Become a better writer – take a leaf out of Chekhov’s book

GS: Am I right that, in that same letter, Chekhov basically pledged to start spending more time on his stories? That’s how I remember it and I think one can see the results in those later masterpieces, such as “Lady with Pet Dog” and “In the Ravine” and so on.

NR: Yes, those are the early stories, many of them comical. At that time, he felt that the literary community disparaged him, and excluded him. Everything changed for him soon after, and he became the talk of the town. “My Petersburg friends and acquaintances are mad at me?” he wrote to a friend in 1890, “What for? For not having bored them enough with my presence, which has bored me for so long myself!”

GS: I’m relieved eved to hear that about Chekhov’s hov’s later writing practices. s. If someone wrote those later stories in one sitting… g… I would find that depressing. ressing.

In the book, ok, I speculate that every ery artist uses some form or iteration of f intuition. So we’re e’re always trying ing to: 1) improve ove the quality of that intuition on ( that is, our ur openness to that quiet t voice and our r willingness to act on it) and 2) get more comfortable with the idea that we can and should come back to a piece again and again, so that it will speak to us in all kinds of weather.

I find it so interesting, the difference between a) the mindstate we enact when reading a piece and analysing it and b) the mindstate we enact when creating something. They seem to be very different spaces, almost unrelated. What is the translator’s mindstate?

NR: I am going to follow your instructions on literary dissection in A Swim in a Pond in the Rain and show you, as much as possible, the process I go through in translating a paragraph. Take the second sentence of Gogol’s “The Nose”. Here is my process, translating it, sentence by sentence: sentenc

The barber Ivan Yakovlevitch, residing on Vosnesensky Vosn Avenue (his last name has been lost, even from his o own shingle – which depict depicts a man with a lathered cheek, the words “Blood-letting too” a and nothing more more) – the barber Ivan Yaklovlevitch wok woke up quite earl early and heard the smell of hot bre bread.

Now, N I’m thinking, in do people still s even say

“shingle” for the sign outside a shop? I think so. I will use it, I think. Anyway, it is OK with me if it sounds old- fashioned because a reader will know they are reading Gogol, and that he is from another century. Also, will the Englishlanguage reader be OK with the repetition of the man’s name? It appears like that in Russian, has the effect of sounding like speech. Of course, I will leave it. But maybe I will add a dash (a very Russian piece of punctuation) so that the reader doesn’t trip but instead enjoys the repetition.

Should I write “quite early” or “rather early” or “early enough” or something else? Yes, Gogol here does write that the barber “heard the smell” – such a Gogolian play! Many translations don’t honour it, instead writing “smelled the smell of fresh bread” or somesuch. But I will stick to exactly keeping his strangeness and will use “heard the smell” (and also “hot bread” instead of “fresh bread”).

To me, translating fiction feels quite different to writing fiction and this is mostly because in writing fiction, I find, once I have set the fictional voice, then the cadences and music issue easily, the task then is to produce story from that voice, the beats, the rhythms. In translating, you aren’t in charge of the characters, or points of view or any happenings, but you are watching for them in the author’s rendering, and you are trying, with each draft, to get that voice down onto the page. Is it the difference between the stand- up comedian and the ventriloquist with her dummy?

GS: That Gogol translation was fascinating. For what it’s worth, that’s very much what writing prose feels like to me – making choices to increase the ambient intelligence of the piece. One of the biggest discoveries I ever made for myself was how incredibly sensitive our reading selves are to small differences in a bit of prose. So, “The yard was covered with snow and light fell across it in a band” and “A band of light fell across the snow- covered yard” are the same thought… and yet not. They make two different yards.

Even the omission of single words changes the tone of the sentence, and this level of care, made over the course of a story, changes the voice (and therefore the meaning) in big ways – really, in the only ways that matter. So, on one hand, this is a cause for anxiety (a single paragraph is potentially a life’s work; a Rubik’s cube of choices) but, on the other hand, it’s a cause for rejoicing: it’s all choices and we get to make them, and therefore originality is always possible ( always still possible, no matter how late in the game).

NR: Chekhov once wrote that he might never have undertaken writing if he hadn’t been a doctor – he found it invigorating to alternate between the two pursuits.

GS: I kind of feel that way about teaching. Over the years, I got into a rhythm during a semester, in which I worked hard at teaching and then felt like I could then fully indulge myself in a few days of writing. This also involved a very rich transition from “I am reading other people’s work in order to form and articulate a viewpoint on it” to “I am just doing my own stuff exactly as I want, no defence or rationale necessary.”

NR: I have a little cough, I’m sure it’s nothing, but it occurs to me: Chekhov used to spray turpentine in a fine spray around the edges of his desk and over various objects to help him with his cough while he worked at his desk.

GS: I am going to try this turpentine- application technique. Ack, just tried it. I can’t breathe! And now my space heater just ignited my desk. Thanks, Anton and Natasha!

NR: Uh- oh. I feel like I’m in the short story you wrote about the fake cave people in the zoo, and I remembered this, the postscript in an 1890 letter from Chekhov: “If we were to cut the zoological conversations out of ‘ The Duel’ wouldn’t it make it more lively?”

GS: This makes me want to put some zoological conversations into the piece I’m working on. As soon as the flames go out on my writing desk.

NR: Yikes.

GS: Well, thanks to you and Chekhov, my writing desk has now completely burned to the ground and so I am off to build another one, out of a tree I will cut down myself, without any help from my peasants.

Natasha Randall is a translator and novelist. A Swim in the Pond in the Rain by George Saunders is published by Bloomsbury at £16.99 on Tuesday

The recent ludicrous decision by the Royal Collection to label Lady Butler’s 1880 painting of the defence of Rorke’s Drift with the warning that it has links to “colonialism and violence” prompted me to do something I hadn’t for 40 years, which was to watch the film of this stirring episode in history, Zulu.

Shot in 1963 on location in South Africa, about 60 miles from the scene of the battle and with hundreds of Zulus as extras, its authenticity is striking. The Zulu chief was played by his own great-grandson, who would become the leading South African politician Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi. Watched on Blu-ray on an ultra-high-definition television, the picture is probably sharper than when first seen in the cinema: never have the landscapes of

Africa looked so spectacular. And when the action starts, the viewer is gripped by its precision.

How it looks may be important for credibility but that is, of course, only one aspect of the film. It succeeds because the script is understated, vitally so if it is to comply with our received wisdom about how the Army undertook, and still undertakes, its duties.

This is all the more remarkable because of the preconceptions the director, Cy Endfield, brought to the project. He had been driven out of America a decade before he made Zulu after falling foul of the

House un-American Activities Committee, which decided he was a communist. Endfield perceived Zulu as a Western, with the British soldiers as the 7th Cavalry and the Zulu warriors as native Americans; but few films of that genre have Zulu’s dignity. The viewer grasps that, while the heroism of the British defenders was remarkable and, importantly, is portrayed in the film without undue glamorisation, the heroism and nobility of the Zulus is just as overwhelming.

Endfield had been a nondescript director before the McCarthyites attacked him, but coming to England was the making of him. Zulu was the fifth of six features he would film with Stanley Baker, whose production company, Diamond, made Zulu. One previous collaboration had been Hell Drivers, a highly original, memorable but somewhat mad 1957 film about truckers for a crooked gravel company; another was Jet Storm, from 1959, a precursor of later airliner disaster movies. Endfield was always looking for something unconventional, and Baker’s persona lends stability to, or acts as an anchor in, his scenarios.

In none of his films is this more the case than Zulu. It is Baker’s film, not only because he is the star, but also because of the moral authority he brings to the role of John Chard, the Royal Engineer who, as the senior officer, decides to defend the field hospital and mission church at Rorke’s Drift against the Zulus. The previous day, between 10,000 and 15,000 Zulus had slaughtered more than 1,300 British and European troops at Isandlwana, 11 days into a British campaign to invade Zululand and effect a federation in South Africa; the odds were stacked against the defenders.

The truth of what happened – 150 British soldiers, plus perhaps another dozen or so walking wounded, holding off up to 4,000 Zulus of ferocious bravery who kept walking towards volleys of machine-gun fire – is stranger than fiction, but it is to Endfield’s credit that the action never lapses into the improbable.

As well as Baker’s level-headed performance, two others are intensely realistic, and help shore up the credibility of the narrative: Nigel Green as Colour Sergeant Frank Bourne, and Glynn Edwards as Corporal William Allen, both fulfil to a tee the stereotype of the by-the-book British noncommissioned officer, and quite possibly portray exactly the calmness under fire and in face of attack that the real defenders of Rorke’s Drift must have shown.

One divisive aspect of a film in which so much else is right is the casting of Michael Caine as Lt Gonville Bromhead, who in real life, like his brother officer Chard, was one of 11 men to win the Victoria Cross that day. This was Caine’s first starring role, and perhaps it is only in light of his later gorblimey screen persona, with which we are so familiar, that some of us find him less than credible as a languid toff in this.

Endfield told Caine that his was the worst screen test he had ever seen, but there was no time to replace him because the team were about to leave for South Africa; Caine told Endfield that no English director would ever have cast him as an officer. For all that, Zulu remains a great film: if you’ve never seen it, seek it out soon – before somebody bans it for its “colonialism” and “violence”.