Editorial
You can find Alan’s autobiography at:
http://sjc1959.pbworks.com/w/page/5749084/Autobiographies

Remembering Alan McConnell Duff. 1942-2012

joint publication

Alan Duff died on 5 September at his home in Ljubljana after nearly a year of extreme physical pain and mental anguish. We, some of his closest friends, wish to celebrate his life and mark his untimely death. It has been immensely moving to put this tribute together, and to find just how loved and respected Alan was.

From Alan Maley

Who was Alan Duff? The public memory is so feeble, fickle and fallible that the question needs answering, especially as he was a man who never sought to promote himself. He was a man of many parts: creative materials writer, translator, linguist, poet, broadcaster and short story writer, and fascinating conversationalist, as the contributions below will amply testify.

We met in the then Yugoslavia at a Federal Summer School in Perucac on the Drina in the early ‘70’s. We clicked. We seemed to have an intuitive mutual understanding which made words secondary – our thoughts running along in advance of them. I was then working in Milan but when I was transferred to Paris in 1974 and needed an assistant to start up ELT activity there, he was an obvious choice. I sent him a telegram asking him if he would be interested. By return, he announced his arrival at the Gare de l’Est from Beograd within two days!

The next few years were among the most intensely creative in my life. But without Alan, I doubt they would have been so productive. These were the heady years of the ‘communicative’ movement and we rode the wave together, producing book after book over a six year period. But above all, we were friends.

When Alan decided to leave his British Council job to strike out on his own as a professional writer, our friendship continued. And when I left France to go, first to China, then to India, we remained in close touch. I have vivid memories of him in winter at the Ming Tombs drinking mulled wine from vacuum flasks, and sitting in the gardens of the old Metropole Hotel in Mysore sketching out ideas for yet another book.

Alan was always his own person – intensely private, delightful company but avoiding social occasions, stubbornly un-technical (he never had a computer and continued to type standing up on his old Remington), and finding satisfaction in his enjoyment of simple food and drink and conversation.

In recent years we met in the kitchen of his flat overlooking the Ljubljanica River in Ljubljana – evenings of good conversation, and the music which he so much loved.

He was prodigiously well-read, and a brilliant linguist. What made conversation with him so special was his quality of attending to what you were saying and his ability to pick up on thoughts you did not know you were having.

He was a major influence on so many people, most of whom are probably not even aware of it – in the field of ELT and in thinking about translation. His poetry, most of it unpublished, is remarkable, as are his short stories.

A generous person, he gave his time and attention to many. I shall always remember his voice, his deprecating humour, and his charm. The world is an emptier place without him. I doubt we shall see his like again. I am proud to have been his friend.

Hamba gahle! The Zulu greeting as friends part – Go well!

From Patrick Early

Alan always wrote at great speed. I can see him now, standing at his typewriter by an open window in Novi Sad gulping in fresh air. We collaborated only once, developing a radio script back in Tito’s day. In fact I contributed very little . Our brief from Radio Belgrade was to take the listener (assuming he or she might actually exist) on an admiring tour of the separate Republics of the Federal Yugoslavia, while reflecting in English on the unique glories of each.

Alan made short work of this embarrassing piece of hackwork. Politically-correct scripts poured forth from his typewriter so fast I could not keep up. The scripts met with the approval of our producer, and out they went. He was a professional and took the bizarre commission in his stride.

In fact Alan possessed huge talent, as translator, educator, and writer. With Alan Maley, he wrote the wonderful Drama Techniques, which introduced grateful teachers to the notion that fun and learning could happen simultaneously in the classroom through ingenious games, group-work and role-play.

Alan was a phenomenal self-taught linguist and later in life, after having adopted Slovenia as his home following the disintegration of the Federal Republic, he added mastery of Slovene to his collection of languages.

I remember the facility and accuracy with which he produced his book on translation, The Third Language ( often cited by the late Chris Brumfit as more incisive than many more academic works ) and the brilliance of his transformation of Raymond Queneau’s Exercices de Style in an English version called Michael and Ilona. Brilliant but sadly never published. I could go on. It is a shame we have lost such a gifted and generous individual.

From Francoise Grellet

I first met Alan Duff in the British Council, at the time when it was still in rue des Écoles in The Latin Quarter of Paris. I must have come with a question or problem for I remember how friendly and helpful he was.

A few months later, I was privileged to work with him and Alan Maley on our book, The Mind’s Eye and began to know him better. What struck me then was how inventive he was and how much he loved words. I was young at the time, had everything to learn about teaching and writing, and found it both inspiring and exciting.

It was only later that I discovered how interested he was in all aspects of translation, after reading The Third Language, a book I found extremely intelligent and stimulating.

We shall all miss him very much.

From Simon Greenall

I met Alan in Lyon in 1978 when he gave a training session at the university department where I worked. It was shortly after publication of his book with Alan Maley, Drama Techniques in Language Learning (Cambridge), and the activities Alan demonstrated were thought-provoking, creative and liberating.

I went to Paris to see Alan later that year where he introduced me to Alan Maley and Michael Swan, and I was drawn into the whole network of ELT. I was 24, thinking about a career. And Alan was, for me, at the centre of that network, convincing me that ELT would be a challenging and honourable profession.

It was only later, maybe only now that Alan has left us, that I can see the place of Maley and Duff’s work. Of course, I devoured all their early books, Sounds Interesting, The Mind’s Eye etc. But something else was happening at that time. Wilkins’ Notional Syllabuses (Oxford) was published in 1976, as was the first edition of the Threshold Level. Both suggested a new way of codifying the language to be taught and of describing how it was used. With its revolutionary focus on fluency rather than accuracy, some claimed that Maley and Duff’s work was the practical realization of this theoretical description of language,. But I now think that the theoretical and practical were ideas which developed independently rather than successively, ideas whose time had come. Change was in the air, and these practical ideas found support in the theoretical ferment rather than deriving directly from it.

The practical nature of these books never lost its potency even during the return to grammar teaching in the 1980s and 1990s. Today, exploiting materials from digital sources are still focused on fluency, as is the idea of emergent language.

Alan’s work was at the vanguard of these new ideas in ELT, and even as fashions change, it remains there today. I’m proud to have known him.

From Adrian du Plessis.

I have a clear memory of the first time I met Alan almost 40 years ago in Paris: he was in characteristic mode, at a typewriter doing what he loved doing and was so good at: just writing. Over lunch we discovered we had a lot in common: we were from the same part of South Africa, had been to the same university, had left the country at around the same time and for similar reasons, shared an enthusiasm for language, and we shared a birthday.

A friendship blossomed over the following months and years and ran alongside a developing professional relationship which was to be hugely important in my life. I was at the time starting an ELT list for Cambridge University Press and the books that the Alan Duff and Alan Maley team wrote for me were crucial in establishing the Cambridge list and its reputation in the eyes of leading members of the profession. The titles will ring bells with anyone who was involved in ELT in the 70s and 80s: Sounds Interesting, Sounds Intriguing, Words, Beyond Words, The Mind’s Eye, Variations on a Theme, The Inward Ear – all in their different ways original, and immensely popular among creative teachers.

The seminal Drama Techniques in Language Teaching (now in its 3rd edition) was another such book, and its huge success suggested a template that could be used for a series: The Cambridge Handbooks for Language Teachers, which became a vital part of the Cambridge list and a major contribution to the profession. I have to thank the two Alans for the original model.

In a history of Cambridge ELT publishing, I wrote recently, ‘It is difficult to exaggerate how much the creative Maley and Duff team contributed to the reputation of Cambridge ELT in the early years’. On reflection, I think it is indeed impossible for me to exaggerate their contribution.

But it is as a friend that I will remember Alan Duff: gentle, sensitive, vulnerable, honest, without guile or malice – genuine to the core. Thank you Alan for everything: the books, the memories, the friendship.

Totsiens, ou maat. (Afrikaans: Farewell, old friend.)

From Andrew Wright

Alan told me his happiest early memories were running on the beaches in Durban, by the crashing surf, with his gigantic dog, long legged and lean.

He chuckled when he told me how he earned a lot of money recording greetings and advice to speak out of refrigerators in France. Alan had such a rich voice.

Alan’s books with Alan Maley are flagships of creativity, practicality and intellectuality. He was something of a hermit but his ideas have rippled quietly into many classrooms.

He put a cornerstone in the foundations of creative language teaching.

He told me he let his poems marinate for a decade or more, occasionally moving a word here or there, removing another, tweaking and honing.

He lived alone under the giant eves of a riverside house in central Europe, thousands of miles from those South African beaches.

From Maria González Davies

Barcelona, 1993. One of my first public talks, at the “Catalan Teachers of English Association” (APAC) Conference, about the role of Translation in Foreign Language Learning, mostly a taboo issue in those days. At that time, the main reference work for the few of us who believed translation actually plays a role in language learning was, of course, Alan Duff’s book Translation. And, who should walk into the room but Alan himself wrapped in a dark red scarf… You can imagine how nervous I became – the author himself! Alan, though, walked up to me and said with a smile “Hello. I am Alan Duff [as if we didn’t know…]. I hope you don’t mind me coming to your talk.” Mind? I mumbled something about it being an honour and a pleasure while the butterflies kept multiplying in my stomach. And wouldn’t go away. However, Alan, being Alan, kept smiling at me, nodding his head and contributing positive remarks – some of the butterflies had certainly left by the end of the talk.

Alan was a true 21st century citizen avant la lettre. He carried with him stories and tokens from Africa, China, all Europe, or India, such as the wavy line next to his signature, which he devised after studying the graphic patterns of Devanagiri script from India. He spoke and translated into and out of many languages in varying degrees:

“How many languages can you speak? This is a question I’m often asked, but I’m not sure that I know the answer. So, I’ve devised a rough standard by which to measure myself. In which language could you speak a) in public b) in private, for at least fifteen minutes without notes, and without ‘hurting the ears’ of the listeners? By that standard, I could speak a) French, Croatian, Slovene b) Hungarian, and ‘dinner-table’ Italian and French” (1995).

Add his childhood Afrikaans and Zulu, and other languages he liked to pick up as he travelled around, such as Spanish or Catalan: “I see language as being like a full moon on a clear frosty night, with the aureolas around it. If the moon is the mother tongue, the aureolas are the other languages we acquire. They all shade in upon one another (i.e. what we learn from one language may help us in learning others), and they are all closely related to the Moon – the mother tongue” (1995).

He was an active translator during the war in former Yugoslavia, as a formal letter of gratitude he received from the Dubrovnik Translator’s Association confirms when thanking him : “… for many years of successful cooperation and particularly for help during the wartime destruction of the city”. He advocated -and was successful- in his campaign “Books for Sarajevo” and “Books for Dubrovnik”, he won awards such as the Trubar Foundation Award for translators of Slovene literature into foreign languages and dreamt of “a long line stretching from west to east – from Lisbon through Barcelona, Trieste, Ljubljana, on to Graz and Budapest –linking some of the major translation centres in Europe” (1997).

There are countless aspects of his personality and career that I would like to include here and cannot for lack of space – but there is a space that belongs to Alan alone, a space that will be occupied by memories, writings, thoughts, and feelings that only exceptional people can fill.

[quotes from personal correspondence]

From Martin Cregeen

I met Alan at the beginning of the nineties, not long after he came to Slovenia. We soon found that we had much more in common than both being translators. Regular lunches discussing everything under the sun became part of our lives. He was hugely knowledgable, always interesting and interested and, ever courteous, his strongest expression of disagreement was a raised eyebrow and a quizzical smile. I'll miss that.

Above all a very good friend, he was also someone to whom I could turn in my work, to check obscurer aspects of capitalisation, or punctuation or solutions to words that are actually untranslatable. He always had time for people, whether colleague, client or clochard. He was a contributor by nature, who will be missed both by the Slovenian Society of Translators, as a long-term member of the editorial board of their journal and a popular lecturer, and by Slovenian PEN, with whom he cooperated in various ways for many years.

He had a vast translation opus and also continued while in Slovenia to publish in the field of ELT. His Into English, in particular, has become an important reference in the translation field.

After an unhappy period of hospitalisation, he died at his home overlooking the River Ljubljanica, cared for by his wife and son. His ashes have been scattered at sea, with the simplicity that was his essence.

From David A. Hill

I always regretted not having met Alan Duff sooner, and not having spent more time with him since I did. I first came across his name in the late ’70s through the delightful little books he did with Alan Maley, and alone: Words! and That’s Life! - an endless source of materials for my students, and pleasure for me!

In 1984, working for the British Council in the then-Yugoslavia, as Alan had done before me, I was given the new second edition of The Third Language; as someone who was then translating from Serbian into English, I was fascinated by his insights into the translation process. It was the first book I’d ever read on translation, and what a book! This became an interlinking strand once we had finally met face-to-face at the British Council Milan Conference whose programme I had organized, in 1988. And it increased because of Alan’s Hungarian connections, when I moved to Budapest in 1998.

From 1995 until 2008 we met quite often, usually at Alan’s Ljubljana flat, as I worked in Slovenia regularly at that time. I loved just turning up and ringing the bell by the big door, and waiting for Alan’s head to pop out of the top window, before he came down to let me in.

He is one of the people whom I never tired of talking to. Literature, the Balkans, translation, ELT, travel, music,… so much we could share and enjoy together. We often sat deep into the night in his low-lit sitting-room overlooking the Ljubljanica river. I realise, searching through things now he has gone, that I have little tangible to hang onto. I am delighted that in October 2000 he signed a copy of Into English for me in his unmistakable neat black ink handwriting. I would have been waiting for the usual Christmas card in that same hand this coming December. We always exchanged them.

But I have his beautiful speaking voice perfectly in my head, his words in my heart, his books on my shelf, and they will remain.

From Michael Swan

Alan's accomplishments are easy to list. He was an outstanding linguist (French, German, Italian, Afrikaans, Finnish, Hungarian, Serbian, Slovene). He was a skilled and scrupulous translator, who also wrote an excellent work, The Third Language, on the theory of translation.

He produced several distinguished EFL books in collaboration with Alan Maley; their Drama Techniques achieved classic status. He wrote probably the best satire on communicative methodology ever produced: The Use of the Telephone Directory in Language Teaching. He was also – though few people knew this – a fine creative writer; his poetry, most of which he never published, is remarkable.

None of this, of course, captures Alan's real essence as a person. For those who were fortunate enough to know him well, his accomplishments receded into the background –as indeed they did for him, for he had no great opinion of his own abilities. For me, what stood out above all was simply his warmth, and his delight in intellectual and personal exchanges. A conversation with Alan was a memorable experience. His opinions were always interesting, always completely his own, and always well-informed. (He knew a great deal about a surprising range of subjects, but never displayed his knowledge for its own sake.) Unlike many good talkers, he was a marvellous listener: I don't think I have ever known anybody who gave such complete and unfeigned attention to what his companion was saying.

Alan was a unique and remarkable person. I am very much the richer for forty years of his friendship, and very much the poorer for his passing. He was greatly loved, and is sadly missed.

*********************

To close, three short, epigrammatic poems by Alan, which we hope convey the essence of the man.