A Gift from James Ballard

As a little preface - English is not my mother tongue. I was born in the USSR in a mixed Estonian-Russian family, and my first language was Russian.

I have never learned English in my life unless you count school. For the first two years, I got from D's to C's because I was bored with memorizing the words and English spelling. And then, I got my hands on a book that my mom was reading (she was fluent in English and read fiction and detectives in the original).

It was a collection of short stories by James Ballard. I had loved science fiction since first grade but didn't know who Ballard was. I asked my mom how she liked it, and she said she liked it a lot. And I was hooked.

Looking back, I realize that, without knowing it, I set the bar for myself, if not for a world record, then at least for an Olympic one. Back then, I could barely string together three crooked sentences about London, and here I took up reading a writer known as a master of a perfect, sometimes almost baroque style, backed up by a colossal vocabulary. I didn't know any of this then, and even if I had wanted to, I couldn't have learned about it in the USSR before the Internet era... I still wonder what wind blew Ballard's The Four-Dimensional Nightmare into the foreign literature section of the small library on my street. Not at all the kind of literature favored by the communist censors.

For a long time, my board books were small paperback carefully wrapped in plastic (the library's collection was treated with care) and a mighty brick of Miller's English-Russian dictionary (I still consider it the best English-Russian dictionary in the world). I struggled through the book and realized that I understood roughly half of what I had read, exactly enough to realize how superb the writing was. To be honest, I don't remember exactly how I came to this decision, but I decided to translate the collection into Russian - no more and no less.

I still had some miserable crumbs of sanity left, so I started with the shortest story, The Garden of Time. I realize now that I chose the most challenging story in the collection, a story of marvelous beauty about the last stronghold of beauty and order passing into oblivion. A small estate lying in the path of a giant army trampling everything in its way, inexorably coming from behind the horizon. The two doomed inhabitants of the villa and the last roses - the flowers of time, plucking which can briefly push the inevitable back into the past - until the crystal bud fades. It is a subtle, elegant allegory of the inevitability of death and stoicism.

It took me several months to translate the story. Twelve pages (I still remember!) - and several months! I pestered my mother with consultations and tortured my English and Russian teachers, trying to find the most accurate turns and idioms... And I did it. I didn't send my translation anywhere, and now there's no point - several versions have been published, and only old geeks like me remember Ballard, but I'm still proud of what I did.

I ended up translating the whole collection, but I want to tell you separately about the story I took on second. I was smarter this time, so I reread it just to ensure I could do it. I was a bit discouraged by the length of the piece, but I was simply enchanted by the plot of The Watchtowers.

A strange, surreal world where mysterious Watchtowers stretch in endless rows over towns and villages, fading into the haze-covered sky, lost in its sparkling heights. No one has ever seen the Watchers, but every member of the once-prosperous town's rapidly disintegrating, paranoid community knows they are being watched and most likely control their every move. The protagonist of the story is the only one who tries to resist the apathy flooding everyone, stir people up, and break the armor of paranoid indifference and depression... But will the Watchers like it? What happens when they decide to pay OVERLY close attention to it?

Since then, I've translated a dozen novels and about three times as many short stories, and almost never have I experienced such an unearthly high as I did working on The Watchtowers. The story is strange, dragging, and lulling. It may seem lacking in action to some people, but how cool it is! And its ending is just a diamond, but I won't tell you about it. What if I intrigue you enough, and you decide to read it.

But one thing I can say for sure: English came into my life thanks to this book. Because of those collected stories by Ballard, you are now reading this story of mine... And I hope you will read many others.