Toward the start of our trip through Russia in 2009, my girlfriend and I watched more TV than we would've liked. We'd just arrived in St. Petersburg by train from Finland. As we settled into our apartment, I turned the TV on and flicked through the channels. I couldn't understand a single word but it was trashiest shit I'd ever seen; this much I could understand. A couple of days later, I was woken in the early morning by a call from Australia, and was told that there had been a ‘terrorist attack’ on a train heading from Moscow to St. Petersburg; we were due to catch the same train route the next evening, in the opposite direction. I turned on the TV but there was nothing about the incident on its dozens of channels. I jumped on the computer and for the next few hours, while the TV remained on in the background, I alt-tabbed through Russian blogs and foreign news sites as they drip fed information. It wasn't until later that afternoon that the Russian news channels started reporting the incident proper (it seems this kind of media silence is common in Russia; see this BBC article about Russians angered after state TV failed to inform its citizens during the wake of a bomb attack in Moscow). By this stage I already knew what had happened – Chechen separatists had bombed and derailed a passenger train, killing twenty-six people and injuring dozens.
We didn't know what to do: catch the train the next day as planned, or stay put? We were already a little on edge, Russia being an intimidating place for first-time visitors (a friend had warned me a couple of days before I left about the frequent race bashings in St. Petersburg). In the evening, the apartment owner popped around to drop off some linen. ‘You'll be fine, fine, fine,’ she assured us when we asked if it was safe to catch the train as planned. ‘These things happen every now and then. They [the separatists] will go into hiding for awhile.’ She was completely nonplussed, and just as jovial and lovely as when we first met her. The city seemed just the same too, that day and the next. I expected fewer people on the streets, more police, more suspicious eyes, but we didn't notice any change of pace. And true to the lady's word, we were fine, fine, fine. We had an unforgettable trip, far away from those mangled piles of bodies and steel. Contrary to what TV and the movies have taught us in scientific fashion over many decades, Russia was a truly beautiful place, full of ordinary, resilient and hospitable people. Sadly, the lady was also correct in that ‘these things’ happened again soon after we left: in March 2010, two suicide bombings in the Moscow subway killed forty people and injured a hundred.
What I learned from watching a lot of TV in those couple of days in St. Petersburg is that in Russia, they love to dub dialogue. Everything – absolutely everything – on TV is dubbed into Russian: movies, sitcoms, documentaries, cartoons, interviews. You might be familiar with the segments in news stories where there would be a soundbite from a non-English speaker, but rather than using subtitles, their voice is faded out after a few words and replaced with a patronisingly enthusiastic voiceover translation, while the original speech continues semi-muted in the background (this is necessary on radio, unnecessary and lazy on TV). On Russian TV, such dubbed footage is often syndicated from other media outlets, but then dubbed once again, into Russian. This means you often hear three voices simultaneously, a cacophony of languages at different volumes that often forms a ghoulish contrast between what you see and hear. The child on screen may be talking about how it would be nice to not have her village bombed once in a while, but the louder English voiceover on top sounds like they’re reading a children's book to a half-deaf toddler, while the even-louder Russian voice over the top of theirs sounds like they’re trying to sell off her stocks before an imminent crash. Assuming that Russian TV dubs the already-dubbed footage and not the original, it would be interesting to see how much meaning is gained or lost in this twofold translation process, whether through added inflections or simple mistranslation.
When we traveled into Mongolia weeks later, we shared a train carriage with a Mongolian youth ice hockey team and an American student. There was only one person onboard who could speak both English and Russian (the student), and one person who could speak Russian and Mongolian (one of the players). Whenever we wanted to communicate something to the Mongolians, we would say something in English, the American would translate this into Russian, then the one Mongolian player who spoke Russian would translate it into Mongolian for his teammates – and the reverse process applied if one of the players wanted to say something to us. Often a straightforward question or remark would unexpectedly draw laughs or confused stares, on both ends. Who fucked up? Usually it was far more effective to communicate when one of the middle-men were absent, by resorting to frantic Charades-like gesticulations or scribbling drawings on a notepad. Any communication involving translation is an approximation, but this way we could find common ground through our shared failure to understand each other, and search for similarities outside language, which only pronounced our differences. A laugh, a gesture, a shared cigarette: these were the order of the day.
When we were in Moscow a week after the train bombing, I wanted to watch a film. We were, after all, in one of the most important and historic film capitals in the world, and we wouldn't have another opportunity to see a film for about two months. I knew that it was going to be difficult to see a Russian film with English subtitles, but I thought it would be possible to at least see an English-language film with Russian subtitles. I asked a guy working at the hostel where we could see a film that hadn't been dubbed. He didn't know, so he asked some others, who also didn't know. Everything is dubbed in Russia, they told me. ‘We don't like reading subtitles.’ No shit – but being in Moscow, I knew that 'everything' couldn't possibly mean everything; there had to be some freaks in this city of twelve million who liked to see films in which they could hear what the actors actually sounded like. After some cumbersome Googling on an iPod, I finally managed to track down a cinema that was screening a few English-language films, with subtitles. One of these was Werner Herzog's Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, the 'remake' of Abel Ferrara's classic of half the same name, starring Nicolas Cage. Perfect!
We caught a train to a suburb and found the cinema, a neat little place with well-loved carpets. We bought tickets and sat in the back row of a half-filled theatre. I can't remember if there were trailers or not, but after the lights dimmed I remember the couple next to us chatting, seemingly unaware that the film had begun. In fact, a good dozen audience members continued talking throughout the opening scenes, at full volume. A man sitting alone in the front row picked up his phone when it began to ring and greeted what must've been an old friend; a couple of others made calls. This was all very fascinating but also very frustrating, because we didn't come just to see Nicolas Cage's weird face – we came also to hear his weird voice; a voice that was drowned out by a cacophony of mumbling Russian voices, and became quickly, irritatingly, dubbed. It wasn't until Cage's character started getting up to some serious mischief, and Eva Mendes’s character sexed up the screen, that the conversations were halted and the place began resembling a cinema (guns and tits are part of a universal cinematic language capable of hushing children and adults alike). We enjoyed the film and went home satisfied. Above all, the film warmed us through its communal experience, and in the comfort one gets when hearing their native tongue – grating Australian accents notwithstanding – in a place where you rarely hear it. We didn't hear much English for the rest of the trip, and Cage's drawling, nasal voice stayed with me in the back of my mind, like a quiet, good friend.
A couple of years ago I had a stopover in Kuala Lumpur, a city I don’t like much for reasons I won’t go into now. I was walking around trying to kill time in the mall-dominated area of the city, when I looked up to see a huge image of Nicolas Cage floating above me on the surface of a building: an advertisement for Montblanc. I found it amusing because Cage had never struck me as billboard-advertising material (except maybe in Japan), and he seemed a particularly unusual choice to sell luxury watches. (I'm sure many yuppies would think twice about forking out for a Montblanc if they'd seen a lot of his films and realised how insane and un-Montblanc he actually is.) I stared at the giant, semitransparent portrait of this strange actor, who'd brought such joy and comfort to me and millions of others. Since the Moscow screening, every Cage film I'd seen had transported me temporarily back to that cosy cinema, full of Russians who just wouldn't shut the fuck up. Hoping for the same transcendental effect here, I concentrated on his lips, which were stretched to a goofy half-smile, and wished him to say something – just a simple ‘hurrrgh’ as he no doubt would've moaned when he had the photo taken – but nothing doing. He remained frozen and mute, and all I could hear was the soundtrack of the loud, sticky city behind me. The air suddenly got more humid, the cars honked louder, and the smell of exhaust fumes tickled my nostrils a bit more forcefully. I couldn't wait to be home.