John is Easy to Please , livre ebook

Ved Mehta

JOHN IS EASY TO PLEASE
Contents
By the Same Author
Foreword
I. A Second Voice
II. The Third
III. Quiet, Beneficent Things
IV. There Is No Telling
V. The Train Had Just Arrived at Malgudi Station
VI. John Is Easy to Please
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Copyright Page
Books by Ved Mehta
F ACE TO F ACE
W ALKING THE I NDIAN S TREETS
F LY AND THE F LY -B OTTLE
T HE N EW T HEOLOGIAN
D ELINQUENT C HACHA
P ORTRAIT OF I NDIA
Foreword
I STARTED WRITING FOR The New Yorker in 1960, and the six pieces collected here for the first time are gleanings from my ten years of reportorial work for that magazine. They reflect, in different ways, the worlds in which I feel at home: India, where I was born and brought up; the United States and Britain, where I have lived since I was fifteen; and what Milton called the olive grove of Academe, where I spent an interlude of almost nine years. The pieces are united by the ancient theme of the tongue and the pen; in the words of the Psalm, My tongue is the pen of a ready writer. George Sherry, the U.N. interpreter ( A Second Voice ); Sir William Haley, the English editor and broadcaster ( The Third ); Sir Basil Blackwell, the Oxford book-man ( Quiet, Beneficent Things ); Ram Babu Saksena, the Urdu translator and critic ( There Is No Telling ); R. K. Narayan, the Indian novelist ( The Train Had Just Arrived at Malgudi Station ); and Noam Chomsky, the American linguist ( John Is Easy to Please )-and many of their confreres who appear in this book-might well be surprised to find themselves in the same room. They would have difficulty in understanding one another s manners, attitudes, and, in some cases, language. The gathering would indeed be a bizarre one-at once flamboyant, Promethean, ironic, romantic, tender, and intellectual-but for me it would be Heaven. After all, as I feel that my autobiography and my other books, taken together, suggest, my whole life is an unprecedented-and so, for the time being, incomprehensible-experiment, conducted by me in the guise of a mad scientist.
V. M.
New York City, January, 1971
I
A Second Voice
A LITTLE WHILE AGO, WHEN I WAS LUNCHING with a friend in the Delegates Dining Room at the the United Nations headquarters, on the East River, a stranger came up to our table and greeted my companion.
Hello, George, what s new with you? my friend said.
What s new? George retorted, in a loud, raspy voice. Why, Bongandanga, Bokenda, Lingunda, Balangala, Bolomba, Lulonga, Belondo, Bomputu, Imbonga, Putubumba, Lualaba, Sofumwango, Bolongo, Benungu, Basankusu, Bulukutu, Bokungu, Kingana, Tumbamami, Popokabaka, Ingololo, Bululundu, Mambirima, Musokatanda, Kamatanda, Mulungwishi, Kintobongo, Mukulakulu, Katentania, Tshimbumbula. At the end of this recitation-or, rather, routine-which I recognized somewhere in the middle as a list of names of Congolese towns, he roared with laughter. The newcomer had bright, brown eyes in a pale, round face, made rounder by a prominent forehead and a receding hairline. He was of average height and huskily built, but he didn t give the impression of being a fat man, perhaps because he talked with his whole body-though less in the manner of an actor than in the manner of a prankster. My friend introduced him to me as George Sherry, and after some polite exchanges Sherry walked away.
From my friend I learned that Sherry, who was thirty-eight, was a senior interpreter in the United Nations Interpretation Section, of which he had been a member since 1947, and that soon he would be transferring out of interpretation to the Executive Office of the Secretary-General, to work on political affairs under Ralph Bunche; in fact, my friend said that Sherry was already spending some of his time drafting cables and diplomatic notes for the Secretary-General s Congo staff. Sherry originally joined the Interpretation Section as a pr cis writer and an editor, but he switched to interpreting almost immediately; now his colleagues regarded him as one of the two or three truly superlative interpreters in memory. Sherry made his mark within days of his arrival. At that time, the U.N. was shifting from the time-consuming system of consecutive interpretation, in which successive interpreters redelivered the original speech in different languages, to simultaneous interpretation, in which the speech would be converted into several other languages sentence by sentence as it went along. Even after the changeover had begun, many of the professionals-who were mostly relics of the League of Nations, and loved remaking delegates speeches-dismissed the whole idea of a simultaneous transmutation of language, especially if there was no advance text of a speech to work from; the human mind, they said, was incapable of working at such speed. They still saw consecutive interpretation as a great advance over translation (a term interpreters apply only to written conversion of language), and to them the simultaneous method seemed as farfetched as the four-minute mile seemed to ordinary men before Roger Bannister. Then Sherry appeared and began successfully running the four-minute mental mile. His incredible linguistic gifts and dexterous voice took the professionals by surprise, and almost at once that voice started talking English for Andrei Yanuarievich Vishinsky, who was the Soviet Union s permanent delegate to the U.N. from 1945 to 1949 and again in 1953 and 1954. Vishinsky was one of the most difficult speakers to interpret for, because he never followed his text and was given to making rapid speeches full of literary allusions, biting wit, and violent outbursts. For six wordy Cold War years, Sherry had so many opportunities to simultaneously interpret Vishinsky that finally the U.S.S.R. began requesting him for many important meetings, and Sherry started receiving poison-pen letters that accused him of being a soulmate of Vishinsky s. Although Sherry spoke with an almost aggressively American accent, the audience so easily identified the voice with Vishinsky s fulminations that the Secretary-General himself started receiving letters that urged him to get rid of the Communist s twin.
Without simultaneous interpretation, the U.N. would have to quintuple its meeting time-a human impossibility-and without people like Sherry delegates from different countries couldn t speak to each other, my friend said. I remember listening to Vishinsky through George s voice. It really was unnerving. You know, Vishinsky made a profession of extemporaneous virtuosity. Well, George s voice worked like an automatic reflex, until one felt that Vishinsky was a double-headed, double-voiced, bilingual monster, simultaneously interpreting himself.
Soon after meeting Sherry, I looked up a few facts about the men who, sentence by sentence, within the space of a few seconds, turn a speech in English, French, Spanish, Russian, or Chinese-the official tongues of the U.N.-into any of the four other languages. I learned that an applicant for the job of interpreter was required to know three of the five languages of the U.N.; that senior interpreters received (before taxes and other deductions) about sixteen thousand dollars a year; that during the plenary sessions of the General Assembly there were altogether approximately seventy interpreters at work; that the interpreters ranged in age from twenty-eight to sixty-one; and that men outnumbered women two to one. Even within an international body like the United Nations, the interpreters were remarkable for their diversity of background. Almost all of them had been bilingual from early childhood, thanks to foreign governesses, foreign schooling, or parents of mixed nationalities. (One interpreter was born in Buenos Aires of a Swiss mother and a Chinese father; another, who eventually married an Australian, had a Russian mother and a French father.) More than half of them had American citizenship, but some held French, Chinese, Argentine, Mexican, English, Belgian, Chilean, Canadian, or Australian passports. Before joining the interpreting service, some of them were teachers, journalists, lawyers, civil servants, film editors, opera producers, or police- men. To discover exactly how one interpreter had developed, I called Sherry up, and he invited me to lunch at his home the following Sunday.
On Sunday, I took a taxi up to West 107th Street, where Sherry and his wife and their six-year-old daughter lived in a five-room apartment. I rang the bell, and Sherry admitted me to a foyer lined with modern, glass-fronted bookcases holding assorted scholarly books in French, Russian, English, and German. Sherry was dressed much as one would expect a U.N. diplomat to be. He was wearing an inconspicuously striped dark-gray suit, a white shirt, and a maroon tie with a woven pattern and fastened to his shirt by a silver tie clip with a small Oriental design; a white handkerchief rose from his breast pocket. We sat down under an abstract painting of a ballet girl in motion.
My wife, Doris, has taken our daughter, Vivien, to the park, he began. By the way, Vivien means lively, from the Latin vivus, and also has a suggestion of hauntedness-from Merlin s Vivien. You know, the magician teaches her a charm, only to be imprisoned in an oak tree by her.
I asked him how he had got started on his linguistic career.
He replied in a rush of mocking words, which rather startled me, because he seemed to be talking about someone else s life. It was as though his voice were still working for some other man. Like any other boy, he said, a little too loud, I was born, and had a mother and father, and went to school. There wasn t much to my life until I touched America, at fifteen. I ve never talked about my birth, but here I come. Catch me. My mother s father was rich, a minor cotton king, in Lodz, in Poland, who could afford to have his sensitive only daughter, Henrietta-she is a wonderful pianist-educated first in Poland, then in Switzerland,