Teach Us to Sit Still

by Tim Parks

  I walk over to the window. In green overalls a man is trimming the borders and the grass round the tree trunks. The motor revs and strains. Why did he have to choose this morning?

  Bowed over their papers, the students don’t seem to have noticed. Maddalena has twisted her thick hair round her fingers and is holding it up over the nape of her neck. Michele has a pencil in his mouth and a thumb pressed to a temple. Someone’s knee is jerking. I’m struck by how similar this is to the scene in the meditation room, almost a year ago now, and how different. There is the same immersion in mental activity. Without the serenity. You can feel the students winding up their bodies to have the mind work harder and faster, reading words, understanding words, substituting them with other words. Comes the first clatter of a keyboard. Francesco has started to write. In the second row Teresa raises her head. She is anxious. She’s not finished reading yet.

  The strimmer stops. In the stairwell someone is shouting into a mobile. Now it starts again. It roars, settles, drones. I hate the sound. But I can do nothing about it. ‘Always ask yourselves,’ guru Coleman said to us during one of his evening talks, ‘in what way am I contributing to my own suffering?’

  If you can do nothing about it, don’t torment yourself.

  I sit down and read through the tasks I’ve set them. Hitchens is difficult, but he is one of the journalists Corriere della Sera often translates and that’s the level we’re aiming at. In fact, because this material is translated already I’ve had to block the computers from using the net. Otherwise the students could just search and download. As a result, they can’t use online dictionaries. They’ve brought paper. Some of them have come with three or four big tomes, wheeling them in suitcases. They put them on the desks that are empty and flick fast through the pages, switching urgently from the bilingual to the monolingual and back. Sitting at the end of a row, Paola has had to put her books on the floor. She tries to balance a Zanichelli on top of her Oxford on top of her suitcase. As she turns to type, both dictionaries clatter to the floor. The noise prompts a deep inhaling of breath throughout the room, then renewed activity. A dozen keyboards are at work.

  ‘Fidel gets Religion,’ the article is headlined. Then a subtitle: ‘Why on earth did Castro build a Russian Orthodox cathedral in Havana?’

  I have sometimes envied Christopher Hitchens. Always on the move, in the public eye, provocative, admired, presumably well paid. The article begins:

  In January of 2009 – on New Year’s Day, to be precise – it will have been half a century since the brave and bearded ones entered Havana and chased Fulgenzio Batista and his cronies (carrying much of the Cuban treasury with them) off the island. Now the chief of the bearded ones is a doddering and trembling figure, who one assumes can only be hanging on in order to be physically present for the 50th birthday of his ‘revolution’. It’s of some interest to notice that one of the ways in which he whiles away the time is the self-indulgence of religion, most especially the improbable religion of Russian Orthodoxy.

  On the other hand, would I want to write this sort of thing? Does Hitchens really care about Cuba? Or Cuba about Hitchens? Or the reader about either? ‘. . . who one assumes can only be hanging on in order to be physically present’ is horrible.

  I try to imagine how the students will translate the piece. Clumsy prose is hard. ‘It’s of some interest to notice that one of the ways in which he whiles away the time is the self-indulgence of religion . . .’ I wonder how much time Hitchens whiles away polishing his self-indulgent sarcasm. Not enough. Russian Orthodoxy is not a religion. Why is ‘revolution’ in inverted commas? Will any of the students be smart enough to eliminate that superfluous ‘physically’?

  The piece is so difficult that I have only given them two paragraphs to translate. The second reads:

  Ever since the upheaval in his own intestines that eventually forced him to cede power to his not-much-younger brother, Raúl, Fidel Castro has been seeking (and easily enough finding) an audience for his views in the Cuban press. Indeed, now that he can no longer mount the podium and deliver an off-the-cuff and uninterruptable six-hour speech, there are two state-run newspapers that don’t have to compete for the right to carry his regular column. Pick up a copy of the Communist Party’s daily Granma (once described by radical Argentine journalist Jacobo Timerman as ‘a degradation of the act of reading’) or of the Communist youth paper Juventud Rebelde (Rebel Youth), and in either organ you can read the moribund musings of the maximum leader.

  His own intestines? In whose, one asks oneself, if not his own? My intestines have been behaving rather well recently. Likewise bladder and belly. I can’t remember the last time I had any pains. I only go to the bathroom a couple of times a night. Since the second trip usually occurs between five and six, I repair to the sitting room to meditate. The house is very still at this hour. The day dawns. Mind and body renew their acquaintance in wordless quiet. Sometimes it seems the whole unhappy experience was just leading me to this. I feel grateful.

  On the other hand, I’m evidently not free as yet from ‘attachment through aversion’. Because here I am deliberately listening for irritating noises, constantly checking how unpleasantly hot it is and taking far too much pleasure in my ironic response to Hitchens. Moribund musings! Hitchens presents himself as wittily embattled on behalf of right and reason but the only thing this article leaves you with is an impression of the man’s boundless self-regard. Castro’s first and most important goal, Hitchens writes towards the end of the piece, was always ‘his own enshrinement as an immortal icon’. Not an unusual ambition it turns out.

  You envy him.

  Paola’s books clatter to the floor again. I get to my feet and start walking round the room. When I first started invigilating exams, twenty and more years ago, I used to resent the wasted time. I used to bring work with me and then be annoyed when my determination to stop the students cheating prevented me from getting on with my own reading or writing. A tussle in the mind. I hated the students for it and myself. But over the last few years I’ve come to accept these strange mornings. I even look forward to them. Well, a bit. I don’t try to do my own work any more. I rather enjoy watching these young people as they give themselves to the task in hand. Having taught them for two years, I know them well. I find myself wishing them well, even the ones who’ve consistently irritated me during lessons. Why is Anna wearing a neck scarf on a day like today? And long tight trousers? Bruna’s hair curls in damp ringlets on cheeks blushed with heat. She is biting a knuckle. I find myself hoping that she will get a good result, I hope they all get good results, I don’t want them to be disappointed. At the same time I know very well that some of them are going to be very disappointed and that when I mark the papers I will be my usual severe self. No favours.

  The achievement with Hitchens, I reflect, walking behind the students as they type, would be to arrive at a calm assessment of the man’s prose without feeling any hostility, any resentment. Why is that so hard? Enrico has found a very smart solution for ‘off the cuff and uninterruptable’. I feel quite proud of the boy, as if he were my son.

  Maybe because Hitchens is so pugnacious. Either you agree with him or you fight back. But I do agree with him, on Castro at least, and I fight back anyway. The prose invites a fight. The words are jumping up and down, making rude gestures and waving fists. Perhaps this is the problem with so many invitations to get involved in the world: they are inviting you to join in a fight without its being important what you’re fighting about. It occurs to me that guru Coleman must have shared his merits with Fidel Castro a thousand times, achieving no more, but then again no less, than Hitchens with his aggressive journalism. Causing less bother, no doubt. I have no idea myself what is the proper way to engage with the world. Or if there is a proper way. Should I be trying to change the world, or not? One of the Silvias, I see, leaning over the girl’s perfumed shoulder, has run into a problem with that imperative ‘Pick up a copy of the Communist Party’s daily Granma
. . .’ Her incomprehension helps me to see how fake it is. Hitchens knows his readers are not going to be picking up Granma. Silvia hasn’t understood that it’s just empty paperspeak.

  Let’s hope nobody translates Granma as Nonna.

  Paola drops her books again. The heat, the tension and the unexpected problem of having to balance dictionaries on a suitcase, are getting to her. I walk swiftly to the front, pick up my plastic chair and carry it across the classroom. She can rest her dictionaries on that. I set it down beside her. A few years older than the others, Paola smiles. I would say ‘my pleasure’ if I didn’t observe a complete ban on talking during exams.

  Perhaps this is the sort of involvement I should be looking at. Giving up my chair.

  Passing behind Monica I’m worried that she hasn’t started writing. One of the intriguing things about teaching translation is how each student betrays his personality in the way he translates. Even the twins are different on paper. Assuming they don’t copy. Monica insists on writing stylish Italian. To do that she must first digest the English until it dissolves into a wordless energy from which her Italian can emerge. But Hitchens is hard work. He won’t break down. She is paralysed between the imperfectly understood English and her unwillingness to write anything imperfect in Italian. I’m anxious for her.

  How can one be in the world, even doing something as simple as invigilating an exam, and stay tension free? Would it be more healthy if I felt no sympathy at all? Perhaps my sympathy for Monica, like my aversion to Hitchens, is a form of self-regard. The one situation is a mirror of the other. I like to feel generous to the student as I like to feel hostile to the journalist. How can one arrive at an opinion, an attitude, without getting heated about it?

  It’s really dreadfully hot in classroom 503. It’s a scandal that the air conditioning breaks down so often. For a while I just stand in the corner and contemplate: twenty-three students working: the smart and the less smart, the pretty and the plain, the witty and the dull. Someone is drinking water from a bottle, someone is hitching up a bra strap. Emilio is scribbling on his photocopies. For a few minutes they merge into each other, they seem one. Over these two years the class has become a group, of course, a group with its unique collective character and atmosphere. I love knowing my students’ names, calling each one by his or her name – it seems the most elementary courtesy – but sometimes it’s nice to think of them as nameless too. A class. A community. I try to imagine the larger community of all the students I have taught over twenty and more years. There have been so many. All nameless. And myself too. I try to imagine myself nameless among my colleagues, among the students I have taught. Would Hitchens write as he does, if writers remained nameless, if books and newspaper articles were, as Robert Walser wished, anonymous, anonymous as butlers carrying a chair to where madam required it? Words seem less noxious when unattached to names. ‘Where now, who now, when now. Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving.’

  I’m just beginning to think of the Beckett passage I’ve given them when my substitute arrives, Andrea. It’s break time.

  Of course, I haven’t asked the students to translate anything so hard as the opening lines of The Unnameable. Over coffee in the thankfully air-conditioned cafeteria I look through the passage, trying to decide what to expect of them, how to mark their work. It’s a piece from Malone Dies. Then Mrs Lambert was alone in the kitchen . . . She stood a moment irresolute, bowed forward with her hands on the table, before she sat down again. Her day of toil over, day dawned on other toils within her, on the crass tenacity of life and its diligent pains. Sitting, moving about, she bore them better than in bed. From the well of this unending weariness her sigh went up unendingly, for day when it was night, for night when it was day . . . Often she stood up and moved about the room, or out and round the ruinous old house, five years now it had been going on, five or six, not more. She told herself she had a woman’s disease, but half-heartedly. Night seemed less night in the kitchen pervaded with the everyday tribulations, day less dead. It helped her, when things were bad, to cling with her fingers to the worn table at which her family would soon be united, waiting for her to serve them, and to feel about her, ready for use, the lifelong pots and pans.

  It’s curious. My attention was first drawn to this passage a dozen years ago in an essay by the critic Christopher Ricks. He was embroiled in an argument with other critics who claimed that Beckett had buried realism once and for all. What could be more realistic than this? Ricks was demanding. Later, I remember re-reading the passage when I was ill and thinking how accurate Beckett was when he said ‘the crass tenacity of life and its diligent pains’. And how right about the way pains keep you on the move, as if you could simply walk away from them. From kitchen to bathroom. From bathroom to garden. Then back to the kitchen. How they invited you to live outside the present, to long for day at night and for night during the day, growing ever more attached meanwhile to the reassuring things that reinforce your old identity – the lifelong pots and pans. They were all reactions that Dr Wise and later guru Coleman taught me to abandon.

  In his collected letters published only a few weeks before this exam and presently in my bag for reading on the train, Beckett describes how illness forced him to change his life:

  For years I had been unhappy, consciously & deliberately . . . I isolated myself more & more, undertook less & less & lent myself to a crescendo of disparagement of others & myself. But in all that there was nothing that struck me as morbid. . . . It was not until that way of living, or rather negation of living, developed such terrifying physical symptoms that it could no longer be pursued, that I became aware of anything morbid in myself.

  Skin conditions, boils, panic attacks and a racing heart finally forced Beckett into analysis. Over some years and with great, as he recalls, reluctance, he recovered.

  I wonder, spooning the last sugar from my cup, whether his Mrs Lambert is meant to recover. What does it mean when it says that she was half-hearted about its being a woman’s disease? That she knew deep down it was a psychosomatic problem, or simply ageing? Or that any diagnosis was irrelevant? She was doomed. A few days ago an older friend had called me and told me he had prostate cancer. Giorgio. It was lunchtime. He had got the diagnosis a few minutes before. We talked it up and down. He’s an immensely tense man, frequently in the throes of depression, an insomniac who makes regular use of tranquillisers and writes excellent aphorisms of exquisite pessimism.

  ‘How long were you in pain before getting yourself checked?’ I asked.

  He’d had no pains at all, he told me. No nocturnal peeing. No warning. Nothing. ‘Should I get myself operated on right away?’ he asked anxiously. ‘What do you think?’ The doctor had told him this would mean the end of his sex life.

  When I couldn’t answer he added, ‘Still, better than no life at all, I suppose.’

  ‘Giorgio,’ I eventually said, ‘you should get the best advice you can.’

  But it is foolish to speculate on Mrs Lambert’s prognosis, and the question of Beckett’s realism is more vexed than it might seem. The suffering woman is a casual invention of Beckett’s narrator Malone who is telling himself stories to pass the time while he dies. She only interests him, it seems, in so far as he can project his own predicament onto her. A few lines after this, he breaks off and dismisses the whole story as ‘Mortal tedium’. Mrs Lambert doesn’t appear again. She was pure fantasy. Later we discover that Malone himself was only one of the many identities of someone called ‘the unnameable’.

  ‘The self is a fantasy,’ guru Coleman had said in his hypnotic voice. ‘It doesn’t exist.’

  Thomas Hardy once said the same thing, yet he was always recognisably Thomas Hardy.

  ‘Let go. Just let go.’

  It’s time for me to hurry back to the exam. I don’t trust anyone else with my students for more than a few minutes. Another instance of over-weaning self-importance, no doubt. The classroom, as I walk in, is suffocating. One or two students gl
ance up, but there is urgency in the atmosphere now. They are pushed. There are clenched jaws and worried eyes. Dictionary pages slap back and forth. I tell Andrea to come back five minutes from the end and help collect the papers. He’s a solemn, bearded, rather Victorian young man. A Ph.D. student. He’d be happy to stay, he says.

  ‘No, one’s enough.’

  Then it occurs to me that I shouldn’t have given this Malone passage as an exam since it was written first in French. Damn, The thought comes to me as I watch Teresa anxiously chewing her blonde hair. The girl is half German, tall with broad bare shoulders. Her T-shirt is stained with sweat. I would like to tell the students that although the exam matters enormously – actually their degree depends on it – from another perspective it really doesn’t matter at all, it’s pure fantasy. Either way, they would do well to stay calm.

  Should I be giving my students a translation from English that is already translated from French? Isn’t this methodologically flawed?

  But can one really talk of translation with Beckett who was after all working back into his mother tongue from French?

  Standing by the door, I think of Beckett moving back and forth from one language to another. Towards the end, it seems, he would write a sentence in French, translate it into English then immediately translate it back into French. And so on. Perhaps this too was a way of stepping back from involvement. First the sentiment, the lyricism, the intensity – as in Mrs Lambert’s story – then the stepping back from it, denying it; she was just someone that someone I made up made up. Perhaps the translation was part of the denial, the distancing. Moi, moi non. Like Walser writing tiny script in pencil. Or Coetzee putting his autobiography in the third person. Except that since Beckett’s first language was English the ‘translation’ often turns out to be more intense than the original French. Beckett is definitely more inventive in English. He can’t resist his genius for it. So then he has to ironise all the more heavily what he has translated, he has to bring in puns and asides. ‘There is a choice of images,’ he adds at one point in the English version of Malone. He hadn’t felt the need for that disparaging flourish in the plainer French.