My Life as a Translator
8 February 1990, Thursday, Glasgow
10.30-11.30 Dole
6pm MY LIFE AS A DOG
I sat through the first twenty minutes thinking ‘I’ve seen this before.’ Which I had, and cursing myself for paying to see a film that I’d already seen and that was so forgettable that, on trying to remember what happened in the end or even what happened after the first twenty minutes, I couldn’t think of anything. Suddenly though I saw a shot that I knew I hadn’t seen before. I must have seen the start, very inattentively, on television. I enjoyed the film a lot. it was very accurate in its description of fore-adolescent desire and sex. It also understood the obsessive and obsessively limited terms of reference that the child has1.
English people, using the middle-class version of the language, the sub-BBC version, can only speak in paragraphs. The middle-classes are incapable of swearing with any gusto. If they do swear they often do it by putting on the accent of what they perceive as the lower classes. ‘Fookin’ ’Ell’. Even the upper class idion seems more colourful and alive than that of the bland middle class. White middle class Americans imitate black people when they swear. Although Bill Cosby doesn’t swear on TV you cant tell that if he wanted to, he could, and he wouldn’t look as ridiculous as George Bush and his ‘doo-doos’2.3
My Life as a Dog was much loved by Kurt Vonnegut, who said, “This movie, directed and largely written by Lasse Hallström and released in 1985, when he was thirty-nine and I was sixty-three, made me like life and human beings much more than I had ever done before. Quite a favor!” The other screenwriters were Reidar Jönsson, Brasse Brännström and Per Berglund.
From Ampthill, young-Toby has brought back a copy of Anthologie des Poètes Français, edited by Jacques Imbert. Young-Toby, though he doesn’t mention it in the diary, has decided to learn more about poetry by translating from the only language he knows well enough, French. His selection is dependent on the poems being semi-comprehensible the first time he reads them. He knows Baudelaire is a great poet with whom he should be familiar. The others he finds by flicking through. When he gets to Prague, he’ll eventually start translating Czech poetry, with co-translators and crib sheets. This is one of the first French poems. It’s more an adaptation (Robert Lowell’s word) than a word-for-word —
PIERRE ALBERT-BIROT
TOBY IS MOULINEXED * BUT
SPINDREL IS NOT FIRE * I
AM OMNISCIENT * UP
ON * WITHIN * IT’S OF
THE SPINDREL * FOR MYSELF I WANT
FLAME * AND FLAME IS * FOR MYSELF
I WANT TO BE BORN THE LUMI-
NOUS-FOUL * WHO IS ABLE
TO DEVOUR ALL THE OTHERS *
MORE THE BANGER OF MY OWN DRUM
Yes, but fire teaches me to polka
This is something strange. A note that may be a poem —
Thatched Cottages
We eat parody bread spread with parody butter, margerine, and parody jam, more like jello as the Americans call it. If you want to get religious we drink parody wine, a little Californian generic perhaps? We live in parody houses, machines for living, but what sort of life? Gardenless, with no ascent into the bedroom or descent into the coal hole — a trowel dropped whilst weeding the flowerbox could kill a passerby. In the highlands, there are parody forests, in the lowlands, parody rivers. We watch parody people in parody worlds. And nobody asks Where is real life? Except maybe in parody.
It’s one of the most adolescent things Toby’s written. The page goes on, but I’m leaving it out, apart from —
Ask the people of France — would you prefer that you had liberty or that the statues in your cathedrals had noses?
Strange boy.