Alexander ZHOLKOVSKY (USC, Los Angeles)
You Don’t Know What You’re Missing
Twenty or so years ago, a group of Americans found themselves amongst a noisy crowd of immigrants queued up to see Slava Tsukerman’s film Liquid Sky. The Americans asked them what language they were speaking. Russian, they were told. The immigrants were amused. “They think we’re Russian. But when the Russians are here” – this was a faddish turn of phrase: the “imminent” Soviet invasion was then a popular theme in films and on TV – “they’ll be shocked. ‘What sort of Russians are these?’ they’ll say. ‘Russians have black hair and big noses. Who are these blond, snub-nosed dudes on tanks?!’”
The sense of superiority was complete. Not only were “we” smarter than “them,” we were also stronger. When the time came, “our” boys would show “theirs.” Plus, the “aborigines” had no sense of humour: they didn’t understand our jokes! Alas, the only thing funny about the jokes was the English of the people telling the jokes, but the Americans tactfully refrained from laughing at that.
An acquaintance of mine is baffled that his sketches, true to the best traditions of late-Soviet-era humorist Mikhail Zhvanetsky, don’t make Americans laugh. But the fact is that he hasn’t bothered to anglicize his fair to middling yarns and puns, not to mention the exotic Soviet realia in them. He assumes, apparently, that what’s funny in Odessa is funny in L.A.
Even Dostoevsky has fared poorly in translation. My favourite line of Svidrigailov’s is Esli vy ubezhdeny, chto u dverei nel’zia podslushivat’, a starushonok mozhno lushchit’ chem popalo, v svoe udovol’stvie . . . (“If you’re convinced that one can’t eavesdrop through doors, but old biddies can be cracked with whatever comes to hand, at your pleasure . . .”). In the respectable Norton edition of Crime and Punishment this line is rendered as follows: “If you are so sure that one can’t listen at doors, but any old woman you like can be knocked on the head . . .” The preface to this edition informs us that the translation by so-and-so (I mercifully omit the translator’s name here) is quite faithful and eminently readable.
As a consequence of such homogenisation, Dostoevsky appears to American readers as a lachrymosely gloomy philosopher, utterly devoid of humour. In any case, his translators don’t permit the slightest shade of Dostoevsky’s real humour to darken readers’ doors. The loss of an entire stylistic layer, however, not only impoverishes the text, it also as it were raises Dostoevsky in the world literary rankings, making him more highbrow.
Of course, lazy and incurious translators are to blame for many distortions. Often, however, a translator runs up against genuinely insurmountable linguistic barriers. For example, there is this famous passage from Gogol’s Overcoat: S etikh por . . . kak budto on zhenilsia . . . kak budto on byl ne odin, a kakaia-to priiatnaia podruga zhizni soglasilas’ s nim prokhodit’ vmeste zhiznennuiu dorogu, – i podruga eta byla ne kto drugaia, kak ta zhe shinel’ na tolstoi vate . . . (“From that moment on . . . it was if he’d married . . . as if he weren’t alone, but some pleasant soul mate had consented to walk down life’s road with him—and this soul mate was none other than that very overcoat with its thick cotton wool lining . . .”). In English translation, the passage inevitably loses the Freudian overtones of the original because English nouns lack the category of gender. In Russian, Bashmachkin’s imaginary “soul mate” (podruga) and his “overcoat” (shinel’) are both feminine nouns and thus metaphorically equivalent. (It’s no wonder that Americans find it so easy to be P.C. when it comes to gender. They just change “he” to “s/he,” and that’s that. There’s no need to bother putting verbs and adjectives into agreement with their subjects.)
A textbook example of a metaphor’s grammatical castration is the fate of the spruce tree, in Lermontov’s renowned translation of Heine’s “Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam.” In the German, the spruce – ein Fichtenbaum – is masculine in gender. Lermontov’s rendering – sosna (“pine tree”) – makes it feminine, just like the distant palm tree (in German, eine Palme; in Russian, pal’ma) it dreams of. Tiutchev substituted a cedar (kedr, a masculine noun) for the spruce, but his translation of the poem is less popular. It’s true, though, that nowadays a love affair between two females wouldn’t raise any eyebrows.
As I’ve learned from an article I recently read, a similar morphological castration is performed in the Russian translation of Constantine Cavafy’s “The Mirror in the Front Hall.” The poem ends with a description of an old mirror’s erotic admiration of the beautiful young man reflected in it. In the original Greek, “mirror” (καθρέπτησ) is masculine in gender, and the gist of the ending is in this sudden homoerotic turn of events. In the article I read, this fact is only hinted at, while Cavafy’s sexual orientation is prudishly glossed over.
Let’s return, however, to the paradox of a text’s “upward mobility” via its impoverishment. The damage is particularly heavy when the specific language of a particular artistic medium (poetry, painting, music) is translated into a common culture lingua franca. This is what always happens when a work ends up in the hands of “outsiders” – that is, in the competence of the institutions charged with supporting, distributing, teaching, and canonizing art, institutions which ordinarily are deaf to the strictly artistic nature of the work itself. If the work is projected into the social realm, its ideological effects are emphasised, while if it’s co-opted into pop culture or adapted for the big screen, the focus is on the plot or on visual effects. If it’s being taught at university, attention is paid to discourse. And so on.
Telling in this regard is the story of the famous Bolshoi dancer Vakhtang Chabukiani’s homecoming to the Tbilisi stage, in the late 50s. It was standing room only in the Rustaveli Theatre every night. The dancer’s fans also gathered in the hallways, in the lobby, on the staircase, and in the streets, passing to each other verbal reports of every phenomenal pas he performed on stage. This rendering of ballet’s fireworks into the flavourless language of approval and exclamation demonstrates in pure form the essence of public recognition. Chabukiani’s art elicited a simple albeit vicarious “Wow!” Isn’t it this that Pasternak had in mind when he wrote that art’s ultimate content is the witness it gives to power – to the power that generates art, that is concentrated within art, and that is transmitted via art?
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Sofia Coppola’s film Lost in Translation (which lent its name to this section of the magazine) was shown as Trudnosti perevoda (“Difficulties of Translation”) in Russian theatres. The distance of the Russian title from the original exemplifies these difficulties themselves. First of all, the allusion to Robert Frost’s famous definition—“Poetry is what gets lost in translation”—is lost. Moreover, in English, “lost (in)” evokes other set phrases and potential titles – “lost in thought,” “lost in New York,” “lost in the jungle,” etc. – all of them lost in Trudnosti perevoda.
But of course the film’s distributors accept this loss—in order to gain access to the Russian moviegoer. As with the American version of Dostoevsky, what we lose in quality – to paraphrase the conman Ostap Bender (in Ilf and Petrov’s Twelve Chairs) – we get back in speed. // Alexander Zholkovsky
