for it, but that’s no reason to disdain a perfectly good mood, and there is plenty of music out there if you don’t happen to know any Slavic languages. I recall seeing a biographical film about the great Polish pianist Arthur Rubinstein where, when asked about Chopin, he said something to the effect that there was great pleasure to be had in the sadness of Chopin’s music. I was extremely susceptible and romantic in those days, and it seemed as if I had been granted permission to be as sad as I liked: if it was okay for Chopin, that Great Romantic Hero, it was okay for me. Followed thereafter a period of listening to other equally melancholy or gloomy music: the artist whose moods most marked that particular era was Leonard Cohen. The mere tone of his voice was enough to get you on a high of melancholy. If that seems like an oxymoron, it is; but times were different. I’ve noticed even Cohen is sounding more cheerful these days, or trying to, anyway, despite having been royally ripped off by his manager and having every right to be full of black bile.

Why are we no longer allowed to enjoy sadness? Why can’t we be negative, or complain, or put the back of our hand to our forehead and lean to the side as the silent era heroines once did? A friend of mine, whose doctoral dissertation was on the culture of cheerfulness, relates the enforced emotions of cheerfulness to marketing and capitalism it’s the Hi How Are You Doing Today Smiley Face syndrome you get at The Gap, at Starbuck’s. Corporate emotion control. No one wants to buy coffee from one of those grouchy waitresses you still encounter on occasion in France or places where they haven’t had customer satisfaction training sessions it will come, alas. Smiles help sales. Gloomy employees are viewed as unreliable and moody they might call in sick, that’s not productive. When I was first hired by the French government, apparently my boss confided to his intern that I was right for the job but: elle ne sourit pas beaucoup. (She doesn’t smile a lot). The intern passed it on when we became friends; you would think not smiling would be an asset in France but this was for the now-defunct tourist office in San Francisco, to sell the Disneyland version of France to Americans. Fromage!

The distaste for melancholy seems to have spread to the arts: filmmakers and writers who specialize in mist and rain are chastised for being depressing. Last night I watched a film by Greek filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos; not distributed in this country outside of New York or film festivals, it is fortunately available on DVD. Witness this explanatory warning from the NY Times review:

But for those willing to enter into its grave, melancholic rhythms, “The Weeping Meadow” is a beautiful and devastating meditation on war, history and loss. (Dana Stevens)

You have to be willing to take the risk, to engage with gravity and melancholy. Or take this Guardian UK review (less prone to cheerfulness, the Brits are nevertheless following the commercial tastes of the US): a painful lack of humour, a bleak pessimistic vision and an obsession with mud and water here are great images, most memorably Spyros’s funeral raft followed by a flotilla of boats full of people carrying black banners, which, of course, takes place in the ever-present mist and rain. There are also romantically depressing tableaux on the beach Clearly this reviewer (Philip French) didn’t hear Arthur Rubinstein on the pleasure of melancholy. For me, this film is a masterpiece but I have my predispositions.

Am I a depressed romantic? I don’t think so. Depression is a real illness, that needs treatment. It is mentally, morally debilitating; life does become bleak and pointless. Something no Angelopoulos film would have the poetry to describe.

Which leads me back to the woman in the Allegory. She is not smiling, but she doesn’t look what we would call depressed: reflective, rather. She’s had half a glass of wine; she’s waiting for something, or someone. She is tired of her babies and children, and is leaving them happily to be devoured by the pet Rottweiler (or are they devouring the dog, hard to tell); she is dreaming of other landscapes, another life. Or perhaps the landscapes in the background are where her demons reside, bringing on her dark moods with the help of a glass of wine.

On my last day in Edinburgh I went back to the National Gallery to say goodbye to Cranach’s melancholy lady. A velvet rope blocked access to the upper galleries. A kindly older gentleman in plaid trousers said: Sorry, lass, we’re short-staffed today and we’ve had to close that gallery. Which painting was it you wanted to see? The Botticelli? No, the Cranach Allegory of Melancholy. He didn’t know the one but he winked and waved to me and said quietly, Come on, then, it’s quiet enough today, I can take you up there for a quick last look.

Yes, these days most people head for the Botticellis. Lovely, safe, predictable. Classic beauty. But I wonder how much quiet pleasure they are also missing, just around the corner, as they hurry to join the crowds jostling cheerfully for a glimpse of the Virgin adoring the Sleeping Christ Child.

There are words, I suspect, that some publishers or editors or agents don’t like hearing when applied to a book. Dark is definitely one of them; I speak from experience regarding a dark novel I wrote once that failed to find a home–with hindsight, thankfully. Another one may be quiet. Which could so easily bleed into boring, or slow, or dull, fair enough; but there is a fine line, and the book that manages to stay just this side of boring, slow and dull is, for the discerning reader (some people find all books dull by definition in this day and age), a gem. Because with such a book you feel like you are rediscovering something you thought was lost forever.

I’m even finding it hard to come up with examples–Penelope Fitzgerald springs to mind, but she belongs to an earlier generation–because really, I set out to write this promotional blog about a book I translated some years ago and which is finally out in the world, La Dame blanche, or, The Lady in White, by Christian Bobin. Bobin belongs to what might be a last generation of quiet authors in France; he started publishing his short volumes of lyric essays and novels in the late 1980s, when it was still possible to retreat to a small town in Burgundy and avoid the mêlée in Paris. And he established his reputation early on, so his loyal followers respect his need for solitude and tranquility, because they know how much it contributes to his work.

Only natural then, that at some point he might be drawn to Emily Dickinson, similarly reclusive, though I would hesitate to call her quiet, or only up to a point. Her way of life, definitely, but not her explosive way with words. Perhaps Monsieur Bobin would also take issue with the term applied to his own work; perhaps it is more that reading his words brings on a sense of gentle well-being, a falling away of all the unnecessary beeping and pinging and outright roar of the outside world. Perhaps he feels that sense of quiet on reading Dickinson.

So in a roundabout way this is an invitation to you to read The Lady in White. (Order here in Europe). Enjoy it for its privileged incursion into the life of a beloved poet who knew no fame in her lifetime, and for the gentle homage a French recluse has paid to her, as if in thanks. I thank them both.

February 2015

There are words, I suspect, that some publishers or editors or agents don’t like hearing when applied to a book. Dark is definitely one of them; I speak from experience regarding a dark novel I wrote once that failed to find a home–with hindsight, thankfully. Another one may be quiet. Which could so easily bleed into boring, or slow, or dull, fair enough; but there is a fine line, and the book that manages to stay just this side of boring, slow and dull is, for the discerning reader (some people find all books dull by definition in this day and age), a gem. Because with such a book you feel like you are rediscovering something you thought was lost forever.

I’m even finding it hard to come up with examples–Penelope Fitzgerald springs to mind, but she belongs to an earlier generation–because really, I set out to write this promotional blog about a book I translated some years ago and which is finally out in the world, La Dame blanche, or, The Lady in White, by Christian Bobin. Bobin belongs to what might be a last generation of quiet authors in France; he started publishing his short volumes of lyric essays and novels in the late 1980s, when it was still possible to retreat to a small town in Burgundy and avoid the mêlée in Paris. And he established his reputation early on, so his loyal followers respect his need for solitude and tranquility, because they know how much it contributes to his work.

Only natural then, that at some point he might be drawn to Emily Dickinson, similarly reclusive, though I would hesitate to call her quiet, or only up to a point.  Her way of life, definitely, but not her explosive way with words. Perhaps Monsieur Bobin would also take issue with the term applied to his own work; perhaps it is more that reading his words brings on a sense of gentle well-being, a falling away of all the unnecessary beeping and pinging and outright roar of the outside world. Perhaps he feels that sense of quiet on reading Dickinson.

So in a roundabout way this is an invitation to you to read The Lady in White. Enjoy it for its privileged incursion into the life of a beloved poet who knew no fame in her lifetime, and for the gentle homage a French recluse has paid to her, as if in thanks. I thank them both.

In the spring of 2010 I was on a train from Simferopol to Sumy, in Eastern Ukraine. I didn’t see much of Simferopol – it is the capital of Crimea, but it is inland, a town of administration, big buildings and airports and train stations, not a place where tourists linger. I had just spent five days with a British tour of southern Crimea, viewing the well-known historical treasures in the region of Yalta, the spectacular scenery. Then the tour abandoned me, as planned, to return to London, and I stayed on, feeling vulnerable, adventurous, very much alone with my limited Russian and my eagerness to explore, to be no longer the tourist but the traveler.

The train was old, Soviet-era, seemed to hold together with layers of paint. I had the compartment to myself; our guide had explained this was the only way to make a reservation from outside Ukraine. I looked forward to the long, overnight journey – Sumy is in the northeast, beyond Kharkiv – and to the solitude, after five days with ebullient, gregarious fellow travelers.

A short while after we left Simferopol a young man came into the compartment. I was reluctant to talk, given my rusty command of the language, and I was worried about how long he intended to stay; but after a few awkward minutes he asked where I was going, heard my accent, was intrigued, and the conversation began.

He had come from Sevastopol, where he was taking a course, learning to be a sailor, and was heading to Dzhankoy, a town in northern Crimea, which was where he was from. He told me he had an uncle in Saint Petersburg, and was hoping to find work through him once he finished his course; prospects were bleak in Ukraine, he said. He was discreet, thoughtful, serious, almost shy. Blond with blue eyes. He condemned the government (Yanukovich had been elected four months earlier) for their corrupt extravagance, for their ability to spend $50,000 on their official vehicles when the average Ukrainian was earning $200 a month. I missed some of what he said, tried to answer his questions about California or Switzerland. Before he left the train, perhaps forty-five minutes or an hour later, he told me his name was Andrei.

When I was younger I had many such encounters with strangers on trains, but they grow rarer as you get older, and the opportunities don’t arise as frequently; people on planes don’t like to talk. And how often are you on a train from Simferopol to Sumy… (The following year, the same tour operator with whom I had visited Yalta tried to organize the same journey to Sumy – and their train was cancelled.)

It’s not that Andrei and I had a deep philosophical conversation, or that there had been any kind of special connection, or regret when he arrived in Dzhankoy. I was actually relieved to have the compartment to myself again; the provodnitsa came in soon thereafter to make up my berth, and I fell asleep to the comforting lull of train tracks, waking now and again when we stopped in a major town.

But I haven’t forgotten him – perhaps because it was such a rare, unexpected encounter. And now it seems to contain so many elements of the terrible, tense situation unfolding in Crimea – the young Russian-speaking Ukrainian with family in Russia; the connection to Sevastopol; his youth, ripe for military picking.

I wonder where he is now. Perhaps safely on his uncle’s ship, ferrying Russian goods to China or Western Europe; perhaps standing in line in a recruitment office somewhere in Ukraine, about to be issued with a uniform and a weapon. Or perhaps still in Crimea, one of those polite, anonymous pro-Russian militia who have occupied government buildings, surrounded the airports, the Ukrainian bases. I would not recognize him, but I wonder which side he is on.

If we could continue the conversation, I expect he would tell me that Crimea is Russian, is Russia. I might agree with him up to a point, but say that there is a problem with that, that legally Crimea now belongs to Ukraine. Is within Ukraine’s sovereign, inviolable borders. Perhaps there could be a referendum, let the Crimeans decide for themselves? Would he say, who are the Crimeans? Would he tell me only the Russians, because historically Crimea belonged to Russia from the time of Catherine the Great until 1954? But wait, I would say, what about the ethnic Ukrainians, and the Tatars: minorities who must be allowed their say, and their guarantee of security; he might reply that they no longer belonged there, because they supported the new government in Kiev/Kyiv. On the other hand he might see the possibility of peaceful continuity, of remaining an autonomous part of Ukraine, with respect for both the original inhabitants (the Tatars) and the newcomers (the Russians and the Ukrainians). He might testify that he has always been well-treated as a Russian speaker/ethnic Russian in Ukraine and that there is no reason why that should change; or he might argue violently, along with Vladimir Putin, that the current government in Kyiv/Kiev is not legitimate, that it is made up of fascists and, according to the Russian media (perhaps his uncle is watching television in Petersburg and has been calling to warn him) that Russians are in danger not just in Crimea but all through Eastern Ukraine; this was, after all, Putin’s pretext for invading Georgia.

Would Andrei agree with me that Putin is just looking for a pretext to enlarge the borders of his empire? That the media in Sotchi inflated his ego and made him more power-hungry than ever, and he knows he can do what he likes with impunity? Or would he say I have misunderstood, that Vladimir Vladimirovich is a great leader who has restored pride to the Russian people and made Russia a great nation again?

Would he listen if I said, How proud will you be if every country on earth turns against you now? Would he – fair enough – throw the long list of my own government’s sins back in my face for Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Vietnam? Is that ever a valid argument for justifying incursion into another sovereign country?

We could argue the differences and similarities between autocracy and democracy all the way to Sumy. Between nationalism and enlightenment. It wouldn’t stop the guns, or even necessarily further understanding. No train ride is long enough for that.

But I would like to take that train ride again someday, or at least to know I can take it. Above all, I would like to know that Andrei, and millions of young men like him, will have other prospects in life than those Vladimir Putin is offering them.

I was apprehensive, I have to admit. Not for the usual reasons one is apprehensive before going on holiday—fear of the unknown, of mishaps, accidents, sickness, or unfriendly natives—but, on the contrary, because I was going to a place I know only too well, and have loved, and it pains me to see her misfortune the way it pains me to see a friend who is ill and suffering.

I decided to avoid Athens; I have lived there, too, have seen her best sides and her worst. I have seen the ranks of AΣTYNOMIA with their shields and truncheons and gas masks, back in the 1970s; I’ve witnessed mass demonstrations and strikes. But I never walked through the streets in the center to see nearly a third of the shops closed; according to a recent article in the Athens News, on Stadiou, one of Athens’s main shopping streets, 40% of the businesses have closed down.

So I took the bus which skirts Athens from the airport to Piraeus: even so I could see how many faded red signs  were up in shop windows and showrooms: ENOIKIAZETAI, For Rent. The same generic sign as back in the days when I rented my own flat there in Nea Smyrni.

For a week I stayed in a part of the Peloponnese that is relatively remote and undeveloped, although easily accessible from Athens and a frequent inexpensive destination for Greek tourists. Taverna owners told us business there too is down by fifty percent. There was an unusual quiet about the place, although people went about their activities as usual, shopping, stopping for coffee on the waterfront, taking the time to live their lives rather than plan them.

Hydra, in comparison, seemed positively bustling, although in retrospect for such a pleasant time of year it should have been busier. I spoke to a few shopkeepers; they all said they were doing all right, that the tourism economy was keeping them going. There was no power all morning long; everywhere was open for business, however, replacing espressos with the Greek coffees they could make on gas burners, keeping supermarket fridges going with generators. I was told it was because of forest fires earlier that year that had damaged the power plant in the Peloponnese, and it was necessary to shut down from time to time to get on with repairs. I didn’t question this, despite media reports that rolling blackouts were a result of austerity measures. It meant I had to stay a few more hours on Hydra: no great hardship. I sat on a bench in the shade and entered an almost meditative state of observing other people’s lives: children as they headed home from school, stopping to climb a tree; muleteers driving brick-laden donkeys up the hill; old men with their shopping bags; gypsy women selling knives. A small black and white cat kept me company; from time to time I threw him a piece of leftover bifteki from my dinner the night before, too copious to finish. Restaurant portions have become gargantuan yet I have heard that old people rummage through the trash in Athens.



I stayed five days in Spetses after that, and it was almost as if my secret plea not to see the suffering face of Greece had been answered. I was like one of those tourists who would visit Sri Lanka, say, and come back claiming “You’d never know there’s a war on.”

Spetses has always been a wealthy island; I had visited in 1976 and remember the white walls and red-tiled roofs and bougainvillea, and its reputation as a weekend place for upper crust Athenians. But even today there is no conspicuous display of wealth: for one thing, cars are banned, and the rackety traffic of thousands of scooters and motorbikes give the place an almost adolescent, amusement park air. Especially when the passengers on scooters include babies and multiple children, or elegant local beauties in four-inch patent leather heels sitting sidesaddle, legs crossed Dietrich-style. Spetses still has its share of funky “pantopoleions” that sell everything imaginable: one of them goes by the name, “If We Don’t Have it then You Don’t Need It.” But around the corner and down the street is an elegant design shop that would not be out of place on the Fulham Road. There is also a Deli that sells smoked salmon and other luxury items; almost anywhere else in Greece this would seem extravagant, proof that they are catering to someone besides the kalamarakia crowd. The clean, white shop had the same vast empty feel as an old Soviet store, although the shelves were filled; I didn’t see many people in there.



Spetses has a remarkable museum devoted to Laskarina Bouboulina, one of the heroes—the heroine, to be exact—of the 1821 War of Independence, and the only woman in history ever to have been named an admiral (posthumously, alas). Among other treasures, you can see her gold-embroidered headscarf and her pistol, her Chinese sewing table and the letter from the Sultan authorizing her to build the ship that she sailed into battle (the Sultan assumed it was to be a merchant ship, his eternal mistake). The museum was started in the 1990s by her descendants in order to raise the money to save the rain-damaged Florentine carved ceiling of the beautiful old house. It is privately owned and run, with no help whatsoever from the Greek state, which these days is just as well. I wondered if it was because she was a woman that the State had never participated in her consecration.

I met a visiting doctor and her daughter; the mother had lived and practiced for many years in Hannover and only recently retired to Athens; her daughter is a lawyer in Cologne. They told me that, according to their taxi driver (taxis are allowed, as are horse-drawn carriages) many of the closed villas along the road to the beach on the other side of the island belong to shipowners and bankers. They ruefully agreed with me that the amount of unpaid taxes accruing to the villa owners would probably be enough to bail out the entire country—certainly their wealth would. The problem, said the doctor, is not that Greece doesn’t have money, it’s just that the Greek state has no money.

I suspect Angela Merkel herself might have a villa on Spetses. If not, God forbid she ever visit the place, or she’ll call for even tougher measures on all those who can only ever dream of having a villa on Spetses.

On my last night, as I was packing, I switched on the television. A banner ran across the top of the screen on one of the public channels saying that the Greek Radio and Television was on strike “due to solidarity with the impoverishment of the Greek people,” or something to that effect. So instead of the evening news they were broadcasting a documentary produced by Arte in English and French (subtitled in Greek) about the 1929 Wall Street Crash. It was suitably ironic, and chillingly instructive. A host of pundits, including Howard Zinn and Joseph Stiglitz, reminded us of how the crash came about, and its consequences on the most unfortunate; and in case we had never realized, or had forgotten, how Hitler’s rise was due in part to Hoover’s recalling of the money lent to Germany for reconstruction after World War I and the subsequent hardship which befell the German people. The pundits also attributed the actual end of the depression not so much to the New Deal as to the buildup of arms manufacturing and the creation of a war economy in the late 1930s.

There are no conclusions to be drawn, no viable comparisons to be made. Or are there? I’m no economist. But it’s food for thought.

Yesterday at Athens airport I had lunch with a friend (who has taken a 30% cut to his retirement pay), and he reminded me of how much harm the media has done by overemphasizing the violence and unrest in Athens, which tends to scare people away; they should be coming to Greece in droves, instead. Many things are as cheap as they were ten years ago, especially rooms and tavernas; we should support the economy that is working, tourism. It is easy enough to avoid central Athens, as I found out; as for getting “stuck” somewhere, that can happen anytime, anywhere—due to the strong winds in Greece’s case, or volcanoes in other parts of the world…

In fact, if I had booked my return flight for one day later, I would have gotten stuck. There is a general strike on today; all flights are cancelled. Hopefully, assuming the ferry company is also following the strike, I would have been stuck on Spetses rather than at the airport or in Piraeus. But that is all idle speculation, or even regret; instead I am stuck in cold, rainy Buchillon. In Athens there have been demonstrations and clashes with the police, depicted on the BBC in the very way my friend deplored, with suitable amounts of flames and menacing policemen, and empty airport halls.

But Greeks know how to get on with life, unfazed by power cuts or demonstrations. As the woman at the shipping office assured me, “Eh, if they cut the power, we’ll just write tickets by hand.” Or as a shop assistant in Hydra emphasized, “We’ll survive. We Greeks always survive.”

At the Bouboulina museum the guide gave me an old one-drachma coin, minted in 1992, with Bouboulina’s face on one side and her battleship, the Agamemnon, on the other. Perhaps it’s time the Greeks started looking for another Bouboulina in their midst—or reconsidering the humble drachma.

[Through the front door, February 4 2012]

Last week I watched one of the longest tennis matches in history – the longest Grand Slam, the longest in Australian Open history. You feel pleased with yourself after something like that – I was there, I remember that match, it was epic. Then it fades from the news and your sense of belonging to something extraordinary fades even more quickly.

This week, I’m experiencing along with all of Europe what must be the longest cold spell in decades, in my life anyway. After a very mild winter with the thermometer only going below freezing perhaps once, we are suddenly picked up and moved to Russia, with temperatures a balmy minus six during the day and minus twelve at night. Add some native Swiss wind, the dreaded Bise, which is anything but a kiss, rather a cause of headaches, dry eyes and bad temper, and your ambient outdoor temperature is more like minus nineteen. All night long the shutters rattled - something they never do - and the atmosphere was definitely Gothic.

I try to recall other cold winters - did I experience this same feeling of helplessness and defeat? Places I’ve been: Russia in 1969 but when you’re young you’re less sensitive to the cold; you remember the people swimming at the open air pool in Moscow, the clouds of steam. Norway off and on in the 70s and 80s: they’re equipped, it’s a way of life there. But there was one day that it got so cold that a Coca-Cola bottle exploded, and even the locals were surprised. Bulgaria too; a freezing New Year’s Eve where the power went out and it must have been somewhere between five and ten Celsius in the bedroom, not more. But there was champagne, and snow, and friendship; people didn’t need blogs and Facebook in those days to comment on the weather.

My oleander will probably not make it this year, despite being wrapped by two somewhat clueless Albanian gardeners who may not have such cruel winters where they come from (although this year, anything’s possible). There is ice – indoors –  around the edges of my skylight. The cat licks the condensation from the wall in the niche by my bed. The front door sticks and I worry about it freezing to the frame altogether. Or maybe I won’t be able to turn the key to let myself out, and will be stuck here until the thaw. I cannot see (through the binoculars) whether the lake has begun to freeze yet, but I worry about the ducks and swans.

These are perfectly ordinary things for many people around the world; they are used to it and know how to deal with it, for the most part. Vodka in the radiators and that sort of thing. I suppose if it goes on long enough I will deal with it in my fashion too, although mopping up the condensation is a major inconvenience, and I suspect that is the architect’s fault, not the weather’s. What is strange and new is the feeling of powerlessness, of looking at the forecast every day and seeing that nothing is about to change, because of a huge high pressure zone:  relentless sun with a bit of cloud, temperatures minus thirteen to minus six. Wind 25km an hour. People have it far worse in Ukraine and Poland, in Serbia and Bulgaria. Cut off from the rest of the world, buried under huge drifts of snow. Living in a place like California you become accustomed to a predictable, benign climate. Those summer winds in the Bay Area are nothing in comparison to this, even if they do mean you don’t have any summer to speak of. Earthquakes have no forecast (tomorrow’s outlook on the Richter scale, 4.3, with a balmy 3.2 forecast for Wednesday); they happen and then they’re done and you deal with the aftermath. This cold wave is incremental, and you don’t really know what you can do other than try to stay warm in the present moment and try not to obsess about how much warmer it is in Paris (minus five). The sun is warming my back through the window. I suppose that compensates for wind chill factor when you’re indoors: sun warmth factor?

Last month I was re-reading Dr Zhivago and the most beautiful and moving passages are the chapters set in wintry Yuryatin and Varykino. Poetic and evocative, lovely to read about from your warm bed, your mild winter; be careful what you wish for, poetry notwithstanding. Now I’m translating a book set in the Pyrenees in the middle of winter, a grisly murder mystery with snow and ice everywhere, including on the corpses. And appropriately titled: “Iced.”

I had my groceries delivered two days ago, something I only do in extremes of weather. They made a mistake and brought me five litres of milk! I think the message is: drink lots of hot chocolate.

Wherever you are, keep warm.

I’ve been long absent from this blog, off fighting on those various battlefields that stretch endlessly into the distance as I seek to keep a roof over my head. Increasingly difficult, as my source of income—literary translation—is paid in dollars, euros, and pounds, all of which are falling against the Swiss franc, the price of my roof and rösti. Is it time to switch and go to work for a prestigious watchmaker? (Maybe they’d give me free photographs of Roger Federer.) But I love my work, and am prepared to take a hit or two for the sake of art and its ultimate triumph, but it might be time to confer with my generals and see what can be done.

Swiss franc notwithstanding, there have been a few small victories over the past few months:

This month Words Without Borders is devoted to the Arab Spring, and I am pleased to contribute to that ongoing and far more important struggle, with the translation of a story by Leila Marouane, Is This How Women Grow Up? Leila writes eloquently and harrowingly of another, more pervasive battle, that of women’s rights, and while her story is set primarily in Algeria, it is hard not to read it and recognize a certain universal disillusionment shared by many women.

On a lighter note, my translation of Anna Gavalda’s novel French Leave (Breaking Away in the UK) has been getting good reviews and even a mention in that bastion of anti-translation book reviewing, The New York Times. It’s a perfect summer read, short and sweet, like a literary basket of strawberries. Although you might find yourself headed for the corner store to buy some pet food at the end. You can read an excerpt here.

So while these two recent publications might be said to typify the aim of any literary translator, getting there is no easy thing, and is not getting any easier. This month the Centre National du Livre in France has published a report, The Condition of the Translator by eminent Le Monde literary critic and blogger, Pierre Assouline, devoted to the situation of literary translators in France primarily but the rest of the world tangentially, and it makes sobering reading. It also makes pounds and dollars sound like not such a bad currency after all, as despite the dearth of literary translations published in English (the famous 3%) we are still much better paid than our colleagues in France or Spain, although they may have a more constant source of work (primarily novels translated from English). Assouline underlines other points which are also a major issue for English language translators: the “féminisation” of the profession, which reflects the fact that fewer and fewer men are opting to take up a profession that cannot support a family; the increasingly fraught relations with publishers regarding contracts and the basic right to have one’s name mentioned on the book, in reviews and on websites.

I have often thought about my own grievances where my profession is concerned, and in comparison to many of my colleagues I realize I have been extremely fortunate. (Swiss franc notwithstanding.) A smash-hit bestseller of a translation; a Nobel-prize winner; a major memoir by a public figure; and the luxury, thus far, to promote primarily novels by women, who as always are underrepresented here too. But. But. The precariousness of my situation was driven home to me recently on a trip to the United States during a lovely lunch with other translators and people active in the literary world.

For some months now I have been concerned about the rise of the ebook—not of the medium per se; if people want to have the complete works of Charles Dickens or Henry James in their pocket that’s their look-out. No. It is the risk of ensuing piracy that worries me. My doomsday scenario—which I hope someone can pull to pieces for me—goes that publishers will begin to lose money on books because they will be pirated instead of bought (see what happened to the music industry, or so we hear); translations are always perceived as bad investments by publishers and so they will be the first to go when said publishers begin to go belly-up because those few readers left on the planet are downloading Harry Potter for free. You can see where my logic is leading (hopefully it is faulty logic). Still, I shared this scenario with my neighbour at the lunch table, a professor at a prestigious New England college who translates on the side/ in his spare time/ for the fun of it and the free lunches. Was he worried? No, not really, because he had his job at the prestigious New England college. Not his main source of income. Not a Swiss franc in sight.

Recently, too, I was approached by a small (university) press to translate a fairly long, difficult work. I was very tempted, but they were offering half my usual rate. (Let’s say they were offering a Spanish rate—bring on the tapas.) I protested, diplomatically, suggesting they contact the French government for some of their generous grants to American publishing houses. I was told, simply, that I was asking too much, grants or no grants: the editor himself was a translator, and based on personal experience such sums [as I was requesting] were not available. (Note the use of the impersonal third person.) His loss, or ignorance. But then again, he was… a university professor, with tenure and a fat salary. Or fatter than mine, at any rate.

Which leads me to the crux of my grievances. Something Assouline touched on briefly, but all the more searingly:

The literary translator would like greater recognition for her work. She is not looking for consecration, but to get credit where credit is due. But she is caught between frustration and paradox: on the one hand, she is cruelly aware that a university professor, in a comfortable situation materially, only translates from time to time, yet benefits from a prestige that is all the greater. On the other hand, the translator has been long convinced, for it is the creed of her profession, that the more self-effacing she is, the more her work will be acclaimed, loud and clear. [Assouline Report, p. 122]

Read: invisible. Like Harry Potter, in his invisibility cloak.

There is a perception, in the English-speaking world, that translations are difficult, or unreadable. I believe this perception is held primarily by publishers, because if The Elegance of the Hedgehog is anything to go by, or the Stieg Larsson trilogy, the public wants more, not fewer, translations. And why is this perception so pervasive among publishers and, perhaps, some readers? Because academia, in the United States at any rate, has co-opted a large segment of the works that will make it into translation, and a lot of these works are indeed difficult and unreadable, why? Because most university professors would not want it known they are translating a “best-seller” like Harry Potter, or even a “commercial” author like Gavalda; it wouldn’t look good on their c.v. Translations, full stop, don’t look good on their c.v.s, according to the article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Even those edgy experimental works that seem, to me at least, to make up the bulk of works in translation available in the United States. And which, fair enough, are better suited to a select audience of literary students, academics, poets, and writers, not the hundreds of thousands who belong to book clubs or still read on their way to work. If more good commercial fiction were published in translation, perhaps the overall perception of translation as something difficult and academic would begin to wane. After all, our parents and grandparents grew up on diets of  Camus and Tolstoy and Françoise Sagan and Alberto Moravia: what has happened since then?

Now, you can argue that, like novelists who become professors of creative writing because they cannot make a living as novelists, these academic “translators” have become professors of Russian/Japanese/French/Afrikaans literature because they cannot make a living as literary translators. There might be a few, I’ll grant you that. But I think it is rather the opposite. Why they translate is somewhat mysterious to me, as it does not help tenure, apparently. A true love of language? Fair enough. But the fact remains that they don’t need to make a living from translation, and this ultimately drives down the rates publishers are willing to pay, as these academics are simply happy to be in print. And this also disinclines translators from forming any sort of association that is truly devoted to the economic/professional status of its members, an association which could work for ensuring both the quality of translations submitted to publishers and a living wage for its practitioners. This is not utopia, such an association does exist…in Norway. (According to Assouline, they went on strike for five months in 2006 to impose a model contract on their publishers. Heja Norge.) Furthermore, as Assouline has pointed out, the universitaire enjoys a certain prestige, which may make him/her look better on a jacket flap than a humble full-time translator.

Finally, there is the indifference of the media. Look at the New York Times Book Review, for a start. Michael Orthofer at the Literary Saloon seems to have made it his life’s mission to point out the repeated failings of the NYT to review translations, and while I disagree with him about many other things I do believe he is absolutely right on this one. Can one imagine Sam Tannenhaus, the book review editor, putting together a report the way Le Monde’s Assouline has? Dream on.

I realize I am staring into this battle not on one front, but many. The economic crisis, for a start (perhaps I should move to Greece). The drop in readership generally. The rise in self-publishing. (Everyone wants to write/be published, no-one wants to read, as my friend Molly Giles used to say.) The ongoing resistance of publishers to translations—and when they do decide to publish a translation, the frequently detrimental conditions offered the translator. The pervasiveness of the academy’s role in what gets published in the US in translation and who translates. The indifference of the US/UK print and internet book-reviewing media.

I don’t really have time to fight these battles, alas. I prefer my battles a word, a sentence at a time, helping Leila to find an audience in English, helping, however indirectly, her Algerian sisters to make their plight known and ultimately have a better life. That still makes what I do worthwhile, and is far more important to me than the fluctuating exchange rate.

Ah. I forgot to mention: who is the enemy? That’s the irony: there is no enemy, not really. We all love literature—publishers, editors, translators, authors, readers. Even book reviewers. There might be a few hard-hearted accountants or executives running things who want more profit and never pick up a book, but they’re not the ones directly responsible. It would be so much simpler if they were.

Assouline sets forth a number of powerful recommendations for improving the Condition of the Translator, applicable to France but easily transferable to the United States and Britain (and Australia, and Canada, etc…) He voices them more eloquently than I could in any summary here, but for anyone who does not read French and would like me to translate them, I will be glad to, for the same reasons I translate Leila’s stories. I’ve always been much better at doing things in writing than at going down into the street to protest. Let’s hope I don’t have to move to Greece, actually.