Translators’ two temptations

Justin Doherty on translating Gaito Gazdanov:

Then, second, there is the problem of Gazdanov’s rambly long sentences: what is at stake here is the thematic and even philosophical importance of the sentence in this work, as Gazdanov’s narrator gropes around for meaning and ways of connecting his experiences of the world and responses to them into some kind of sense. You have to keep in mind as well that these sentences are not actually modeled on the elegant and elusive style cultivated by Marcel Proust, rather they stretch and almost break syntactic tolerance and threaten a complete loss of control (maybe the influence of surrealism is what one should be looking for here, rather than Proust). My feeling as translator is that one has to follow Gazdanov as best one can: you are of course inviting criticism for being too eager to imitate Russian sentence-structure and abuse of the norms of English literary style, but this decision is the opposite of intellectual laziness – indeed, nothing is more tempting for the translator than to sort ‘bad’ sentences out and put them into some kind of proper, elegant and stylish order, but, to reference Sartre once again, this would be ‘bad faith’ on the part of the translator and what was lost would be infinitely greater than anything that might be gained.

Perhaps this goes without saying, but surely there is some third way other than

1) “to follow Gazdanov” if this means sticking to Russian norms (or Gazdanov’s violations of those particular norms) of word order, syntactic structure, and sentence length in English, or

2) to put “‘bad’ sentences” into “proper, elegant, and stylish order.”

There ought to be possibilities neither flatten the style into an elegance like any other nor sound ten times as odd in English as they did in Russian. If someone writing in Russian actually did model their style on Proust, they wouldn’t need to imitate French sentence structure in a way that abused the norms of Russian literary style; they’d want to find a departure from Russian literary style that was analogous to Proust’s differences from conventional French style, analogous in that it produced the same “elegant and elusive” impression in the minds of native readers.

I suspect none of this is news to JD and I’ll be impressed with his resolution of the problem in practice as soon as I read Night Roads and his translation of it. Writing this blog I’m discovering that my opinions about translation are stronger than my knowledge of translation theory or practice could justify, and I’d be glad to hear other opinions from anyone who finds mine off-base.

Raskolnikov and Pisarev

Pisarev’s article on Bazarov, the nihilist from Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, famously takes Bazarov as an accurate and positive portrayal of Pisarev’s own generation, unlike Antonovich at The Contemporary, who had seen Bazarov as a caricature of young radicals (70). If Turgenev wanted his novel to show what the mysterious younger generation was like, Pisarev turns it around, using it to explain the puzzle of the older generation’s bewildered and critical attitude toward their “sons”:

Turgenev’s opinions and judgments cannot alter one whit our view of the young generation and the ideas of our time; we need not even take them into account, we shall not even argue with them; these opinions, judgments, and feelings, expressed in images that are inimitably alive, can do no more than provide material for a description of the older generation in the person of one of its best representatives. I shall try to organize this material, and if I am able, I shall explain why our old men do not join us, why they shake their heads and, according to their various personalities and their various moods, are either angry or uncertain or quietly sad at the thought of our deeds and reflections. (3)

According to Joseph Frank, Crime and Punishment is a reaction to this article by Pisarev, and to the new ideas that were coming out of this half of the “schism among the nihilists” (69-75). Raskolnikov’s article “On Crime” takes Pisarev’s ideas to their logical extreme (78, 108). In Dostoevskii’s view the idea that an elite could legitimately violate the moral code of right now in the name of a better future for the oppressed was dangerous, and could lead not just to crimes like Raskolnikov’s but inner confusion and torment like his, too (100-01). Chernyshevskii and others at The Contemporary, if disconnected from reality in their theories, were naively good-hearted compared to Pisarev and Zaitsev at The Russian Word. The strain of thought of The Contemporary is represented in the novel by the clueless and ultimately good Lebeziatnikov, and that of The Russian Word by Raskolnikov (56, 88, 128).

Here is the chapter of Crime and Punishment where Raskolnikov’s “On Crime” is mentioned in a conversation between Raskolnikov, Razumikhin, and Porfirii Petrovich.

See Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865-1871 (Princeton, 1995), chapters 4-7.

Links

• Frogs in Turgenev and, especially, Bulgakov, from Russian Dinosaur.
• Russian History Blog has a new “blog conversation” up, with reactions by Gulag experts to a new book, Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the Shaping of Soviet Society by Steven A. Barnes. There’s also an interview with Barnes in the New Books in Russian and Eurasian Studies podcast.
• Sarah J. Young on Gulag literature looking back to Dostoevskii. Among other things, I was surprised to learn there’s an English translation of literary critic D. S. Likhachev’s memoirs.

Razumikhin

I’m up to volume 4 in Joseph Frank’s 5-volume biography of Dostoevskii and his reading of Crime and Punishment. Without dwelling on it (so far at least), he mentions that the name Raskolnikov “evokes the Russian word for a schismatic religious dissenter, a raskolnik” and the name Razumikhin “contains the Russian word for ‘reason,’ razum” (98-99). Frank says that naming Razumikhin after reason is evidence of “Dostoevsky’s desire to link the employment of this faculty not only with the cold calculations of Utilitarianism but also with spontaneous human warmth and generosity” (99). There’s also an interesting footnote on Dostoevskii accidentally writing Rakhmetov in his notes when he means Razumikhin, and Razumikhin saying that his name is an abbreviation of the original form Vrazumikhin.

It’s a small thing, but I’ve always wondered why everyone explaining “Razumikhin” for an Anglophone audience works from razum. It’s just the -in ending that’s one of the standard endings for Russian surnames (along with -ov/-ev). The -ikh- is something else. To my non-native ear it sounds like the obsolete form razumikh, as in азъ разумихъ. (Is the proper aorist form азъ разумѣхъ? You can find examples of both.) After all, the name could have been Razumov or even Razumin; both exist, and the first is reasonably common. Razumov/Razumin would still have meant reason, and the warm kind of reason instead of the cold rassudok. But Razumikhin has, if I’m not mistaken, the additional suggestion of ecclesiastical language, the Church, and Christianity.

Letter-Man

Monument to the letter ё in Ulyankovsk (by Oblam, CC license)

The reign of Peter I: the emperor creates a city on a swamp out of nothing, organizes his servitors into a Table of Ranks, and carries out the last major orthographic reform before 1917.

1842: Gogol publishes “The Overcoat,” where Akakii Akakievich lives in that city, St. Petersburg; occupies an unimportant position in the Table of Ranks; and in fact is none other than a letter of the alphabet, specifically K or kako (188-89).

So argues Kathleen Scollins in a recent article. The narrator of “The Overcoat” calls attention to both the letter K and the word kak (which resembles the official name of the symbol К, kako) while talking about how Akakii Bashmachkin was named (188-89), and A.B.’s initials are not only the beginning of the alphabet, but could be read, again using letters’ names, as az — buki, or “I am the letters” (194). Akakii Akakievich has an “intimate, almost flirtatious relationship” with the letters of the alphabet that he copies in his job as a clerk, which makes the letters seem like people and him seem more like a letter (195). A draft of the story mentions several letters explicitly by their old names (Ж, М, С, Т), and another part of the story that does survive in the canonical text is filled with words that are grammatically related to the names of Ж, Т, and C (200-01).

The story appeared a few years after a flurry of articles polemicizing about an expected but never realized orthographic reform (189-94; here KS follows M. P. Alekseev and Mikhail Vaiskopf). From 1828 to 1832 several journals published appeals from superfluous letters petitioning for mercy and other such whimsy. A piece by Nadezhdin in 1836 even uses a metaphor, suggestive for “The Overcoat,” in which letters:language::clothing:people (201-02). The timing of Gogol’s story – published in 1842 but probably written earlier – seems to explain both the presence of the alphabet theme in the drafts and its partial removal in the final text. By 1842 the alphabet polemics were probably in that dead zone when they no longer seemed topical but did not yet seem an unknown piece of the past that it’s pleasant to unearth.

Akakii the letter kako is, in KS’s reading, not capable of meaning anything by himself, like the letter or preposition к as opposed to a word or prepositional phrase (201). After he loses the overcoat he challenges his superiors in the table of ranks and in the alphabet simulaneously: he progresses through the letter Ж (zhivete, “live”) through М (myslete, “think”) and on to T (tverdo, “firm”) and ultimately С (slovo, “word”), where he achieves the power to mean something, to be part of a word instead of just a letter, to be a verbal author instead of authored by everyone else in the story (203-04, 208).

See Kathleen Scollins, “Како сделан Акакий: Letter as Hero in ‘The Overcoat,’” The Russian Review 71 (2012): 187-208. Disclaimer: I’m a friend of the author’s.

A superfluous man

This dialogue is from a novel with the names and “he saids” taken out:

“And what… what shall be said of one whose heart, whose education, and the wants of society, have called in vain to some noble purpose; who has floated on, a dreamy, neutral spectator of the struggles, agonies, and wrongs of man, when he should have been a worker?”

“I should say that he ought to repent, and begin now.”

“Always practical and to the point! You never leave me any time for general reflections, Cousin; you always bring me short up against the actual present; you have a kind of eternal now, always in your mind.”

The first speech is the self-definition of a superfluous man, and the whole dialogue could be a repentant nobleman of the 1840s talking to an energetic nihilist raznochinets of the 1860s. Source below the fold.

Pages: 1 2

“As they said before February 19th…”

Petr Gorskii, April 1863:

It’s the expression “as they said before February 19th” that caught my eye. That’s the date of the 1861 manifesto emancipating most privately held slaves in Russia. Obviously that’s a watershed in Russian history, but I hadn’t realized the date had become this kind of phrase, like “4th of July” or “Cinco de Mayo” or “8 марта.”

This graph shows the frequency of various dates in the Google Books Russian collection from 1800 to 2000. The top line is January 1.  The green and red lines near the bottom are December 25 and March 8. October 25, the yellow line, jumps up after 1917. The blue line is February 19, which goes higher than I would have guessed after 1861. It stays above October 25 well into the Soviet period and doesn’t really come back to the pack until the 1960s or 1970s.

Much of what’s going on here, I suspect, is that people said “October” instead of “October 25″ when talking about the Bolshevik takeover. Still, it illustrates how big a deal the 1861 emancipation was, and how much it was viewed as a clear before/after moment, rather than part of a long process of change involving several reforms.

Speaking of February 19th, a contributor to the English Wikipedia article about the emancipation writes “household serfs were the worst affected as they gained only their freedom and no land.” This explains why one of Tolstoi’s peasants calls the manifesto “the paper that says house servants get kicked out and sent to live under a bridge for their pains.”

Twentieth-century links

It’s been a good month for this reader of Anglophone blogs about Russian culture. Sarah J. Young’s highlights from the BASEES conference include some interesting thoughts about form and content in Shalamov, as well as a discussion of Iurii Dombrovskii that complements this post at the Faculty of Useless Knowledge. I’ve finally worked my way through an interview with Jan Plamper and “blog conversation” about his book The Stalin Cult: A Study in the Alchemy of Power. I’m impressed with what Russian History Blog can do. It feels a bit like traditional academic writing done faster, which is nice; if I could effortlessly compare a book review in, say, Slavic Review to all other reviews of the same book, and then hear the author’s response, and then the reviewers’ responses to the response, I would.

I didn’t know it until I read it, but if you put together everything I want in one blog post, it looks like this.

Petr Gorskii

Edyta Bojanowska’s article had me browsing through the last issue of Time, where I stumbled on this story by a minor writer who was new to me, Petr Gorskii. He shared the literature section with K. Babikov, N. Poletaev, P. A. Bibikov, Mikh. Iletskii [pseudonym of M. L. Mikhailov], V. V. Krestovskii, Liodor Pal’min, and a translation of an 1853 novel by Elizabeth Gaskell.

Joseph Frank calls Gorskii “one of the numerous denizens of St. Petersburg’s literary Grub Street who clustered around the various publications, eking out a beggarly existence on the edge of destitution and often supplementing their literary labors with manual work” and a “confirmed alcoholic” who “lived on much the same miserable level as the figures who peopled his sketches” (9, 11).

Illustration to a different sketch by Petr Gorskii also called "Poor Lodgers"

His sketch “Poor Lodgers: Sublime Love. A Story” both is and isn’t what I expected. It’s the story of a poor clerk scraping by on a meager salary and meager bribes who decides to save a beautiful young girl from a life of prostitution. Instead of the rescue ending there triumphantly, like Nekrasov’s famous poem, or exploding in the ugliness of human psychology, like in Notes from Underground, Gorskii’s story continues well beyond the successful rescue. It’s all a flashback, so we know things will end badly for the hero Oblachkov, but otherwise it would look like happily ever after: Natasha loves him, is intelligent, tactful, an enthusiastic and talented housekeeper; she raises enough money that the couple can move to a decent apartment, and is perfect in all ways. Her only flaw is that she is so self-sacrificing that she doesn’t want to waste their money on heat for her comfort, so she gets sick and dies.

I thought a physiological sketch would be long on specifics meant to prove the author knows how things really are, and would be narrated in a sparse style that affected not to comment on anything. Gorskii delivered on the first part but surprised me on the second. I learned that one type of alcoholic is remarkable in being able to quickly get as drunk off only a kosushka as another would from a shtof, while a different type feels no effect after splitting an entire chetvert’ with one other person (267). (A kosushka is a quarter of a shtof, which is a tenth of a vedro. Even bigger is a chetvert’, apparently a quarter of a vedro. A vedro is about 3.25 US gallons.)  Other details we find in the sketch that would have been left out of most novels: Oblachkov has to pay to get Natasha’s passport back (283), and when Natasha is dying the landlady insists she be taken out of the apartment because she isn’t formally registered as living there (“она непрописана,” 293). Meanwhile Oblachkov couldn’t take her to the hospital because the hospital administrators were juking the stats: they were held accountable for the ratio of deaths to recoveries, and they guarded their bonuses by refusing to admit the sickest patients on bureaucratic pretexts (292). Never again will I think of “what gets measured gets done” as a modern idea, and Gorskii will be in my mind the next time I read an exposé of a similar scandal in a modern police force or school.

The odd part of the sketch (would this have been different in the 1840s?) was how self-consciously literary it was. You could see this in absurd names like Pustoporozhnev or Dorimedont Asklipiodotovich (287). You could see it in the narrator’s comments about how common and well-known aspects of the story were. And you could see it in simile after simile. Some of these were reasonably clever in a cynical way, like “her love burned stronger and stronger, like the fires that break out in large oil, liquor, and wine stores” (283-84). Some of them explain why Gorskii was mocked by literary snobs of his time. On page 275 we have “to cap all his misfortunes, Oblachkov’s friend, as it were, sprinkled salt with ground glass into the wound in his heart, which was beginning to fester.” A few sentences later it is as if his friend is twisting a dagger in his heart. Two pages after that another dagger is at his heart.

Here’s a 2-volume 1864 edition of Gorskii’s Satirical Sketches and Stories (TOC 1, 2). The sketch I read is not the same as the “Poor Lodgers” in volume 1, though that sketch has a Dorimedont Flegontovich.

Open access

Good news if you want non-academics to be able to read academic research (h/t Jonathan Bernstein). The status quo could be worse – right now people like me can go to research university library, figure out what desk to go to for a day of guest access, then e-mail articles to ourselves for later. But it’s hard to think of good reasons not to get rid of these obstacles. I suspect administering restricted access costs more than distributing the electronic articles to everyone interested.

It’s nice to see a move toward open access coming from Harvard University, whose library in the mid-1990s had the most draconian policies for non-affiliated locals that I’ve seen. (If you brought written proof that no public library in the county could get you a given item, they might let you look at it in the building; otherwise, you couldn’t get past the front door, and certainly no browsing. No annual library cards at any price.)