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Tim Parks: headhunters, pianists - we’re all the same - Telegraph

His work raises the issue of intervention. The translator’s goal is to vanish, to prevent his own identity from influencing the writer/reader interface.

Now in his fifties, Parks says that “whereas 10 years ago I might have offered advice to a friend in marriage or professional difficulties, my instinct now is to listen and not influence the situation. Because people will do what they will do.”

Then he tells me: “Maybe one of the characteristics of a decadent period is that the people doing a lot of thinking - maybe the people who you hope would be driving a community - are the people who are bowing out and saying, ‘We don’t think there’s much you can do about all this’.

“So it’s interesting looking back at writers like D H Lawrence or somebody much more difficult - like Nietzsche - and their line was that it’s always better to make an adventurous mistake than not get engaged at all.”

So while Parks has an “emotional sympathy” with Batesonian non-intervention, he also “rather admires” Helen’s work.

“It’s an ambiguity about how we think of the Third World,” he says. “Half of the time we’re thinking we should sort the whole thing out for them, and the other half we’re thinking it’s criminal that we ever got engaged with them at all.

“Between colonialism and the charitable organisations, there’s an enormous amount in common: that you go somewhere and do something. I’m not really on anybody’s side in that debate.”

intervention, action, passivity, engagement, risk, competition, anthropology, bateson, parks, “dreams of rivers and seas”