Each translation or adaptation glows with a different set of influences. DBC Pierre has relishes the process
For some reason, my closest friends were always improbably heavy sleepers. Or rather: my friends and I used to get so bombed that we would sleep very heavily. It was a challenge to wake any of us, but we took turns devising new tactics to that end. Finally, one of us found a solution. It used no violence or volume. Rather, we amateur scientists found that inserting a disordered concept into the sleeping brain would, after some moments, cause it to wake in angst. You just had to say, in a reasonable but urgent tone, something like: "Your exhaust pipe's frozen", or "The budgie's caused a plinth". Being an obsessive-compulsive - dare I say, anal - organism, the brain will not rest under threat from such conceptual chaos.
I had forgotten this until one morning a couple of years ago.
I stumbled from bed to find an email in my inbox from a new source. For anecdotal purposes I'll call him Vinko Gorski. At the best of times, I'm not bright in the morning. I wish harm on chipper people. Days for me are like tiny lifetimes, starting innocent and dumb, then be coming less innocent and dumb as the day progresses. So I read the text of this email, which included the line: "I'm a bit seduced to under stand everything, but despaired also so I would ask for your help, risking to become really annoying."
I drank a coffee and read more. "Boy, this story has really bomb under the back, but I don't respect to put only tit issues for the boy, but make also serious topic," it said. "I hope is not just making you dull so many boring questions."
As my mind booted up for the day, things began to fall into place. Some time before that morning, my first novel, Vernon God Little, had been published. Vinko Gorski was a translator. Vernon went on to be translated into more than 40 languages, but it happened gradually, and at that time I was still getting my head around the questions of adaptation and translation. I hadn't thought about these when I was writing it - in fact, I hadn't thought much at all, but rather felt the work. Written in a teenage vernacular, it must be a devil to translate. As I was swept up into a new life as a writer, also trying to translate the events of that life and keep them sewn to my old self, I received mail from translators around the world. Each was struggling to spin the book into a different language, and each opened a unique window on to the issue of adaptation, laying bare the detail of how we live in worlds made of ideas, and how these create the culture around us.
To summarise, Vernon God Little is the story of a teenager having a very hard time in Texas in the company of a pathetic mother and her ridi culous friends. He is fatherless, and much of the book's sub-plotting revolves around his father's death and the possible whereabouts of his remains. Perhaps more than some books, Vernon is one you either get or don't get.
Vinko thought he got it.
Having approached me from his small ex- Soviet state, he explained that he had just under six months to translate the book. This was shortly after Vernon won the Man Booker Prize, and I was sucked into a vortex of travel and the presence of fascinating, articulate new people for 14 seconds each. And in the midst of all this - checking mail at airports before boarding long-haul flights, in hotels from Rio to Rey k javik, at home in the dead hours of night - just about every day for a year, at least one email came from Vinko with another folkloric set of questions and ponderings about the book.
"Boy, Pierre, on this subject of cursing, when you leave the childish western way and try Slav ic curse you really know what it's all for, boy, like some druncards in my neighbourhood." Or "I wonder what is exactly meaning of 'jacket?' Obvious it could mean three differently - at least here we have three different: the short coat, or the sportish, unofficial mainly for teenage and low-middle classes, or like in Top Guns, for even woman with skirt. I hear even writer like to wear these coat, but without skirt of course."
I must have rewritten the book twice over in paraphrased emails trying to put the thing across to Vinko, endeavouring to explain that sometimes a knock on the door is just a knock on the door, and whatever wood the door is made of doesn't really matter. Even when Vinko's work had supposedly been delivered to its editor, questions would arrive with increasingly imaginative openings: "It me again, hovering with silly question", and "Still no news from publisher but meanwhile my wife start with the draft and make some good question . . ."
I stuck with Vinko, as I did with every trans lator. Some were university academics, indeed, lecturers in English, who hadn't spent a day on an English-speaking street. Others were suave multilinguals who silently figured out the work by reading other translations in languages they also knew. I came to see how a creative product wasn't only a set of ideas, but also a type of shine - its radiated energy, its colour temperature was the thing a good translator would try to capture, to pass on to an audience in a world where ideas had a different hue.
Among the brightest translations was the German, whose masters changed the title to Jesus von Texas, and whose masterful translator sealed Vernon's underdog status by giving him an East Berlin street twang. I never heard from the Dutch translator, who wrapped up in record time after deciphering the Italian translation; and another eastern European translator was so unable to grasp the basics of the language that I fancy retranslating the copy back into English for publication under a different title; still another was a pessimistic eastern woman who instead of questions sent pictures of herself in glum poses, helping seedlings to sprout for a second novel, Ludmila's Broken English.
Then, following this wave of translations, there came a small flurry of adaptations for theatre: an experimental work in Scotland, a musical in Holland, and another play in Germany. Having reflected on all that has happened in these years, I've come to relish the notion of a translation or adaptation as a variation on a theme - a dance or dub mix of the original, glowing with a different set of influences. Moreover, I may be able to enjoy another artist's work more intimately than anyone else - because I see his or her work around a theme I played with myself.
Over the course of the past year the elements fell into place for a production of Vernon God Little at the Young Vic, directed by Rufus Norris and adapted by Tanya Ronder. The idea that Vernon will reach a professional English-speaking stage is just dawning on me, and with it a sense that I will see the work concretely brought to life for the first time outside of the imagination. I have met Tanya Ronder, have exchanged some correspondence regarding finer points of the book's plot, and have an invitation to visit rehearsals to meet the main characters, including Vernon, the beleaguered companion I shared intense years with.
And that's a curious feeling. It must be akin to meeting for the first time the sibling you were separated from at birth. I say it without fear or concern whatsoever for the nature of the work theatrically - not least given the calibre of the team bringing it to life - because there's a calm that comes with knowing a theatrical production is a wholly original work unto itself, and not a mere translation.
Which is nothing compared to the serenity of knowing Vinko Gorski isn't doing it.
In the last throes of correspondence with him, after no less than a year's work, he jubil antly wrote that his translation had finally been accepted by the publisher, and was on its way to press.
"Just only for my small interest," he wrote in his penultimate mail, "one thing I wonder for myself - why Vernon's father doesn't come to his house?"
"Vinko," I replied, "Vernon's father is dead."
I've saved as a token to extraordinary posterity Vinko's last words to me:
"Oh shit."
"Vernon God Little" opens at the Young Vic, London SE1, on 27 April. http://www.youngvic.org
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