Read Online A Heart So White by Javier Marías - Free Book Online Page B

or Vienna or even Brussels and then two months at home, before returning for a further stint of two months or so in the same places), the task of the translator or interpreter of speeches and reports is boring in the extreme, both because of the identical and fundamentally incomprehensible jargon universally used by all parliamentarians, delegates, ministers, politicians, deputies, ambassadors, experts and representatives of all kinds from every nation in the world, and because of the unvaryingly turgid nature of all their speeches, appeals, protests, harangues and reports. People who have never done this kind of work might think it must be fun or, at the very least, interesting and varied, or more than that, they might even think that in a sense one is at the heart of world decisions with firsthand access to highly detailed and important information about every aspect of the lives of different races, political information, urban and agricultural information, information about armaments, cattle-raising, ecclesiastical matters, physical, linguistic, military and Olympic information, information about police matters and tourism, chemistry and propaganda, sex and television and viruses, sports and banking and cars, hydraulics and war studies and ecology and local customs. It's true that, during my working life, I've translated speeches and texts by all kinds of people on the most unexpected subjects (at the start of my career I was chosen to utter the posthumous words of Archbishop Makarios, just to name one unusual example), and I've proved myself capable of repeating in my own language, or in any of the other languages I understand and speak, long diatribes on such absorbing subjects as the different types of irrigation in Sumatra or minorities in Swaziland and Burkina (formerly Burkina-Faso, capital city: Ouagadougou), who, like everyone else, are having a bad time of it; I've reproduced complicated justifications for providing children with sex education in the Venetian dialect, or the embarrassment of so doing; on the feasibility of continuing to finance the lethal and expensive weapons made by the South African factory Armscor, since, in theory, they can't be exported; on the possibilities of building a replica of the Kremlin in Burundi or Malawi, I think it was (capital cities: Bujumbura and Zomba); on the need to split off from the Spanish peninsula the whole of the east coast (including Murcia) thus making it an island and avoiding the annual torrential rains and floods that are such a burden on the national budget; on a disease attacking marble in Parma, the spread of AIDS in the islands of Tristan da Cunha, the infrastructure of football in the Arab Emirates, low morale in the Bulgarian navy and, as happened a few years ago in Londonderry by order of a mayor who ended up being sacked, a strange ban on burying the dead, who instead were piled up in a stinking heap on a bit of waste ground. All this and more have I religiously translated and transmitted and repeated, exactly as spoken by others, by experts and scientists and luminaries and wise men from every discipline and from the most distant countries, unusual people, exotic people, erudite and eminent people, Nobel prizewinners and professors from Oxford and Harvard who would submit reports on the most surprising topics at the request of their governments or by representatives of their governments or by delegates or even by the deputies of those representatives.
    The truth is that the translations are the only fully functioning element in these organizations, which are, in fact, gripped by a veritable translatorial fever, somewhat morbid and unhealthy, for every word pronounced (in session or assembly) and every scrap of paper sent, whatever the subject, whoever it is, in principle, addressed to or whatever its objective (even if it's highly confidential), is immediately translated into several languages, just in case. When we're working, we translators and