"Roads to Translation: How a novelist relates to his translators"
«Pas de deux»
"Roads to Translation: How a novelist relates to his translators"
64(4) Meanjin (2005), www.meanjin.unimelb.edu.au
Rep as Coetzee, JM (2006) "Speaking in
Tongues: Drawing on his experiences with
translators, Nobel laureate JM Coetzee identifies
some of the practical difficulties involved in
the craft of translation." Weekend Australian (28-29 January) Review pp
4-6.
BOOKS of mine have been translated from the
English in which they are written into some 25
other languages, the majority of them European.
Of the 25 I can read two or three moderately
well. Of many of the rest I know not a word; I
have to trust my translators to render fairly what I have written.
Whether that trust is well placed I find out only
rarely, when a bilingual reader who has compared
translation with original happens to report back to me.
Some such reports come as a jolt. In Russia, I
discover, The Master of Petersburg has been
renamed Autumn in Petersburg; in the Italian
version of Dusklands, a man opens a wooden crate
with the help of a bird (what I wrote was that he
used a crow, that is, a crowbar).
Most reports, however, are reassuring. Even in
the money-driven world of modern publishing,
shoddy translations seem to be rare. In the
translation of literary works in particular, the
urge to give of one's best even when it may not
be noticed still seems to reign.
As author I find it gratifying when a translator
contacts me for advice. Among those who regularly
confer with me are my French, German, Swedish,
Dutch, Serbian and Korean translators.
On the other hand, there are some who have never
been in touch, among them my Turkish and Japanese
translators. Given the differences of linguistic
structure and cultural background between Turkish
and English, and between Japanese and English, I
would have thought that these two would find my
texts more troublesome than their European
confreres do. Or perhaps it is out of politeness that they do not
contact me.
ARE my books easy or hard to translate? Sentence
by sentence, my prose is generally lucid, in the
sense that the syntactic relations among words,
and the logical force of constructions, are as clear as I can make them.
On the other hand, I sometimes use words with the
full freight of their history behind them, and
that freight is not easily carried across to
another language. My English does not happen to
be embedded in any particular sociolinguistic
landscape, which relieves the translator of one
vexatious burden; on the other hand, I do tend to
be allusive, and not always to signal the presence of allusion.
Dialogue comes with its own set of problems,
particularly when it is very informal and
incorporates regional usages, contemporary
fashions and allusions, or slang. My dialogue is
rarely of this kind. For the most part its
character is formal, even if its rhythms are more
abrupt than the rhythms of narrative prose. So
hitting the right register ought not to be a problem for the translator.
Where my dialogue is aberrant is when it comes
from the mouths of children or of characters for
whom English is not a first language. In general,
it is best for such speech to be translated not
word for word but by speech typical of children
in the language translated into (hereafter called
the target language), or by the speech of a
foreigner making typical foreign slips.
My novel Waiting for the Barbarians presents an
unusual problem for the translator. It is set in
an unspecified space at an unspecified time in
history; it would be hard to maintain that this
milieu is Western, yet, despite allusions to
barbarians, to an imperial palace, and to such
items as lacquered armour, it is as hard to fit it snugly into the Far
East.
All of its dialogue can be conceived of as
translated by an invisible hand from an
unspecified foreign tongue into English. Its
language is more or less bare of allusion to the
past of the English language and indeed to the history of Western
thought.
Furthermore, within this invented discourse there
are passages of what may be conceived as
translation from a hypothetical barbarian tongue
into the language of the narrator and thence into
English. Such passages are marked by a simplified syntax and lexicon.
The principal character in the novel, and its
narrator, is called simply the Magistrate and is
addressed as "Magistrate." His principal duty is
to officiate over the system of justice in this
part of the frontier, but in the absence of a
bureaucracy he seems to oversee the day-to-day
operation of the neglected frontier town.
Since there is no term in English for someone who
is in effect judge and mayor and town clerk,
since a magistrate in this book would not be a
magistrate in any other book, does it matter what
one calls the man in the target language? Perhaps
not; but there are good approximations and bad
approximations. If magistrate is the authorial
approximation in English, what would be a good
approximation in German, for instance?
The question was raised in correspondence by my
German translator, specifically by my second
German translator, since two translations of
Waiting for the Barbarians have appeared in
German. In modern German, der Magistrat denotes
the magistracy, not a single individual. The
standard translation of the English magistrate is
Friedensrichter. But Friedensrichter translates
back into English as justice of the peace, which
in American usage stands for a quite lowly
office. Hence the translator's decision to
resurrect der Magistrat in its old sense, a sense
still alive in Switzerland, where Magistrat is a title as well as an
office.
PHRASINGS planted in Waiting for the Barbarians
for their generic Far Eastern associations
naturally aroused the interest of my Chinese
translator. The crucial passage in the book was
the following, spoken by the Magistrate:
I... am no less infected with [the vision of
Empire] than the faithful Colonel Joll as he
tracks the enemies of Empire through the
boundless desert, sword unsheathed to cut down
barbarian after barbarian until at last he finds
and slays the one whose destiny it should be (or
if not he then his son or unborn grandson) to
climb the bronze gateway to the Summer Palace and
topple the globe surmounted by the tiger rampant
that symbolised eternal domination.
"It would be highly appreciated," wrote my
translator, "if you could help clarify what
Summer Palace and globe surmounted by the tiger
rampant... refer to. I wonder if [they] refer to
the Old Summer Palace in Beijing that was
destroyed by British and French allied force in
1848." The question may seem simple, but it holds
surprising depths. It may mean: Are the words
Summer Palace intended to refer to the historical
Summer Palace? It may also mean: Do the words
refer to the historical Summer Palace?
I, as sole author, am the only person able to
answer the first question, and my answer must be
that I did not consciously intend to refer to the
palace in Beijing, and certainly did not intend
to evoke the historical sack of that palace, with
its attendant national humiliations.
At the same time, I did intend that enough of an
association with imperial China should be evoked
to balance and complicate, for instance, the
association with imperial Russia evoked elsewhere
in the book by the phrase Third Bureau, the arm
of the security forces for which Colonel Joll works.
As for whether the words in question do refer to
the palace in Beijing, as author I am powerless
to say. The words are written; I cannot control the associations they
awaken.
But my translator is not so powerless: a nudge
here, a nuance there, and the reader may be
either directed towards or headed off from the Beijing of 1848.
THE necessary imperfection of translation -
brought about in the first place by the
incapacity of any given target language to supply
for each single word in the source language a
corresponding single word that [p R-4/p R-5]
would cover, precisely and without overlap, the
denotation of the original and its major
connotations to boot - is so widely accepted that
the translator becomes accustomed to aiming for
the best possible translation rather than a hypothetical perfect one.
But there are occasions where less than perfect
translation of a key word can have serious consequences.
My novel Foe, if it is about any single subject,
is about authorship: about what it means to be an
author not only in the professional sense (the
profession of author was just beginning to mean
something in Daniel Defoe's day) but also in a
sense that verges, if not on the divine, then at
least on the demiurgic: sole author, sole creator.
Here is an exchange between my Serbian translator
and myself, from the time when she was working on Foe:
AB: Autor, alas, is not a profession in Serbian.
In some places I simply have to say writer
(denotes strictly a literatus)... [She goes on to
caution against too many Latin-sounding words in a Serbian text.]
JMC: The notion that one can be an author as one
can be a baker is fairly fundamental to my
conception of Foe. "Writer" would suffice only if
the distinction between writer and scribe/scrivener were quite marked.
AB: You write: "The notion that one can be an
author as one can be a baker is fairly
fundamental to my conception of Foe." That is
precisely the reason it worries me. The baker
bakes, the author authors, yet our verb [in
Serbian] is makes/creates. The English senses are
better covered by tvorac (maker/creator/founder)
[than by autor]. Defoe is properly the tvorac of
Robinson Crusoe... You also write: "Writer would
suffice only if the distinction between writer
and scribe/scrivener were quite marked." It is,
but the word lacks the symbolical quality of the
English author. I think I will try to use the
maker/creator word, toning it down with writer only when absolutely
necessary.
JMC: That sounds the best solution. Makir (maker)
is the word routinely used for poet in Scottish
poetry of the 14th-15th centuries.
AB: Good to know about makir - such a resonant word.
Working on the Serbian translation of Elizabeth
Costello, AB met an unexpected obstacle when she
transliterated Elizabeth's name into Cyrillic characters.
Elizabeth looks forward to seeing her writings on
the library shelves among such great Cs as
Chaucer, Coleridge and Conrad. Then with dismay
she realises than her nearest neighbour is likely to be Marie Corelli.
The first problem is that in Serbian, Chaucer,
unlike Coleridge, Corelli and Costello, is not spelled with an initial K
AB: Should I drop Chaucer, or replace him with,
say, Keats? Corelli is a K, but the allusion
would be lost on Serbian readers. May I insert an
adjective like "sentimental" or "very minor"?
JMC: Drop Chaucer. Then I suggest you consult a
Serbian-language encyclopedia and pick out a
minor English-language writer near to Kostelo.
AB: Minor writers: only the popular ones get into
foreign encyclopedias. Agatha Christie, James Fenimore Cooper, AJ
Cronin?
JMC: Agatha Christie, I think.
HERE are two communications from my French
translator at the time when she was working on
Youth. The first illustrates a situation familiar
to translators, where a phrase that the writer,
in his innocence, regards as perfectly clear is
revealed by the test of translation to be ambiguous.
CduP: You write: "London is full of beautiful
girls. They come from all over the world: as au
pairs, as language students, simply as tourists."
I tend to understand that these girls are in
London to learn English, rather than doing
tertiary studies in languages. I would say: des
filles venues des quatre coins du monde pour
apprendre l'anglais (rather than etudiantes en langues).
The second communication illustrates the reverse:
a word that has complex connotations in the
source language, connotations that cannot
dependably be evoked in the target one. The text
runs: "In a perfect world he would sleep only
with perfect women, women of perfect femininity
yet with a certain darkness at their core that
will respond to his own darker self."
JMC: Dark here is the dark of dark secrets, dark
history, etc. I don't have enough of a feel for
the connotations of sombre in French, but English
sombre has connotations of sad or saddening that we don't want.
CduP: This is not an easy one. The connotations
of dark secrets would be rendered by the French
noir... as in magie noire, messe noire, roman
noir... I am not sure noir will work in this passage.
JMC: Dark, as used here, is a very Lawrentian
word. Is there a standard DH Lawrence translation
in France? If so, you should use the word that
routinely translates dark there. The first book
to check would be The Plumed Serpent, where it occurs all over the
place.
CduP: In the entries [on Lawrence] in Le
Dictionnaire des oeuvres, on Le Serpent a plumes,
there is a quote referring to Cipriano Viedma: Il
possedait un pouvoir magnetique que son education
n'avait pas entame. Cette education s'etendait
comme un leger voile sur le lac sombre de son ame
rude. In the commentary, phrases like sa nature
intime (for Kate) keep cropping up (for core?) - monde primitif also
occurs.
We could think of secret, of tenebreux: Ma
jeunesse ne fut qu'un tenebreux orage -
Baudelaire; Le labyrinthe des consciences les
plus tenebreuses - Balzac; both anachronic, I know.
We had to settle for sombre and abandon the
allusiveness of the original: Femmes qui auraient
au fond d'elles-memes quelque chose de sombre qui
repondait a ce qu'il y a en lui de sombre.
THE heroine of Age of Iron is a classics
professor dying of cancer. The novel follows the
movement of her thoughts, and this creates
certain problems for the Korean translator.
In English, the etymological connection between
nursing and sustenance (nourishment) is present
though somewhat hidden by the drift of sound-change.
The connection is clearer in French: nourrice.
How, without becoming pedantic, does one explain
to the Korean reader why it is the French rather
than the English word that flits through the consciousness of the
heroine?
When Professor Curren's mind wanders to the
West's classical past, should the translator
treat these moments as allusions and footnote
them? Since such allusions are often glancing and
casual, how can he be sure he has picked them all
up? Is a passing reference to a photograph of
Sophie Schliemann worth a long footnote on Troy,
Homer's Iliad, and the excavation of what he
thought was Agamemnon's tomb by Heinrich Schliemann?
The phrase amor matris crosses the professor's
mind. For the benefit of a reader without Latin,
the famous ambiguity of the phrase can be
explained in a quick footnote; but how does one
evoke the atmosphere of rote learning in
classrooms going back six centuries in the West?
In Boyhood, the young hero is obsessed with
cricket. The ball-throwing machine that he
constructs for batting practice in the backyard
is easy enough to picture as long as one has an
idea of the relation of batsman to bowler in
cricket. For the Korean reader, is cricket worth
a long elucidatory note, or should the machine be
left unexplained as a cultural puzzle?
How does one translate "portly Paul Kruger" (in
Youth) into Dutch? The English word portly is in
transition from an older sense of stately, where
port is the same element as in deportment, to a
newer sense of stout. This instability has
certain consequences: a person one calls portly
is a figure of fun in a way that a person one
calls fat is not: he bears his weight with a gravity that is comical.
Dutch offers statig for the older sense, dik for
the newer. There is no word that carries both
senses. Dik (English thick, solid, plump, stout)
is not complimentary but lacks the required euphemistic shading.
In Elizabeth Costello, Elizabeth's sister gives a
speech at a graduation ceremony. Her speech ends
as follows: "studia humanitatis are truly on
their deathbed. [Their death] has been brought
about by the monster enthroned by those very
studies as first and animating principle of the
universe: the monster of reason, mechanical
reason. But that is another story for another
day." The text continues: "That is the end of it,
the end of Blanche's oration.."qqqzzzz
In Dutch, unfortunately, the standard word for
reason is rede. Rede is also the standard word
for oration or speech. This double function makes
etymological sense - it parallels the development
of Latin ratio from an arithmetic account, a
reckoning, to accounting or computation in the
abstract, to scheme or system, to systematic
thought - but to use the word twice here would only sow confusion.
The best solution my Dutch translator and I could
come to was to resurrect the Latin word: het
monster van de ratio, de mechanische rede.
The English word highway is rich in connotation.
Via highwayman it carries 18th-century
associations with risk and danger: compared with
a road, a highway is positively glamorous (this
is of course not true in the US, where the word is in everyday use).
In A House in Spain, the house in question lies
in a Catalan village off the highway. But in the
new Europe supervised from Brussels, my Dutch
translator informs me, there is a strict and
exhaustive hierarchy of road types, with
associated maximum speeds. This hierarchy does not include cognates of
highway.
For my Dutch translator, the question was whether
the village is located near an autosnelweg
(express motorway), a snelweg (expressway), or
simply a lowly provinciale weg (provincial road).
If we take the author's intentions into the
reckoning and try to match referent with
referent, the likeliest answer would be the last;
but if we had no author to interrogate, how would we know?
There are two quite different considerations at
work here. One has to do with real-life road
types and their congruence or lack of congruence
with the author's intentions. The other has to do
with the range of historical, social, and
literary associations called forth by the idea of
a village not far from the highway, and the range
called forth by the idea of a dorpje not far from
an autosnelweg, a snelweg, or a provinciale weg. [p R-5/p R-6]
No matter how competent a translator may be in
both languages, and how finely attuned to nuance,
there are texts for which they will simply feel
no sympathy. In an ideal world the thing to do
would be to decline to work on such texts; but in
the real world such rectitude may not always be advisable.
Waiting for the Barbarians was first translated
into German in 1984. By common consent this
translation was not a success, and the book has
since been retranslated. Why was the first
translation a failure? The translator could read
my English perfectly competently, word by word
and sentence by sentence, and turn it into adequate German prose.
Yet as I read the text she produced I felt more
and more disquieted: the world that her pages
evoked was, in subtle and not so subtle respects,
not the world I had imagined; the narrator whose
voice I was hearing was not the narrator I had conceived.
In part this was a matter of word choice: given a
choice between two valid options, the translator
seemed more often than not to choose the one I would not have chosen.
But in the main it was a matter of rhythm of
speech but also rhythm of thought. The
sensibility behind the German text, a sensibility
embodied in particular in the speech of the narrator, felt alien to me.
A passage from Waiting for the Barbarians
illustrates some of the difficulties created for
the English-to-German translator by uses of the
present-participle form of the verb for which
there are no equivalents in German.
If I lived in the magistrate's villa on the
quietest street in town, holding sittings in the
court on Mondays and Thursdays, going hunting
every morning, occupying the evenings in the
classics, closing my ears to the activities of
this upstart policeman [Colonel Joll], if I
resolved to ride out the bad times, keeping my
own counsel, I might cease to feel like a man
who..." Here is the version produced by the first German translator:
Wenn ich in der Richtervilla in der ruhigsten
Stra e der Stadt wohnen wurde, wenn ich montags
und donnerstags im Gericht Sitzungen anberaumen,
jeden Morgen auf die Jagd gehen, meine Abende mit
der Lekture klassischer Schriftsteller ausfullen,
meine Ohren verschlie en wurde vor dem Treiben
dieses arroganten Polizeihengstes, wenn ich den
Entschlu fassen wurde, diese schlechten Zeiten
heil zu uberstehen und den Mund zu halten, wurde
dieses Gefuhl vielleicht nachlassen, ich sei ein Mensch, der...
There are several reasons to be dissatisfied with
this translation. Occupying one's evenings with
der Lekture klassischer Schriftsteller is not the
same as occupying them with the classics; or
rather, the man who would occupy his evenings
with der Lekture klassischer Schriftsteller is
not the same man as the one who occupies his
evenings with the classics: the former sounds
like a pedant who does not look to the classic
texts for solace, and certainly does not seek in
the classical authors friends and companions.
The man who in German dismisses Colonel Joll as
ein arrogante Polizeihengste, an arrogant jackass
policeman, is ruled by a different set of
prejudices from the man who in English dismisses
him as an upstart policeman (in the latter case,
or so it seems to me, it is hard to tell whether
upstart or policeman is meant to be more
insulting to this specialist in state security).
In the second translator's version, the two
phrases in question are rendered - exactly - as
sich mit den Klassikern beschaftigen and dieser Emporkommling von
Polizisten.
A more general and perhaps more interesting
question to arise from this passage is how a
German translator should deal with a long
sequence of English - ing forms, such as we have
here. The English seems to me to contain a quite subtle ambiguity.
One abbreviated paraphrase might read: "If I were
to live in the villa, if I were to hold sittings,
if I were to go hunting, if I were to occupy
myself in the classics, if I were to close my
ears, then I might cease to feel like a man
who..." An alternative paraphrase might read: "If
I were to live in the villa, all the time I lived
there holding sittings, going hunting, etcetera,
then I might cease to feel like a man who..."
The former implies a set of decisions - whether
to live in the villa, whether to hold sittings,
whether to go hunting, and so on - which, if
taken, will (it is hoped) bring about a certain
result. The latter paraphrase implies a slip into
an enclosed, iterative time-world, an escape from
the difficult and unpleasant historical time in which Colonel Joll
operates.
The first translator's version sets out a number
of conditions, embodied in conditional forms of
the verb (wohnen wurde, anberaumen [wurde]),
which have a hypothetical consequence: wurde
dieses Gefuhl vielleicht nachlassen, ich sei ein Mensch, der...
The second translator's version sets out the same
conditions, embodied in this case in hypothetical
(subjunctive) forms of the verb (in der
Magistratsvilla wohnte,
Gerichtsverhandlungenleitete...), leading to a
comparable hypothetical consequence: wurde ich
mich vielleicht nicht mehr wie ein Mann fuhlen, der...
In neither case is the implication hinted at in
my second paraphrase taken up. In fact, I cannot
see a way in which it can be taken up in German
without considerable expansion of the passage.
French, with its - ant present participle, makes
it easier to follow the syntax of the original:
Si j'occupais la villa du magistrat, en menant
une vie jalonnee par la chasse tous les matins,
les soirees consacrees a la lecture des
classiques, en fermant mes oreilles, si je me
resolvais a attendre, je cesserais peut-etre de
me sentir comme un homme pris...
I HAVE no idea of what translators from English
into Korean do about such rarefied phenomena as
the atemporal tendency of the present participle.
My own Korean translator needs much more
down-to-earth advice. He wants to check on the
meaning of specialised English words such as
thanatophany and off-spin, of unfamiliar English
idioms such as "hug the shadows," of
unrecognisable foreign phrases like dies irae and
stoksielalleen; he wants puzzling references to
Esther Williams, the Isles of the Blest, and the
charge of the Light Brigade to be explained. My
Icelandic translator copes perfectly well with
European languages but needs help with South
African terms like muti, snoek, Kaffraria. My
Hebrew translator asks why the word many is
misspelled "menny" in Disgrace (answer: because
Thomas Hardy, to whom the passage refers, chose to misspell it).
One of the ways in which translators can grow in
competence is by expanding their lexicon. At a
more general level, they also grow in confidence
by confirming that they can identify semantic
nuances in the source and find ways of
representing these, even when the target language proves resistant.
This leads to my final question: Is there a high
road (a highway) to excellence in translation,
and might that high road be provided by a theory
of translation? Would mastery of the theory of
translation make one a better translator? There
is a legitimate branch of aesthetics called the
theory of literature. But I doubt very much that
there is or can be such a thing as a theory of
translation - not one, at any rate - from which
practitioners of translation will have much to learn.
Translation seems to me a craft in a way that
cabinet-making is a craft. There is no
substantial theory of cabinet-making, and no
philosophy of cabinet-making except the ideal of
being a good cabinet-maker, plus a handful of
precepts relating to tools and to types of wood.
For the rest, what there is to be learned must be
learned by observation and practice. The only
book on cabinet-making I can imagine that might
be of use to the practitioner would be a humble handbook.
This essay also appears in the latest edition of
Meanjin (Volume 64.4, Tongues: On Translation),
www.meanjin.unimelb.edu.au and will be included
in a coming book Translation and the Classic
(Oxford University Press). Copyright JM Coetzee.
The master's voice
JOHN Maxwell Coetzee was born in Cape Town in
1940. He was the first novelist to win the Booker
Prize twice, for The Life and Times of Michael K
(1983) and Disgrace (1999) and was awarded the
Nobel Prize in literature in 2003. Since 2002 he
has lived in Adelaide, South Australia, which is the
setting for his latest novel, Slow Man.
Fingal
<kamou...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
>JM Coetzee
>"Roads to Translation: How a novelist relates to his translators"
> 64(4) Meanjin (2005), www.meanjin.unimelb.edu.au
> Rep as Coetzee, JM (2006) "Speaking in
>Tongues: Drawing on his experiences with
>translators, Nobel laureate JM Coetzee identifies
>some of the practical difficulties involved in
>the craft of translation." Weekend Australian (28-29 January) Review pp
>4-6.
Nice post. I really like Coetzee's work. I would think that he must
find it very difficult to convey to non-English speaking readers not
just what he means in English, but the full meaning of whatever
Afrikaans words he uses as well.
There was a great article in the New Yorker a couple of months back,
about the "revolution" in translating Russian classics, particularly
Tolstoy and Dostoevskii. If you're interested, I could try to find it
for you.
«Pas de deux»
news:234mu11b83acbgmr6...@4ax.com...
We are interested. Please try to find it. Many thanks.
GK
Fingal
<kamou...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
Alas. I looked for it all over the web, but it doesn't seem to be
online anymore. It did, however, spark some very serious debate. You
can read lots of that by searching for "Translation Wars" and "David
Remnick."
If you're near a library, check it out in the Nov. 7, 2005 issue of
the New Yorker.
«Pas de deux»
> On Thu, 9 Feb 2006 07:17:09 -0500, "?Pas de deux?"
>>> about the "revolution" in translating Russian classics, particularly
>>> Tolstoy and Dostoevskii. If you're interested, I could try to find
>>> it
>>> for you.
>>
>>We are interested. Please try to find it. Many thanks.
>>
>>GK
>>
>
> Alas. I looked for it all over the web, but it doesn't seem to be
> online anymore. It did, however, spark some very serious debate. You
> can read lots of that by searching for "Translation Wars" and "David
> Remnick."
>
> If you're near a library, check it out in the Nov. 7, 2005 issue of
> the New Yorker.
http://www.aup.fr/faculty/dept/clen/pevear.htm says:
The New Yorker has featured an article on Richard Pevear,
Professor of Comparative Literature at AUP and one of the most eminent
translators of our time. The article, written by editor David Remnick,
is titled "The Translation Wars" and appeared in the November 7, 2005
edition of the magazine. Printed copies are available by request from:
communi...@aup.edu.
«Pas de deux»
news:E33If.10412
>> "Translation Wars" by David Remnick
>>
>> from Nov. 7, 2005 issue of the New Yorker.
>
> http://www.aup.fr/faculty/dept/clen/pevear.htm says:
>
> The New Yorker has featured an article on Richard Pevear,
> Professor of Comparative Literature at AUP and one of the most eminent
> translators of our time. The article, written by editor David Remnick,
> is titled "The Translation Wars" and appeared in the November 7, 2005
> edition of the magazine. Printed copies are available by request from:
> communi...@aup.edu.
>
Also, le voici:
voila:
The New Yorker
November 7, 2005
SECTION: FACT; Onward And Upward With The Arts; Pg. 98
HEADLINE: THE TRANSLATION WARS; How the race to translate Tolstoy and
Dostoyevsky continues to spark feuds, end friendships, and create small
fortunes.
BYLINE: DAVID REMNICK
BODY:
In the early seventies, two young playwrights, Christopher Durang and
Albert Innaurato, collaborated on a satire about nineteenth-century
Russian literature called "The Idiots Karamazov." In their liberal
interpretation of Dostoyevsky, Father Zosima is a gay foot fetishist.
Which causes the angelic monk Alyosha to wonder, "How can there be a God
if there are feet?" The main character is based not on any figure in
Dostoyevsky but, rather, on his first and most enduring English-language
translator, a woman of Victorian energies and Edwardian prose, Mrs.
Constance Garnett.
In the first production of "The Idiots Karamazov," at the Yale Repertory
Theatre, Garnett was played by a student at the drama school named Meryl
Streep, who portrayed the aged "translatrix" as a muddled loon. The
mangling of the translator's craft is a main plot point. The Russian for
"hysterical homosexual," Mrs. Garnett insists, is "Tchaikovsky." When
she recalls for the audience the arduous process of translating
"Karamazov," she confuses the four brothers with the "Three Sisters," a
stumble that leads inevitably to the musical number "O We Gotta Get to
Moscow!" Mrs. Garnett closes the proceedings by reciting a conjugation
of the verb "to Karamazov."
Poor Mrs. Garnett! Translators suffer a thankless and uneasy afterlife.
(Or they never get that far: until the King James commission, English
translators of the Bible were sometimes burned at the stake or
strangled-or, as in the case of William York Tyndale, both.) Translators
are, for eternity, sent up, put down, nitpicked, and, finally,
overturned. The objects of their attentions dread their ministrations.
Cervantes complained that reading a translation was "like looking at the
Flanders tapestries from behind: you can see the basic shapes but they
are so filled with threads that you cannot fathom their original
lustre." And yet they persevere: here comes Edith Grossman, four
centuries later, quixotically encountering the Don and his Sancho on
behalf of a new generation of English readers.
Without translators, we are left adrift on our various linguistic ice
floes, only faintly hearing rumors of masterpieces elsewhere at sea. So
most English-speaking readers glimpse Homer through the filter of
Fitzgerald or Fagles, Dante through Sinclair or Singleton or the
Hollanders, Proust through Moncrieff or Davis, Garcia Marquez through
Gregory Rabassa-and nearly every Russian through Constance Garnett.
As a literary achievement, Garnett's may have been of the second order,
but it was vast. With her pale, watery eyes, her gray hair in a chignon,
she was the genteel face of tireless industry. She translated seventy
volumes of Russian prose for commercial publication, including all of
Dostoyevsky's novels; hundreds of Chekhov's stories and two volumes of
his plays; all of Turgenev's principal works and nearly all of
Tolstoy's; and selected texts by Herzen, Goncharov, and Ostrovsky. A
friend of Garnett's, D. H. Lawrence, was in awe of her matter-of-fact
endurance, recalling her "sitting out in the garden turning out reams of
her marvelous translations from the Russian. She would finish a page,
and throw it off on a pile on the floor without looking up, and start a
new page. That pile would be this high-really, almost up to her knees,
and all magical."
Without Garnett, the nineteenth-century "Rooshians," as Ezra Pound
called them, would not have exerted such a rapid influence on the
American literature of the early twentieth. In "A Moveable Feast,"
Hemingway recounts scouring Sylvia Beach's shelves for the Russians and
finding in them a depth and accomplishment he had never known. Before
that, he writes, he was told that Katherine Mansfield was "a good
short-story writer, even a great short-story writer," but now, after
reading Chekhov, she seemed to him like "near-beer." To read the
Russians, he said, "was like having a great treasure given to you":
In Dostoevsky there were things believable and not to be believed, but
some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness,
wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to
know as you knew the landscape and the roads in Turgenev, and the
movement of troops, the terrain and the officers and the men and the
fighting in Tolstoy. Tolstoy made the writing of Stephen Crane on the
Civil War seem like the brilliant imagining of a sick boy who had never
seen war but had only read the battles and chronicles and seen the Brady
photographs that I had read and seen at my grandparents' house.
Among the most astringent and authoritative critics of Garnett were
Russian exiles, especially Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky. Nabokov,
the son of a liberal noble who was assassinated at a political
conference, left Russia in 1919. He lived in Europe until 1940, when he
came to the United States. In "Lectures on Russian Literature," there is
a facsimile of the opening pages of his teaching copy of the Garnett
"Anna Karenina." On the blank left-hand page, Nabokov has written a
quotation from Conrad, who told Garnett's husband, Edward, "Remember me
affectionately to your wife, whose translation of Karenina is splendid.
Of the thing itself I think but little, so that her merit shines with
greater lustre." Angrily, Nabokov scrawls, "I shall never forgive Conrad
this crack"-he ranks Tolstoy at the top of all Russian prose writers and
"Anna" as his masterpiece-and pronounces Garnett's translation "a
complete disaster." Brodsky agreed; he once said, "The reason
English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy
and Dostoevsky is that they aren't reading the prose of either one.
They're reading Constance Garnett."
Garnett's flaws were not the figment of a native speaker's snobbery. She
worked with such speed, with such an eye toward the finish line, that
when she came across a word or a phrase that she couldn't make sense of
she would skip it and move on. Life is short, "The Idiot" long. Garnett
is often wooden in her renderings, sometimes unequal to certain verbal
motifs and particularly long and complicated sentences. The typescripts
of Nabokov's lectures, which he delivered while teaching undergraduates
at Wellesley and Cornell, are full of anti-Garnett vitriol; his margins
are a congeries of pencilled exclamations and crabby demurrals on where
she had "messed up." For example, where a passage in the Garnett of
"Anna" reads, "Holding his head bent down before him," Nabokov
triumphantly notes, "Mark that Mrs. Garnett has decapitated the man."
When Nabokov was working on a study of Gogol, he complained, "I have
lost a week already translating passages I need in 'The Inspector
General' as I can do nothing with Constance Garnett's dry shit."
A less imperious but no less discerning critic, Kornei Chukovsky (who
was also a famous writer of children's books), esteemed Garnett for her
work on Turgenev and Chekhov but not for her Dostoyevsky. The famous
style of "convulsions" and "nervous trembling," he wrote, becomes under
Garnett's pen "a safe blandscript: not a volcano, but a smooth lawn
mowed in the English manner-which is to say a complete distortion of the
original." Garnett (1862-1946) was one of eight children. Her father was
paralyzed, and when Constance was just fourteen her mother died of a
heart attack from the exertion of hoisting her husband from chair to
bed. Constance won a scholarship to read classics at Newnham College,
Cambridge, and after graduation she married a publisher, Edward Garnett,
the scion of a family of English literary aristocrats.
When the Garnetts were setting up housekeeping, Edward began to invite
various Russian exiles as weekend guests. Constance was entranced by
their stories of revolutionary fervor and literary ferment. In 1891,
when she was confined with a difficult pregnancy, she began to learn
Russian. Soon, she tried her hand at translating minor pieces, beginning
with Goncharov's "A Common Story" and Tolstoy's "The Kingdom of God Is
Within You" and then moving on to her favorite of the Russians,
Turgenev. In 1894, she left behind her infant son and her husband and
made a three-month trip to Russia, where she drove long distances
through snowstorms by sleigh, visited experimental schools, and dined
with Tolstoy at his estate.
When Garnett returned to England, she began an ascetic lifelong routine
of housekeeping, child-rearing, and translating. Mornings, she made
porridge for her son David, and then, according to her biographer
Carolyn Heilbrun, "she would go round the garden, while the dew was
still on the plants, to kill the slugs; this was a moment of
selfindulgence." Garnett was a sickly woman, suffering from migraines,
sciatica, and terrible eyesight, and yet her ailments did not deter her
from working as a translator. She turned down an offer from Tolstoy's
close friends Louise and Aylmer Maude to collaborate on a translation of
"War and Peace" and did it on her own. (So, too, did the Maudes, her
only rival in Tolstoy.) Garnett went nearly blind working on "War and
Peace." She hired a secretary, who read the Russian text to her aloud;
Garnett would dictate back in English, sometimes grabbing away the
original text and holding it a few inches from her ailing eyes.
Hemingway recalls telling a friend, a young poet named Evan Shipman,
that he could never get through "War and Peace"-not "until I got the
Constance Garnett translation." Shipman replied, "They say it can be
improved on. I'm sure it can, although I don't know Russian."
Richard Pevear was living in Manhattan in the mid-nineteen-eighties when
he began reading "The Brothers Karamazov." He and his wife, a Russian
emigree named Larissa Volokhonsky, had an apartment on the fourth floor
of a brownstone on West 107th Street. To earn money, Pevear built custom
furniture and cabinets for the emerging executive class in the
neighborhood. He had always earned just enough to get by: in New
Hampshire, he cut roses in a commercial greenhouse; he worked in a
boatyard repairing yachts. He'd published verse in The Hudson Review and
other quarterlies, and he'd worked on translations from the languages he
knew: French, Italian, Spanish. He'd translated poems by Yves Bonnefoy
and Apollinaire, and a philosophical work called "The Gods," by Alain, a
teacher of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone Weil.
Larissa was born in Leningrad; her brother Henri is a poet who was a
rival of Brodsky. While Larissa was still living in Russia, she learned
English, sat in on a translation seminar, and, using a smuggled copy of
The New Yorker, translated a story by John Updike. After she emigrated,
in 1973, she translated "Introduction to Patristic Theology," by John
Meyendorff, a Russian Orthodox priest and thinker.
One day, when Richard was reading "Karamazov" (in a translation by one
of Garnett's epigones, David Magarshak), Larissa, who had read the book
many times in the original, began peeking over her husband's shoulder to
read along with him. She was outraged. It's not there! she thought. He
doesn't have it! He's an entirely different writer!
As an experiment, a lark, Pevear and Volokhonsky decided to collaborate
on their own "Karamazov." After looking at the various
translations-Magarshak, Andrew MacAndrew, and, of course, Constance
Garnett-they worked on three sample chapters. Their division of labor
was-and remains-nearly absolute: First, Larissa wrote out a kind of
hyperaccurate trot of the original, complete with interstitial notes
about Dostoyevsky's diction, syntax, and references. Then, Richard, who
has never mastered conversational Russian, wrote a smoother, more
Englished text, constantly consulting Larissa about the original and the
possibilities that it did and did not allow. They went back and forth
like this several times, including a final session in which Richard read
his English version aloud while Larissa followed along in the Russian.
Their hope was to be true to Dostoyevsky, right down to his famous
penchant for repetition, seeming sloppiness, and melodrama.
When they had a text they liked, they sent a copy to an editor at Random
House. It came back with a brief letter that said, in Richard's reading,
"No, thanks. Garnett lives forever. Why do we need a new one?" Then they
tried Oxford University Press. The editors there sent the text along to
an Oxford don, who objected to Alyosha Karamazov being called an
"angel"; in the margin he wrote instead "good chap"; another marginal
note said, simply, "balls." Oxford University Press turned them down.
They did not despair. Pevear and Volokhonsky had in the meantime armed
themselves with enthusiastic letters of endorsement from some of the
country's best Slavic scholars-including Victor Terras, at Brown; Robert
Louis Jackson, at Yale; Robert Belknap, from Columbia; and Joseph Frank,
Dostoyevsky's supreme biographer, from Stanford-and sent the manuscript
out to Holt, Harcourt Brace, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and a couple of
others. There was only one bite: Jack Shoemaker, from North Point Press,
a small house in San Francisco (now defunct), called, offering an
advance of a thousand dollars-roughly a dollar per page. They estimated
that the translation would take five to six years-more than twice as
long as it took Dostoyevsky to write the novel. Although translators of
long-dead authors do not have to share royalties, the arithmetic was
unpleasant. Pevear called back and shyly asked if, perhaps, North Point
could come up with a bit more money. Shoemaker offered six thousand.
"P/V," as they would come to be known in the academic journals, went to
work on "The Brothers Karamazov." In time, they would become the
best-selling and perhaps the most authoritative translators of Russian
prose since Constance Garnett. A few months ago, I visited Pevear and
Volokhonsky in Paris. They moved to France in 1988, convinced that
France would be cheaper than the Upper West Side. They live in a small
ground-floor apartment on a side street called Villa Poirier. They are
both in their early sixties and have two grown children. Pevear is a
mild, friendly man with a gray goatee and the sort of untraceable accent
that comes off a little high-end. Volokhonsky is earthier, more reserved
than her husband, though hardly retiring. Sometimes Pevear would barge
uninvited into his wife's sentences, but she did not easily relent. The
rooms are spare and light, and reminded me of apartments I had visited
in many Russian cities, apartments of a particular intellectual variety,
with the entranceway lined with bookshelves and volumes in Russian,
English, French, and other languages. Russian intellectuals always seem
to display pictures not only of the family but also of their cultural
icons; Larissa kept photographs above her desk of John Meyendorff and
another venerable Orthodox thinker, Alexander Schmemann.
Pevear and Volokhonsky made it clear that their work is a
collaboration-her Russian, his English-but they work in adjoining
offices, alone. "We don't want to work over short passages together,"
Pevear said. "Larissa does an entire draft first. The first draft for
'The Brothers Karamazov' took two years, and thankfully we had an N.E.H.
grant"-for thirty-six thousand dollars-"which we stretched out."
"We thought it would last forever!" Larissa said. "We'd never had
anything like that kind of money. We moved to France illegally on a
tourist visa, and it was finally a policeman who told us that we needed
to 'regularize our situation,' as he put it."
Unlike Garnett, who started small and then worked her way up to the big,
baggy monsters of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, Pevear and Volokhonsky began
with the bulkiest and most complex masterpiece imaginable. "The Brothers
Karamazov" is, to use Mikhail Bakhtin's famous term, the most polyphonic
of Dostoyevsky's novels, the one with the most voices, tones, and
textures braided into the text. Tolstoy and Chekhov are far clearer,
more serene; perhaps, among the main nineteenth-century texts, only
Gogol's "Dead Souls," with its singular vocabulary and jokes, is as
difficult for a translator.
"We thought, if we can do this together, we should start with the book
that meant the most to us and had suffered the most from previous
translators," Pevear said. "Dostoyevsky's marvellous humor had been
lost. The Divine Comedy is divine, a religious work, but it's also
funny; there are comic moments. The same with Dostoyevsky, and the
comedy comes when you least expect it. Ilyusha is dying. His shoes are
outside the room. His father is banging his head against the door. A
prestigious German doctor comes from Moscow to treat the boy. The doctor
comes out of the room after seeing him and the father asks him if there
is any hope. He says, 'Be pre-pared for an-ny-thing.' Then, 'lowering
his eyes, he himself prepared to step across the threshold to the
carriage.' Dickens would never have joked at such a moment. He would
have jerked all the tears he could have from us."
"Yes, that's true," Larissa said. "Translators too often look for the
so-called Russian sensibility, and, lo and behold, they find it: the
darkness, the obsessiveness, the mystic genius. All of that is there, of
course. But there is also a lightness, a joyful Christian lightness,
too. There are deaths, suicide, the death of a child, Ivan goes mad,
Mitya goes to prison-and yet the book ends with joy."
Dostoyevsky's detractors have faulted him for erratic, even sloppy,
prose and what Nabokov, the most famous of the un-fans, calls his
"gothic rodomontade." "Dostoyevsky did write in a hurry," Pevear said.
"He had terrible deadlines to meet. He wrote 'Crime and Punishment' and
'The Gambler' simultaneously. He knew that if he didn't finish 'The
Gambler' on time he would lose the rights to all his future books for
the next nine years. That's when he hired his future wife as a
stenographer and dictated it to her. Tolstoy was better paid, and he
didn't even need the money. And yet Dostoyevsky's roughness, despite the
rush and the pressure, was all deliberate. No matter what the deadline,
if he didn't like what he had, he would throw it all out and start
again. So this so-called clumsiness is seen in his drafts, the way he
works on it. It's deliberate. His narrator is not him; it's always a bad
provincial writer who has an unpolished quality but is deeply
expressive. In the beginning of 'The Brothers Karamazov,' in the note to
the reader, there is the passage about 'being at a loss to resolve these
questions, I am resolved to leave them without any resolution.' He
stumbles. It's all over the place."
"And this is how people speak," Volokhonsky said. "We mix metaphors, we
stumble, we make mistakes."
"Other translators smooth it out," Pevear said. "We don't."
In his preface, Pevear points out that the narrative voice in the novel
is full of hedged assertions, mixed diction, wandering syntax, weirdly
incorrect compound modifiers ("Ivan Fyodorovich was convinced beyond
doubt of his complete and extremely ill condi- tion"), "fused" cliches
(as when he refers to a monk from Obdorsk as "the distant
visitor"-combining "visitor from far away" and "distant land"). In order
to re-create some sense of the tone of the original, Pevear and
Volokhonsky have to rely on their own literary instincts, but they have
also devised a set of guidelines. For instance, they will not use an
English word that the Oxford English Dictionary says came into use after
the publication of the novel they are translating. In the Sidney Monas
"Crime and Punishment," the translator uses "pal" instead of something
like "old boy." "We won't do that," Pevear said, making the face of a
child who has inadvertently eaten a Brussels sprout.
Also, Volokhonsky said, "Dostoyevsky doesn't use slang, really, though
sometimes there is a vulgarism. For example, he uses
profiltrovat'sya-'to filter through,' say, into a society-or
stushevat'sya, which Dostoyevsky seems to have invented, meaning 'to
efface yourself out.' " There are no real obscenities. In "The Demons,"
a Holy Fool-a religious idiot savant-curses, but Dostoyevsky uses dashes
instead of the word itself. Pevear and Volokhonsky are hardly prudes,
but their read-ing tastes have limits. Even when they desperately needed
the money, they refused an offer to translate Victor Erofeyev's
fantastically dirty novel, "Russian Beauty." Nor did they find much to
admire in a recent scandalous text from Russia, Vladimir Sorokin's "Blue
Lard." "It was the only book I ever asked to have removed from my
house," Volokhonsky said. "I said, 'Take it back, rid me of its
presence. We are not amused.' " To compare the Garnett and the
Pevear-Volokhonsky translations of "The Brothers Karamazov" is to alight
on hundreds of subtle differences in tone, word choice, word order, and
rhythm.
"These changes seem small, but they are essential. They accumulate,"
Pevear said. "It's like a musical composition and a musician, an
interpretation. If your fingers are too heavy or too light, the piece
can be distorted."
"It can also be compared to restoring a painting," Volokhonsky said.
"You can't overdo it, but you have to be true to the thing."
Volokhonsky's sense of fidelity has obvious roots: she is confounded by
any translation that has little sense of the original's qualities as
they play on a Russian ear and sensibility. Pevear's fidelity to
Dostoyevsky's "sloppiness" comes from a rather grand ambition. "I began
as a writer, as a poet, not as a translator, so I started out with that
set of problems," he said. "It seemed to me that English prose had
become textureless, flavorless, flat, naive, a kind of dull first
person. 'I woke up. I saw the window. I felt very bad. The sun was
rising over the hills.' Now, Dostoyevsky writes often in the first
person, but there's a richness of texture and idea and voice. So one
subliminal idea I started out with as a translator was to help energize
English itself.
"Hemingway read Garnett's Dostoyevsky and he said it influenced him," he
continued. "But Hemingway was just as influenced by Constance Garnett as
he was by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Garnett breaks things into simple
sentences, she Hemingwayizes Dostoyevsky, if you see what I mean."
The Pevear-Volokhonsky translation of "The Brothers Karamazov" won
almost uniformly positive reviews and the PEN prize for translation. "In
the Wichita Eagle, we got an amazing full-page review with the headline
' "karamazoV" still leads creative way,' " Pevear said as we broke for
lunch one day. "The only problem is that they used a photograph of
Tolstoy." Traditionally, translating was part of a Russian writer's
work. Before the nineteenth century, the sum total of great Russian
literature-after taking into account a twelfth-century epic, "The Song
of Igor's Campaign," a few comic playwrights, and some stars of the
Westernizing eighteenth century, such as Derzhavin, Radishchev, and
Karamzin-was relatively negligible. The upper, reading classes
automatically thought of literature as a European import. Some read the
works in translation, others in the original. In "Eugene Onegin,"
Pushkin provides us with Tatiana Larina's reading list-"From early on
she loved romances, / they were her only food"-and it is all foreign:
Richardson, Rousseau, Lovelace, Sophie Cottin, Madame de Stael. And in
Chapter 2 of Pushkin's story "The Queen of Spades" an old countess calls
on a young officer, her grandson:
"Paul," cried the Countess from behind the screen, "send me some new
novel, only pray not the kind they write nowadays." "What do you mean,
grand'maman?" "That is, a novel in which the hero strangles neither his
father nor his mother, and in which there are no drowned bodies. I have
a great horror of them." "There are no such novels nowadays. Would you
like a Russian one?" "Are there any Russian novels?"
During the Soviet period, citizens were deprived of censored works but
could read countless translations: Boris Pasternak's "Hamlet," Vasily
Zhukovsky's "Odyssey," Nikolai Gnedich's "Iliad." Pushkin paid
epigrammatic tribute to Gnedich:
Poet Gnedich, renderer of Homer the Blind, Was himself one-eyed,
Likewise, his translation Is only half
like the original.
As part of the Revolution's project to educate the masses, Maxim Gorky
initiated a publishing house in 1918 with the plan of producing at least
fifteen hundred volumes of "the most outstanding works of world
fiction"; the project came to a halt in 1927, having turned out a
hundred and twenty books. As socialist realism was imposed on Soviet
writers, one form of permissible resistance, of finding an inner
freedom, was to read translations of foreign writers. No private library
was complete without Hemingway, Faulkner, London, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck,
Salinger-all officially permitted as "progressive writers" exposing the
"ulcers of the capitalist world." There were also stodgy classics that
had long ago gone out of fashion in the English-speaking world
(especially Sir Walter Scott), as well as some minor writers like A. J.
Cronin and James Aldridge. It was common, as in the case of Aldridge,
for writers to be translated because they were Communists or, at least,
sympathizers. Among the essential pillars of culture in the Soviet era
was the journal Innostrannaya Literatura-Foreign Literature-which
published stories and novels in translation.
One of the forbidden lights of Russian literature during the Soviet era
was Vladimir Nabokov. None of his books, not the early Russian-language
novels written in France and Germany or the later works, written in
English when he lived in the United States and Switzerland, were
approved by the authorities. He was considered dangerously "anti-Soviet"
and banned outright. Even his translation of "Eugene Onegin"-with its
three accompanying volumes of commentary (notes so Nabokovian, so
joyful, intricate, and erudite, that they seem like the apparatus to one
of his novels, like the "commentary" of "Pale Fire")-even this was
impossible to find in the pre-Gorbachev Soviet Union except in illegal,
smuggled editions.
Pevear and Volokhonsky told me that they considered Nabokov's "Onegin"
one of the great triumphs of translation, even though it is nothing like
their own work. Nabokov, who regarded "The Gift" and "Lolita" as his
best novels, thought that his "Onegin" was perhaps the most important
project of his life and, at the same time, like all translation,
innately futile. In 1955, just as he was setting out on the project, he
published a poem in this magazine on the impossibility, the insult, of
translation:
What is translation? On a platter A poet's pale and glaring head, A
parrot's screech, a monkey's chatter, And profanation of the dead. The
parasites you were so hard on Are pardoned if I have your pardon, O
Pushkin, for my stratagem. I travelled down your secret stem, And
reached the root, and fed upon it; Then, in a language newly learned, I
grew another stalk and turned Your stanza, patterned on a sonnet, Into
my honest roadside prose- All thorn, but cousin to your rose.
The poem, which is written in Pushkin's signature stanza form-fourteen
lines, a hundred and eighteen syllables in iambic tetrameter, with a
regular scheme of feminine and masculine rhymes-is both tribute and
apology, to Russian and to Pushkin.
Nabokov worked on "Onegin" for nearly a decade. His intention, as he
makes clear in the introduction, is not to provide a traditional
"poetic" rendering, a pleasurable English "Onegin," like Avrahm
Yarmolinsky's, James Falen's, or Charles Johnston's noble attempts. Such
efforts, he felt, had necessarily ended in failure. Not long before
publishing his own "Onegin," Nabokov took to the pages of The New York
Review of Books and, like the lepidopterist he was, picked the wings off
a translation by Walter Arndt-which, to his rage, went on to win the
Bollingen Prize. Nabokov could not bear Arndt's "Germanisms," his
freewheeling sacrifice of semantic accuracy for rhythmic "beauty." Of
all the sins of a translator, he would later write, "The third, and
worst, degree of turpitude is reached when a masterpiece is planished
and patted into such a shape, vilely beautified in such a fashion as to
conform to the notions and prejudices of a given public. This is a
crime, to be punished by the stocks as plagiarists were in the
shoebuckle days."
For his part, Nabokov intended to provide the reader with a
literal-minded "crib, a pony," as he once told an interviewer. "And to
the fidelity of transposal I have sacrificed everything: elegance,
euphony, clarity, good taste, modern usage, and even grammar." He had no
hope for "Onegin" as an English poem. His purpose was singular and
clear. Just as Dante wrote the Divine Comedy to move a reader toward
Scripture (or so he said), Nabokov wrote his translation to inspire his
reader to know the poem in Russian:
It is hoped that my readers will be moved to learn Pushkin's language
and go through EO again without this crib. In art as in science there is
no delight without the detail, and it is on details that I have tried to
fix the reader's attention. Let me repeat that unless these are
thoroughly understood and remembered, all "general ideas" (so easily
acquired, so profitably resold) must necessarily remain but worn
passports allowing their bearers short cuts from one area of ignorance
to another.
Despite the stubbornly eccentric and unlovely texture of Nabokov's
"Onegin," the work was generally well reviewed, especially by those who
understood and accepted his intention and did not go looking for an
English poem. The most notable exception was Edmund Wilson, who decided
in July, 1965, to wage battle against the translation in the pages of
The New York Review.
Since 1940, just after Nabokov's arrival in the United States, Wilson
and Nabokov enjoyed a warm friendship, a constant Dear Volodya-Dear
Bunny correspondence full of mutual instruction, jocular competition,
oneupmanship, and traded enthusiasms. They were well matched: both were
self-confident, supremely intelligent, and well trained in the art of
polemics. Wilson had been extraordinarily kind to Nabokov, making
introductions for him that led to teaching jobs, a Guggenheim
fellowship, contracts with book publishers, and publication in The New
Yorker and The New Republic. And yet there was an uncommon, almost
frightening honesty in the relationship. Wilson did not hesitate to tell
Nabokov that he did not like "Bend Sinister," "Lolita," "Ada," and other
major works. (He never bothered to read "The Gift.") Nabokov, despite
his debts to Wilson, treated him, especially on Russian matters, with a
breezy condescension: "Dear Bunny, I am going to steal an hour from
Gogol and thrash out this matter of Russian versification, because you
are as wrong as can be." Wilson was bemused by many of Nabokov's
literary judgments, his disdain for Mann's "asinine" "Death in Venice,"
Pasternak's "vilely written" "Dr. Zhivago," Faulkner's "corncobby
chronicles"-anything that smacked of journalese, local color, big ideas,
or political propaganda. And yet, for a quarter century, despite any
friction or jealousies, the friendship seemed to thrive on its
directness. "I like you very much," Nabokov told Wilson in 1945, to
which Wilson replied, "Our conversations have been among the few
consolations of my literary life through these last years-when my old
friends have been dying, petering out or getting more and more
neurotic." In the end, however, the relationship could not survive
Wilson's attack on Nabokov's "Onegin." The assault was too fierce, too
presumptuous, and Nabokov's amour propre was never quite restored.
Despite his imperfect, book-learned Russian, Wilson betrayed no doubt
that he was capable of taking on Nabokov. In the course of his career,
he learned several languages in order to "work up" his projects: Russian
and German to write on Marx and Lenin in "To the Finland Station,"
Hebrew for "The Dead Sea Scrolls," Hungarian to read Endre Ady and other
poets. He was especially earnest about his Russian, consulting grammars,
Dahl's dictionary (a more antiquarian sort of Russian O.E.D.), and,
quite often, his emigre friend.
When it came to Russian literature, the correspondence between Nabokov
and Wilson was rather like that between an amused, patient teacher and
an eager, overreaching student. Wilson's publication of "The Strange
Case of Pushkin and Nabokov," in The New York Review of Books, was an
assault from the back of the class:
This production, though in certain ways valuable, is something of a
disappointment; and the reviewer, though a personal friend of Mr.
Nabokov-for whom he feels a warm affection sometimes chilled by
exasperation-and an admirer of much of his work, does not propose to
mask his disappointment. Since Mr. Nabokov is in the habit of
introducing any job of this kind which he undertakes by an announcement
that he is unique and incomparable and that everybody else who has
attempted it is an oaf and an ignoramus, incompetent as a linguist and
scholar, usually with the implication that he is also a low-class person
and a ridiculous personality, Nabokov ought not to complain if the
reviewer, though trying not to imitate his bad literary manners, does
not hesitate to underline his weaknesses.
Wilson not only disapproved of Nabokov's "bald and awkward language"; he
also discerned in his friend a desire to "torture both the reader and
himself" by "flattening out" Pushkin. In "The Wound and the Bow," Wilson
found the key to imaginative art in the injuries and humiliations
suffered by a writer in his youth-in Nabokov's case, the humiliation of
being stripped of his homeland, of being forced to wander the world far
from his home and his language. Nabokov's revenge, he feels, is
"sado-masochistic," and it expresses itself in an infuriating perversion
of Pushkin:
Aside from this desire to suffer and make suffer-so important an element
in his fiction-the only characteristic Nabokov trait that one recognizes
in this uneven and sometimes banal translation is the addiction to rare
and unfamiliar words, which, in view of his declared intention to stick
so close to the text that his version may be used as a trot, are
entirely inappropriate here. . . . He gives us, for example,
rememorating, producement, curvate, habitude, rummers, familistic,
gloam, dit, shippon and scrab.
In all, Wilson accused Nabokov of "actual errors in English," an
"unnecessarily clumsy style," "vulgar" phrases, immodesty, inaccurate
transliteration, a "lack of common sense," a "tedious and interminable
appendix," a poor grasp of Russian prosody, an "overdone" commentary
that suffers from "information which is generally quite useless,"
and-"to try to get all my negatives out of the way"-"serious failures"
of interpretation. The particulars take up the bulk of Wilson's attack,
though he closes with some lapidary tribute to Nabokov's mini-essays on
Pushkin's period, cohort, and influences.
After reading Wilson's piece at home in Montreux, Nabokov cabled the
co-editor of the Review, Barbara Epstein, in New York: "Please reserve
space in next issue for my thunder." If Wilson saw his essay as simply
an elaboration of an ongoing game, his target did not. Nabokov, whose
sense of humor was so supreme on the page, was not at all amused, and
his counterattacks, published in Encounter and The New York Review,
filleted Wilson personally as well as in the philological particulars:
As Mr. Wilson so justly proclaims in the beginning of "The Strange Case
of Pushkin and Nabokov," we are indeed old friends. I fully share "the
warm affection sometimes chilled by exasperation" that he says he feels
for me. In the 1940s, during my first decade in America, he was most
kind to me in various matters, not necessarily pertaining to his
profession. I have always been grateful to him for the tact he showed in
refraining from reviewing any of my novels. We have had many
exhilarating talks, have exchanged many frank letters. A patient
confidant of his long and hopeless infatuation with the Russian
language, I have always done my best to explain to him his mistakes of
pronunciation, grammar, and interpretation. As late as 1957, at one of
our last meetings, we both realized with amused dismay that despite my
frequent comments on Russian prosody, he still could not scan Russian
verse. Upon being challenged to read Eugene Onegin aloud, he started to
do this with great gusto, garbling every second word and turning
Pushkin's iambic line into a kind of spastic anapest with a lot of
jaw-twisting haws and rather endearing little barks that utterly jumbled
the rhythm and soon had us both in stitches.
Like an admiral commanding a flotilla that his underfunded opponent
cannot hope to match, Nabokov lords his superior command of Russian
language and prosody over his opponent. After a while, his methodical
counterattack seems unfair:
In translating slushat' shum morskoy (Eight:IV:11) I chose the archaic
and poetic transitive turn "to listen the sound of the sea" because the
relevant passage has in Pushkin a stylized archaic tone. Mr. Wilson may
not care for this turn-I do not much care for it either-but it is silly
of him to assume that I lapsed into a naive Russianism not being really
aware that, as he tells me, "in English you have to listen to
something." First, it is Mr. Wilson who is not aware that there exists
an analogous construction in Russian, prislushivat'sya k zvuku, "to
listen close to the sound"-which, of course, makes nonsense of the
exclusive Russianism imagined by him, and secondly, had he happened to
leaf through a certain canto of Don Juan, written in the year Pushkin
was beginning his poem, or a certain Ode to Memory, written when
Pushkin's poem was being finished, my learned friend would have
concluded that Byron ("Listening debates not very wise or witty") and
Tennyson ("Listening the lordly music") must have had quite as much
Russian blood as Pushkin and I.
Wilson never relented in his argument that Nabokov's translation was
nearly unreadable as a poem (and here he was right), but, with time, he
seemed to regret the affair. On rereading his original article, Wilson
admitted that he had sounded "more damaging" than he had intended. But
it was too late. The correspondence with Nabokov, once so robust and
warm, now dwindled and ceased. Wilson felt the loss acutely. There were
a few last desul-tory letters in the years left to them, but Nabokov
could never fully forgive the "Onegin" affair and other slights,
including a wounding passage about his wife, Vera, in Wilson's memoir
"Upstate." A quarter century of intense friendship ended. In a letter to
the Times Book Review in November, 1971, Nabokov wrote, "I am aware that
my former friend is in poor health but in the struggle between the
dictates of compassion and those of personal honor the latter wins."
Wilson died in June, 1972. Pevear and Volokhonsky may be the premier
Russian-to-English translators of the era. They are certainly the most
versatile and industrious and the only such team in which one member,
Richard Pevear, does not really speak the language. Pevear told me that
he has not even spent much time in Russia-just one three-week trip to
St. Petersburg to meet his wife's old friends and family.
"I've never been curious to see Russia," he said during one of our
conversations in Paris. "I'm not curious to see the city of Moscow.
Should I be?"
Larissa looked faintly embarrassed by her husband's incuriosity. "I
don't know what to say."
By listening to Larissa talk with her emigre friends in Paris, by
reviewing thousands of small matters of translation, Pevear has
certainly picked up a great deal of Russian, but not its outlandishly
rich vocabulary, the complicated grammar, with its maddening various
verb conjugations, shades of tense, reflexivities, cases, endings,
gerundial gymnastics.
Parenthetically, it's impossible for me not to sympathize with him.
Russian was the bane of my academic life. I've never given a subject
more time and concentration only to feel broken before the task. In
college, to the dismay of the two emigree dominatrixes who were my
teachers, I spent hundreds of hours poring over a brown-and-blue text
called Stillman and Harkins (and, later, a more advanced green one by
Charles E. Townsend), hundreds more hours in language laboratories
mispronouncing verbs, and all to very little avail-so little that I
dropped out of school for a year and, upon return, shifted to the sunny
promise and mathematical logic of French. Later, I resumed my Russian
studies with a young tutor from Novosibirsk, who, upon hearing me
attempt a participial phrase with a reflexive, heavily prefixed verb of
motion in the anchor position-a maneuver that I considered the triple
salchow of my conversational repertoire-winced, as if stabbed, rolled
her eyes into the back of her skull, and, upon recovery, seemed eager to
return to the communal apartment she had shared in central Siberia. She
produced a blue text called "Russky Yazyk dlya Vsyekh"-"Russian for
Everybody"-a beginning grammar published in Moscow, and said, "So, we
start from page one, yes?"
As a teacher, Nabokov revelled in the difficulties of the language
almost to the point of serene confidence that no student would ever
quite surpass what he called the
Kak-vy-pozhivaetye-ya-pozhivayu-khorosho (How-are-you-I-am-fine) level
of Russian. Nabokov was especially focussed on pronunciation. "Please
take out your mirrors, girls," the future author of "Lolita" instructed
his students at Wellesley, "and see what happens inside your mouths."
Many of his students went into his courses hoping to read Tolstoy in the
original (as I did) and left satisfied if they could mutter a simple
"These boys are standing on those bridges."
Larissa Volokhonsky is a less imperious professor to her husband than
Nabokov ever was to the women of Wellesley. Her drafts and proofs
provide literal renderings of the original and plenty of signposts, but
the final authority is his. "In English I make mistakes," she said, "but
there is enough to explain to Richard what is going on in the Russian
text and to collaborate."
Since the great success of "The Brothers Karamazov," Pevear and
Volokhonsky have translated (for a variety of publishers) all of the
major Dostoyevsky novels and many of his stories; Mikhail Bulgakov's
"The Master and Margarita"; a selection of Chekhov's short stories and
one of his short novels; and, most famously, Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina."
Strangely, Pevear spoke readily, and with confidence, about Tolstoy's
language. He said that the hardest part of starting a long project like
"Anna Karenina" was "getting the voice," capturing the narrative tone
that will run throughout the book. "Tolstoy's style is the least
interesting thing about him, though it is very peculiar," he said. "It
seems like most, translators included, are insensible to the crudeness
of Tolstoy's style, but Tolstoy liked to be crude, he was crude
provocatively. 'Anna Karenina' is interesting very often for how the
prose is deliberately not smooth or fine. Nabokov apologizes for
Tolstoy's bad writing. But Tolstoy himself said the point is to get the
thing said and then, if he wasn't sure he had said it, he would say it
again and again."
Pevear and Volokhonsky agree with the majority of their critics that
they are best at Dostoyevsky and, perhaps, Tolstoy. Gogol is notoriously
difficult for everyone, Chekhov deceptively simple.
"Chekhov has his own difficulties," Larissa said. "His tone seems to be
very simple and ordinary, almost banal, and yet it is very hard to
catch. It almost falls into trivia, near-cliche."
Richard interrupted, saying, "Yeah, there is a weary rhythm. 'And they
saw . . . And then they could see . . . And if it was clear they could
move on . . .' One thing after another, without any evident passion, a
monotony. Look at 'The Steppe' "-one of Chekhov's best-known longer
stories. "The rhythms and paragraphs are on the same level all the time.
The task is to maintain that level without falling into banality.
Remember, this is the author of 'A Boring Story.' He takes banal people
and puts them into banal situations, but he has hope for them. As a
doctor, he knew that life is horrible, and if we all knew that, we would
hang ourselves. And yet there is a hidden source of light in his work;
the source is unknown and unclear. He talks of the horror of life in 'In
the Ravine.' And yet there is radiance somewhere in the corner.
Dostoyevsky was a Christian and so there is a transcendent clear light.
With Chekhov, the light is milder, but it is there."
Pevear and Volokhonsky finished "Anna Karenina" in September, 1998-or so
they thought. Despite their growing reputation in the United States,
they failed to impress the editors at Penguin in London. "They told us
the book was unreadable," Pevear said. "They told us it had to be more
'reader-friendly.' But Tolstoy himself is not reader-friendly! They said
it was not at a stage to be copy-edited."
Pevear thought that he had solved the problem by taking out some of
Tolstoy's more repetitive or overemphatic passages. "Then we got a
persnickety copy editor who kept telling us that things might read
obscene in a way we hadn't intended," he said. "For example, Kitty says,
'I love balls.' This editor was good enough to tell us that this might
read funny. But Kitty liked going to balls! What were we supposed to do?
And one sentence read, 'Did you come recently?' Oh, it was all pretty
painful. And then they started blue-pencilling in alternate translations
from Rosemary Edmonds, dozens and dozens of times. I was out of my mind
with rage. There were more than a hundred cases of that. It took me two
weeks, working twelve-hour days, to restore everything."
Finally, in 2000, the book was published in the U.K. Penguin sold a few
hundred copies in England. At Viking-Penguin in New York, Caroline
White, a senior editor, ordered a print run of thirty-two thousand, with
the hope that some strong reviews would mean that the new edition would
displace Garnett, the Maudes, and other translations on the academic
market.
Then, one day in the spring of 2004, White called Pevear in Paris. She
had big news. Oprah Winfrey was selecting "Anna Karenina" for her book
club. Neither Pevear nor Volokhonsky quite understood the commercial
implications. In fact, they had no idea who Oprah Winfrey was. "I
thought she was a country singer," Richard said.
White informed them that Viking-Penguin would print an additional eight
hundred thousand copies of their translation in a single month. Soon the
buses, subways, and coffee shops of America were filled with people
reading Tolstoy. I asked Richard and Larissa what "the Oprah moment"
meant for them.
"It means I have an accountant," Richard said.
"Notes from Underground" now sells eight thousand copies a year, "Crime
and Punishment" twelve thousand, "The Brothers Karamazov" fourteen
thousand, "Anna Karenina" twenty thousand. Flush, though not rich,
Pevear and Volokhonsky split their time between the apartment in Paris
and a farmhouse in Burgundy. They have been thinking about future
projects, including the stories of Nikolai Leskov, famous for "Lady
Macbeth of the Mtsensk District." But they cannot look too far ahead,
because the publisher Everyman has engaged them to translate the novel
that E. M. Forster insisted was the greatest of all, and that is
certainly the longest volume in the nineteenth-century lineup: "War and
Peace." Volokhonsky is about two-thirds of the way through with her
first draft, and Pevear about six hundred pages into his.
"There is a real challenge in 'War and Peace,' a vast amount of
historical detail," he said. "The novel has five hundred historical
figures and fictional figures, so we have to write commentaries for the
historical ones, which are the vast majority. In the battle scenes, we
have to come up with the words for particular kinds of guns and cannons,
for military tactics. There is a huge hunting scene, so we have to find
very particular words for the wolves, the foxes, the kinds of dogs, the
horses, the color of the horses, their gaits, the shape of their paws
and hooves and the way they wagged their tails. Tolstoy knew all this as
second nature. Or the terms of fashion and high society. In the opening
scene, the aunt, ma tante, is dressed in 'high ribbons.' Elena Kuryagina
is dressed in listya i mokh-'leaves and moss.' What do we do with that?
We'll have to call our friend Sasha Vasiliev, a stage designer, who has
a collection of old stage costumes."
Their deadline is at the end of 2006. Although they prefer Dostoyevsky
to Tolstoy, they are finding "War and Peace" to be immensely satisfying.
"Even when people go to war, with tragedy and grief, there is still a
safe and harmonic world," Larissa said. "Natasha has babies while living
in a world that might not be there tomorrow."
Pevear, especially, has read some of the theory about translation:
Walter Benjamin, Jose Ortega y Gasset, Roman Jakobson, and, of course,
Nabokov. He said that he takes the most inspiration from a
turn-of-the-century French poet and translator named Valery Larbaud. At
the end of our last conversation in Paris, Pevear went to his shelves
and pulled down a volume in French, and read a prayer by Larbaud
addressed to St. Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin. Following
the line with his finger, Pevear squinted and, slowly, translated:
"Excellent Doctor, Light of the Holy Church, Blessed Jerome. I am about
to undertake a task full of difficulties, and from this moment on I beg
of you to help me with your prayers so I can translate this work into
French with the same spirit with which it was composed."
Pevear snapped the book shut and picked up the Maude translation of "War
and Peace," which he'd been reviewing for his own work.
"I know how he feels," he said. "It's the same thing that sits on our
heads when we start up."
Early this fall, Penguin announced the publication of a new translation
of "War and Peace"-it was by Anthony Briggs, a British academic. Briggs,
who won generally positive reviews, sounded like an attractively modest
sort. One of the British papers, the Daily Telegraph, quoted him as
saying, "Professional translators are generally mediocre people like me,
not great poetic geniuses." The Times Literary Supplement published a
short, curious article pointing out that Briggs had, unlike some of his
predecessors, rendered all Tolstoy's French into English and even
spelled out some of General Kutuzov's obscenities. (Tolstoy had obscured
the profanity with ellipses.) What Rosemary Edmonds, the last translator
of the novel, had as "It serves them right, the b-- b--s!" Briggs has as
"They asked for it, the fucking bastards!"
In the meantime, Pevear and Volokhonsky were working on their
translation at their farmhouse in Burgundy. I wrote to them about the
Briggs approach and hoped for a response, even a prickly one. It came a
couple of weeks later:
We're well and had a busy but fruitful summer. I'm about to lose the
battle of Austerlitz (W&P vol 1 pt 3). . . . About your questions: I
don't know how "new" it is to translate the French passages in "War and
Peace." Edmonds keeps only the "Eh bien, mon prince" of the opening
speech, but puts the rest in English, whereas Tolstoy has the first ten
lines in French, along with many other extended dialogues in the opening
chapters. There are also French words and phrases all through the novel.
The Maude and Garnett versions translate all of it into English, as they
do, for instance, Napoleon's letter to Murat, and the German of
Weyrother's disposition before Austerlitz. If, as you say, Anthony
Briggs also translates it all, then as far as I know ours will be the
only version that DOESN'T. We do as Tolstoy does, and, like the Russian
editions of the novel, put the translations in the footnotes. Tolstoy
used French for a reason, or for several reasons: to give the tone of
the period; to play on the ironies of a French-speaking Russian
aristocracy suddenly finding itself thrown into war with France; to
suggest a certain frivolity and uprootedness in characters like Prince
Vassily and the witty Bilibin. . . . Interestingly, when Napoleon
banters with his troops, he does so in French, but when he talks
seriously, Tolstoy lends him Russian. About Kutuzov's purple patch,
again we'll do as Tolstoy did. He would never have written out "fucking
bastards," and in any case Briggs has not been very inventive. None of
us can figure out what epithet Tolstoy had in mind for Kutuzov, but it
seems to have involved the mistreatment of mothers. With best wishes
from us both . . .