“Truly”, “fluently” and the art of Robert Fisk

Before I get started on an intriguing conversation about translation and journalism (I stress that the subject matter is intriguing; my very brief essay is for you to judge), I feel that I have to say something that I never wanted to say. My expectation was that with the reopening of the bookshops our sales would gradually return to their previous levels (last year was our best year since 2014, so Covid-19 has hit us hard). It may be that 2021 will see a return to normality, but it is becoming difficult to be optimistic. Waterstones hasn’t ordered a single copy of Fear in the World, and they are not to be blamed for this. They have staff and shops whose existence will be in question, so the existential problems of small publishers have to take second place. Nor do I want to give the impression that my own situation is difficult, as I have shifted to working for others through this crisis. The problem is the survival of Vagabond Voices after the crisis.

I want to be clear on this point: all contracts will be respected which means four books will be published next year (and the two we’re already committed to in 2022), and we are committed to publishing all five volumes of A.H. Tammsaare’s pentalogy, Truth and Justice. Some of you have written in for reassurance on this matter, and nothing will change. I am talking about Vagabond Voices’ survival in its current form.

We already have requests for donations on our website, but perhaps not everyone is aware of them. Besides, I am not primarily looking for donations. What I would most like our readers to do is spread the word, because undoubtedly we are not reaching our potential audience, and you can help us a little bit by telling people of our existence and of this newsletter. Some of you have bought a great number of our books, and it is unlikely that you will want more, but as with birds of a feather, I suspect that you have friends and acquaintances who could be interested. You will already be talking about books – not only ours of course – but with this impending crisis (which must be affecting most small publishers) remember us if you want to see Vagabond Voices live on and hopefully beyond my own retirement.

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Some years ago my nephew came to stay and when he saw the English-Italian dictionary on my desk, he disarmingly said, “So you don’t really know the language.” This was the kind of commonsensical comment that we all from time to time let slip about professions we’re entirely unfamiliar with. They obviously demonstrate an understandable ignorance but also carry a certain truth.

We don’t fully know any language, including our own.

Nevertheless, a translator does not usually use a dictionary to know the meaning of a word, but rather to have a list of words to prompt ideas about which would be the best one. Take the word “truly”. It is the adverbial form of the word “true”, which has a much higher frequency. If we use it at all, we use it to qualify an adjective, such as “This is truly fantastic.” You may never use it this way, but I think that you have probably heard it, and it is used as a synonym of “very” for superlative adjectives like “fantastic” which don’t really need an adverb. Apart from this, “truly” is a very low frequency word and has an archaic taste to it. If I were to say, “Truly, I have had a wonderful day,” you would think me a little odd or a member of some weird religious sect. Italian has a similar word: veramente. It is the adverbial form of the word, vero, which means “true”, but the real workhorse in this area which is very widely used is davvero. Veramente too has a restricted usage (though a higher frequency than “truly”) and this is only when it qualifies a verb. If somebody were to say a sentence such as, “The bus for Rome leaves on Mondays and Thursdays,” and you know that in your particular village it is on different days and also think that everyone else should know that, you would say, “Veramente, the bus leaves on Tuesdays and Fridays.” Like many words, it comes with its own baggage, and it politely suggests that the first person, in this stilted dialogue typical of grammatical examples, isn’t quite all there. Languages, incredibly flexible things, are made up of minor rigidities we call inferences and set phrases.

This is the sublime landscape that the translator has to navigate, and translation is aided by dictionaries and thesauruses (coming from the Latin for “treasure”, thesaurus was often used in other languages for dictionaries, encyclopaedias and collections of mottos and wise words, but in English it is firmly associated with dictionaries of synonyms and antonyms, and perhaps something more, like Roget’s which is the daddy of them all and much more extensive). Now they are online and easier to access than a book (which after much use may start to fall apart), but I think that the offline versions are better (they have no adverts and are generally compiled in a more professional manner.

Into this intricate fertility of words and usages comes a powerful new force: the English language, often called the New Latin in Italian, and with good reason.

I came across an example of this in an article on Robert Fisk this morning. The Italian journalist (in a fine article) wrote that Fisk could speak Arabic in maniera fluente. This struck me as odd, because there was a time when an Italian would not have understood that: the word used then was correntemente which carried more or less the same meaning in that context. This is just one tiny example of how English is changing languages, and this worries me greatly. That I should do this in a time of apocalyptic arguments over the undoubted destruction of our planet is most probably a sign of the kind of jaundiced nonsense that old men have produced for millennia. The evidence is there, and I say old men advisedly!

My Italian newspaper devoted the entire back page to Robert Fisk’s death, and the article went into some details about his methodology and style. “Robert Fisk always sought out the truth, even when some of us considered it a lost cause. The onslaught in his reportage on Sabra and Chatila keeps drumming in my brain like a soundtrack: ‘The flies told us where. They were in their millions and their buzzing was almost as eloquent as their smell. As big as bluebottles, we were initially completely covered with them, as they seemed unaware of the difference between the living and the dead.” Unlike those who fuss over words like “truly” and “fluently”, these brave journalists attempted to inform us – even when we were not that interested in being informed – and did so at great risk to themselves, and for their efforts they were often greeted with hostility and anger. So much discourse has been delegitimised over the last forty years, and the treatment of the Palestinians is one. Speaking up comes with a cost. And a few days ago the shameful accusations against Corbyn were taken up again. This reminded me of something that got no coverage in the press at the time of the last Westminster election: on BBC’s Good Morning Scotland, Lord Dubs (who was saved by the kindertransport) stated in an interview that the accusations of anti-Semitism against the Labour Party’s then leader were baseless and “unkind” to a good man. That same day I turned on the radio for the World at One (Radio Four) and I fully expected to hear Lord Dubs again, but instead there was an unremitting attack on Corbyn’s anti-Semitism with no opportunity for a counter argument from anyone (including the many Jewish labour members who supported him). Cleary the BBC was backing the Tories in England and the Labour Party in Scotland in the hope that a divided anti-Tory vote would weaken the SNP. The BBC’s motivations (bad as they may have been) are not as serious as the misrepresentation of an international scandal that needs to be addressed in the name of common humanity. The Italian journalist ended his article with the following sentence: “Fisk will continue to teach us and haunt our reports even after this death.” This is a fitting in epitaph to a great journalist and a man of remarkable moral probity and courage.

Allan Cameron, Pitigliano, November 2020