The writer, journalist and translator Sally Laird, who has died of cancer aged 54, once likened Russia, in an article in Prospect magazine, to an 'impossible' lover to whom she was helplessly drawn. The writing she published testified to this love, but was also driven by a formidable intellectual curiosity. Voices of Russian Literature (1999) contains interviews with 10 contemporary writers, including Lyudmila Petrushevskaya and Vladimir Sorokin, whose work she translated. It is an exceptional book, scholarly yet intimate. Robert Chandler, a fellow translator, wrote of it: 'I know no book that presents a more nuanced picture of Soviet life in the post-Stalin years.'
Sally had an extraordinary ear (she was a first-rate musician) and a gift for languages, making her an outstanding literary translator. Petrushevskaya's The Time: Night (1994) and Immortal Love (1995) were, according to their author, written with the urgency of someone on a bus who needs to get to her destination fast. Sally caught that bus – and Petrushevskaya's unique voice. She also unswervingly translated Sorokin's ambitious first novel, The Queue (1988).
Sally was born in Barnet, north London. Her parents were New Zealanders: Shirley taught classics and John was a BBC producer. He was a man of twinkling charm, an original thinker and raconteur – Sally took after him.
At Camden school for girls, she founded a magazine, Bias, and when she was 15, the Guardian published her critique of a GCE multiple-choice English exam (Tick Off for Tedium). The article must have left the examiners squirming with its confident assertion that there is more than one right answer in literature – as in life. She started in journalism as she meant to go on: her wit was never a garnish, it was part of her argument.
I met Sally at Oxford University, where she edited the student magazine Isis. She graduated with a first in Russian and philosophy from St Anne's College in 1979. As part of the course, she spent a year in pre-glasnost Voronezh, 300 miles south of Moscow. Her letters describe the oddity of having your roommate spy on you. In 1979, she won a Harkness scholarship to do an MA in Soviet studies at Harvard. The broadcaster Bridget Kendall remembers that 'Sally's commitment to Russia was about integrity, looking for writers who stayed true to themselves.'
In the early 80s, Sally worked for Amnesty International and, in 1988, became editor of the magazine Index On Censorship. In 1990, she was appointed director of the Central and East European Publishing Project, a foundation devoted to assisting independent publishing and translation initiatives in the countries of the former Soviet bloc. Sally played a leading role in conceiving the Central European Classics series, presenting major 19th and 20th-century fiction in English translations, published by Central European University Press.
In 1989, she married Mark Le Fanu, a film historian. When he was offered a post at the European Film College, she moved, in 1993, with their daughter, Sylvia, to Ebeltoft in Denmark. This was to be Sally's second love affair with a country – calmer than her first. She became fluent in Danish and set up a translation company, Absolute English, improving many a Danish thesis in the process.
Sally was a virtuoso at friendship. She had such appetite as a person – for good cakes, conversation, Bach and Dorset ('the landscape to which I'm most deeply bound'), where she spent childhood holidays. She was a staunch walker and swimmer, disappearing into the freezing Danish sea without a backward glance. She could get to the emotional and intellectual heart of things in a trice. Yet for all her serious-mindedness, Sally took a delight in absurdity. As a child she created a world presided over by her beloved but pompous bear, Bruin, and an entire language – bear Latin – called 'Eugrisy'. In an unfinished memoir, she explains its 'elaborate alphabet complete with rules about the number of curls bears of different ranks were allowed to add to each letter'. She also drew witty portraits of her friends as bears.
In 1999, Sally revisited Voronezh and, as another Prospect article reveals, received – on return – this email from a Russian friend: 'Good day, dear, gentle, clever and unforgettable Sally. After you leaving Voronezh there was a sad. But we'll never forget our dear meetings. It was the real happiness.' The sentiment is shared by everyone lucky enough to have known her.
She is survived by Mark and Sylvia.
•Sally Ann Laird, writer, journalist and translator, born 2 May 1956; died 15 July 2010"
The wit that's never a garnish, Russian literature as "impossible" lover, the broken English from a Russian friend's e-mail; the frightening preciosity--the best obituaries are an admixture of writer and subject, and this is no exception, less an appraisal, or even an appreciation, and more like an act of loving ventriloquism.
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