Free A Heart So White by Javier Marías Page B

before, I can barely remember a single word, not that I ever did and not because there's a limit to how much information the memory can retain, but because, even at the moment I was translating I could remember nothing, that is, even then I had no idea what the speaker was saying nor what I said subsequently or, as one imagines happens, simultaneously. He or she said it and I said or repeated it, but in a mechanical way that has nothing whatsoever to do with intellection (more than that, the two activities are completely at odds), for you can only repeat more or less accurately what you hear if you neither understand nor assimilate any of it (especially if you're receiving and transmitting without pause) and the same thing happens with written texts of this type, which have no literary merit whatsoever and which you never get the chance to correct or ponder over or go back to. So all the valuable information to which people might imagine we translators and interpreters working in international organizations are privy, in fact, escapes us completely, from beginning to end, from top to bottom, we haven't a clue about what's brewing or being plotted and planned in the world, not the slightest glimmer. And even if, sometimes, in our rest periods, we stay behind to listen to the great men without translating them, the identical terminology used by all of them is utterly incomprehensible to anyone in his or her right mind, so that if occasionally, for some inexplicable reason, we do manage to retain a few phrases, the fact is that we then deliberately forget them as quickly as possible, because keeping that inhuman jargon in your head for any longer than the time it takes to translate it into the second language or second jargon is an unnecessary torment, positively harmful to our battered equilibrium.
    What with one thing and another, I often wonder with some alarm if anyone understands anything of what anyone says during those meetings, especially in the strictly rhetorical sessions. For, even if one accepts that the assembly members do understand each other's primitive argot, there's still nothing to stop the interpreters making any changes they like to the content of the speeches and no possibility of any real control or available time for denials or amendments. The only way to control us completely would be to have a second translator there, equipped with headphones and microphone, who would simultaneously translate us back into the original language, in order to check how effectively we were saying what was being said in the room at that moment. But, in that case, you'd need a third translator, similarly equipped, who would, in turn, check the second translator and retranslate their words and perhaps a fourth to watch over the third and thus, I'm afraid,
ad infinitum,
translators checking interpreters and interpreters checking translators, speakers checking congress members and typists checking orators, translators checking polticians and ushers checking interpreters. Everyone would watch everyone else and no one would listen to or transcribe anything which, in the long run, would lead to the suspension of all sessions and congresses and assemblies and the permanent closure of all international organizations. It's therefore preferable to take a few risks and put up with the incidents (sometimes serious) and the misunderstandings (sometimes enduring) that inevitably arise from interpreters' inaccuracies and even though we rarely add jokes of our own (we'd risk losing our job), it's hard sometimes to resist slipping in the occasional falsehood. The international representatives and our immediate bosses have no option but to trust us, likewise the leading politicians from the different countries where our services are required outside of the international organizations, at the meetings known as "summits", or on the official visits they all make to each other on friendly, enemy or neutral territory. It is, however, true that on