The Russian Interpreter

I realized, when I read the memoirs, that his enthusiasm for the book had been more sincere than I suspected, and characteristically generous. One of the things that had attracted him was his love of the Russian character. But the Russians he had known seemed to be mostly the extravagantly eccentric members and hangers-on of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in Monte Carlo, and remarkably unlike the dour Soviet citizens in my story. This, and all the discussions of restaurants and hotels, made me a little uneasy. A more immediately practical problem was how to do the Russian dialogue so that it was comprehensible to an English-speaking audience, when the point of so much of it was its incomprehensibility to Proctor-Gould and Manning’s waywardness in translating it for him.

Another, and even more fundamental, difficulty: how to represent the cityscape of Moscow, which features so largely in the story, when there was not the slightest prospect of getting permission to film there. The usual stand-ins for Moscow at the time were Dundee or Helsinki; and in Black Narcissus Powell and Pressburger had most magically conjured up an even more exotic location – a monastery in the high Himalayas – out of even more homely materials: studio sets and locations among the rhododendrons of Surrey. I can’t remember now why Pressburger, when we finally met him at his home in the Tirol, rejected all these ways to go. Instead he proposed using locations which were quite openly and recognizably parts of London, but with a little man on a bicycle who would cycle round changing the street names for each scene – covering up ‘St James’s Street’, in the particular instance that Pressburger offered, with a sign reading ‘Gorky Street’. This seemed to me wonderfully bold and witty, and very much in the fantastical spirit of his earlier films with Powell; but also totally ridiculous.

He subsequently wrote a draft of the screenplay which included the cyclist, but I think this is where the project finally died, on the corner of St James’s aka Gorky Street. When Powell’s option expired Peter Sellers picked it up himself. I had a letter from him in Beverly Hills saying that he had ‘two first class intellects working and thinking about how it should be scripted’. That was the last I heard of it.

An American theatre director, Philip Wiseman, later persuaded me to adapt it for the stage. I wrote the first two acts, with the streets of Moscow safely offstage, and gave up on the third. I’d been intrigued by the limitations that the form had imposed, though, and the experience of coping with them was one of the things that aroused (or re-aroused) my long-dormant interest in writing for the theatre.

 

By the time I’d begun the services Russian course, in 1952, the blockade of Berlin had long since been lifted, and I never had to interrogate any prisoners, or even (as some of my fellow linguists did) listen in to Soviet radio traffic. I did much later put it to good peaceful use, and translated a fair number of plays, mostly Chekhov, but including one about everyday life in Soviet Moscow. I even once or twice did a bit of interpreting. I wasn’t very good at it. My first effort was at a horrible drunken Soviet banquet marking the end of our stay in 1956, when I found myself sitting next to a fellow-travelling French crystallographer who said she wanted to make a speech and asked me to translate for her. I was about as drunk as Manning is in an incident in the book which is based on this, and made a rather similar error. As I gradually sobered up in my sleeper aboard the overnight Red Arrow express to Leningrad and the boat home, it slowly came to me that, although I had translated the speech (in favour of peace, international friendship, etc.) out of French reasonably adequately, the language into which I had translated it had been English instead of Russian. Not that anyone, at that stage in the evening, had appeared to notice.

Changes in the city did, of course, continue over the years, in spite of what my friends said. Entire landscapes of new housing appeared on the outskirts. The old tumbledown houses did, with the help of the town planners, finally tumble down. The foyers of the hotels that served hard-currency tourists and businessmen became the hunting grounds for high-class prostitutes and call girls. Then came Gorbachev and perestroika – and the last time I went, in 1988, to see one of my plays produced, I often found it difficult to believe my eyes and ears.

Now, though, the old Soviet world that I knew, at once harsh and easy-going, labour-intensive and lethargic, has vanished entirely. Or so I assume. I’m always being urged to go back to see another of my plays which has been in the repertoire of the Moscow Arts Theatre for ten years or so now. I keep putting it off. For one thing, I don’t want to reveal, even to myself, how bad my spoken Russian is these days, and quite how far I have declined from being any kind of Russian interpreter.