ONI [antikvár]

translator's note The people interviewed in this book, all of them in their seventies and eighties, speak in a peculiar dialect of their own. It is an idiom naturally determined by their age, their work, and their ideology: a way of speaking which combines the language of communist propaganda with stilted, archaic expressions and old-fashioned slang. The fact that most of them lack any kind of formal education heightens the general effect. Their sentences are clumsy, their grasp of grammar tenuous; they misuse words, and see language not as a way of conveying their meaning but as an instrument for distorting and concealing the truth. Years of mendacity and propaganda have made them adept at begging questions, skirting issues, and speaking in hints and allusions; when they feel cornered, they automatically lapse into textbook communist jargon, constructing phrases on such a level of abstraction that they become unintelligible: their words simply fail to refer, and the result is gibberish. This happens when the speaker has no meaning at all to convey but wishes to pretend that he does; when he is unwilling to answer a question and, equally unwilling to say so, tries to appear to be providing informadon while providing none. Sometimes, inured by years of speaking in this way, he genuinely thinks he can see meaning where no meaning exists, and really believes that he is saying something - indeed, that he is saying something true. The language which these people have learnt to speak encloses them in a world of communist dogma which they cannot relinquish. Inevitably, a lifetime of this has permanently warped their ability to think for themselves. They repeat lessons learnt by rote, and can go on speaking for hours without saying anything, indeed without making any sense. This is why they must be stopped occasionally and reminded, in concrete terms, of what they are supposed to be addressing themselves to - a technique which the interviewer puts to frequent use. To wit, after a particularly stunning example of pure nonsense from Mr Berman, she says resignedly, "Yes, well, perhaps we'd better stick to the facts." When language is mangled and pulled about in this way, any attempt at translation will inevitably be a compromise between