Grappling with a work of classical literature poses one extra difficulty for a translator – the author of the work is no longer available for questioning.
It must be a rare work of fiction which has not raised questions of various kinds in the minds of its readers. With authors who are alive and available, a translator can seek clarification on any point which raises doubts, defies comprehension or would deepen the translator’s understanding of context, background and characters’ motivations. Apparent inconsistencies may also arise, especially in a work which has been written over an extended period of time – sometimes over several years. In this connection, it is worth recalling that before the advent of word processing, and even the now extinct typewriter, books were written by hand, and checking several hundred handwritten pages with all their marginal annotations, insertions and deletions for inconsistencies would have been a task of an entirely different order of difficulty in mid-nineteenth-century Russia.
One such question would be: “Ivan Alexandrovich, why did you choose this title for the book?”
The Title
Goncharov gave this novel the title of Обыкновенная История, literally “Ordinary story” (Russian doesn’t use articles), traditionally translated as A Common Story. Since he gave all his three novels titles beginning with the two letters Об– (Ob–), it might be thought that that helps to explain this title. However, that theory is undermined by the fact that this was his first novel, and his choice of these two letters is thus unlikely to have been influenced by the fact that his two later novels also bore titles beginning with those letters.
I don’t believe any direct evidence has emerged to explain his reason for beginning all three titles with “Ob–”, although it has been surmised that because his first novel was so successful, he might have stuck with these two letters for some talismanic reason – as some kind of good-luck charm – in the same spirit in which some professional athletes make a point of wearing the same talismanic garment which they wore for their first successful performance.
However that may be, it still leaves unsolved a deeper mystery, namely why he called it A Common Story at all. If one were to canvass the opinions of ten people who had read the book, and asked them what they thought was “common” or “ordinary” about the story, I wonder how many of those opinions would be the same. Of course, the answers offered by Goncharov’s Russian-speaking contemporaries would be much more illuminating, relevant and valid than those of today’s English-speaking readers of a translation, who might very well find a great deal about the geographical, historical and social setting of the story anything but “ordinary” – and, of course, it was anything but those aspects which the author had in mind when he chose the title. Goncharov’s contemporaries would not have been sidetracked in that way. What was it about the story as such, rather than its setting, that influenced the author in his choice of title, and that he thought was “ordinary”?
The only inkling I have been able to glean, which might shed some light on what he meant by the title, was from one of the numerous passages of dialogue between Alexander Aduyev and his uncle Pyotr Ivanych.
Alexander has come to see his uncle, and is bursting to tell him how he has fallen in love and is delirious with happiness. Pyotr Ivanych has neither the time nor the patience to hear him out, and proposes in order to save time that he should tell that story to Alexander instead of the other way round. Alexander is totally baffled.
His uncle then proceeds to recount in some detail the sequence of events leading to his nephew’s state of seventh-heaven bliss with such devastating accuracy that Alexander’s first thought is to accuse his uncle of spying on him. Pyotr Ivanych dismisses that accusation and explains:
“It stands to reason; it’s been the same old story since Adam and Eve – with slight variations. Once you know the character of the dramatis personae you can predict the variations.”
Unforeseen / Unforeseeable Recurrence
An example. When the expression “искренние излияния” (“iskrenniye izliyaniya”; dictionary definition: “sincere outpourings”) occurs for the first time, you, the translator, try to find the best solution in that instance. Subsequently, it recurs time and again and you realize that it has taken on a talismanic significance, and has become a leitmotif, and you have to reappraise it in this new light. But you don’t remember how you translated it previously, and – because there was no way of predicting the frequency of its recurrence or its importance as a leitmotif, it never occurred to you to keep a record of it. In that case, you have to go back, search for and gather together all occurrences, and ensure that they are all given the identical translation – which may or may not be the one you originally decided on. So, you must decide either to bring all the subsequent choices into line with that, or to find a translation which better accords with the use made of that expression by the down-to-earth and pragmatic Pyotr Ivanych to mock and deride his nephew’s high-flown and florid locutions, along with his idealistic illusions and the conduct that accompanies them.
QUOTATIONS
What to do about quotations in general? Is it part of the translator’s task to track down their origins – author and work? Well, the author whose work you are translating didn’t provide this service to his readers, so why should you? Since your author didn’t feel it necessary to do so, it can be inferred that he felt he was safe in assuming that the quotation in question would have been familiar to his readers. Should then the readers of the translation, who can largely be assumed not to be familiar with them, be left without this information, which would help to level the cultural playing field for them? Or should the translator take that extra step and supply it for them? This step, however, may be the beginning of the slippery slope of crossing the frontier into editorializing or exegesis, and should be left to the discretion of publishers and their editors, especially taking into account that the reader is also left in the cultural dark by the far greater number of opaque allusions – which inevitably crop up in a work aimed at a readership in an alien culture, and also far removed in time.
Readers of contemporary fiction translated into English rarely enjoy the benefit of such cultural playing-field-levelling information. Whether they actively feel the lack of it is a moot point. It may well be that what is true in so many other areas of life is also true here – namely that when you are not conditioned to expect something, you don’t miss it if you don’t get it. A case in point is the recent smash-hit bestseller trilogy by Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, so smoothly translated , and so free of the distractions just described, that it would not surprise me if a large number of readers of its English version were virtually oblivious to the fact that it was a translation that they were reading, in spite of the fact that it contains many allusions to Swedish life and culture which would elude them. Interestingly, its original title, Men Who Hate Women, was for some reason clearly considered inappropriate for English-speaking readers.
If it should be objected that I am comparing apples with oranges, I would concede only that, in fact, the comparison is between different varieties of apple.
QUOTATIONS IN VERSE – WHICH OCCUR FREQUENTLY IN THE SAME OLD STORY
The extra problem posed is not the same as the problem which faces a translator who undertakes the entirely different task of translating the whole of the original poem from which these passages have been taken.
The choice is essentially between a version in prose or in verse.
However, in the case of these isolated excerpts, it is clear to me that priority should be given to presenting the sense of the passage to your readers so that they can understand its relevance to the surrounding context. Any attempt to render the passage in verse in order to preserve the style, charm, humour, beauty, quirkiness or any other aesthetic value of the original – especially if it rhymes – would inevitably be at the expense of the sheer meaning and releva
nce of the quotation to its context.
“Being Faithful to the Original”
An elevated and noble-sounding precept, but like so many such, it tends to crumble under closer inspection and disintegrate under a microscope. To wit.
One reader wrote to offer a commendation of the Oblomov translation, but with a gentle sting in its tail, he asked: “Can it be true that an illiterate servant girl could quote Alexander Pope? She says: ‘For fools rush in where angels fear to tread’. No doubt, Goncharov knew this; has he put ‘it’ in the wrong mouth?”
An adequate response to this comment, on the face of it a perfectly legitimate one, means spelling out, or peeling off, the layers of a translator’s thought processes as he or she mediates between what some describe as “remaining faithful to the original” and what fewer have described as “faithfully serving the readers”, by transmitting something that will make perfect and accessible sense to them in their own language, will not jar, stop the flow or leave the reader puzzled or baffled, while remaining “faithful” to the author’s thought, as well as, in this case, couched in the original epigrammatic or proverbial form chosen by the author.
By “it” did that reader mean the saying he quotes in English? If so, there is no evidence whether Goncharov knew “it” or not, since his original Russian expression “Для дураков закон не записан” (“dlya durakov zakon nye zapisan”) literally translated becomes: “For fools [the] law is not written.” This expression is a sawn-off version of a longer “winged utterance”, as such locutions are known in Russian, in the same way that “As fools rush in” is a sawn-off version of its original. Illiterates, be they servants or not, girls or not, are probably just as likely to make use of figures of speech, proverbs and other “winged utterances” as any other native speakers of their language. English speakers grow up absorbing and using a great number of them which originated in the Bible and the works of Shakespeare, without necessarily having read, or being able to read, either.
When it comes to rendering “sayings”, many – often conflicting – factors enter into the equation, and the result is always a trade-off. Some “purists” or “extremists” might advocate staying “faithful to the original”. A recent, oft-quoted example would be the rendering of a certain original Russian expression as “drinking up his trousers”, which has been justified precisely by invoking the precept of “faithfulness to the original”, although its actual effect is simply that of dumbfounding any “literate English servant girl” who may happen to be reading it. She might, of course, be comforted to learn that it was “faithful to the original” (“пропил брюки” – “propil bryuky”). An equally extreme example of following this precept would be to translate literally into Russian the expression “he’s lost his marbles” or a figurative expression which was once used at the United Nations about President Reagan’s tax proposal: “Everyone was wondering whether he was going to run or pass, but in the end he punted”, sowing no little consternation among the interpreters.
It seems to me that the reductio ad absurdum of this approach would be simply to transliterate the whole text of a Russian original into the reader’s native alphabet – what could be more “faithful” or “closer to the original”?
Here is a further example of a literary translation problem of a different order, which challenges (or should challenge) the translator.
Translating the ipsissima verba (that is, the “raw material”) of the original, even correctly, is often a far cry from delivering it in “processed” form – that is, in a form which makes sense of those words to a contemporary English-speaking reader – and as close as possible to the sense in which they would have been understood by the Russian-speaking contemporaries of the author.
At a certain point in the story, the author tells us that in the aftermath of a failed love affair which leaves an embittered Alexander in its wake, he, Alexander, has written a novella which, according to Goncharov, is about “ordinary people”, and depicts them as liars, cheats, dissemblers and hypocrites with, apparently, no redeeming features. The sentence immediately following this is a comment by the author – which, translated literally and correctly, reads: “Everything was appropriate, and in its proper place.”
How does this apparent contradiction square with the sentence it follows?
And: “What on earth are readers of the translation going to make of it?”
I have canvassed the opinions of one or two native Russian speakers, and they read into the words a certain irony on the part of the author, Goncharov, at the expense of Alexander, the author of the novella, and may in fact be a “put-down” – in spite of the fact that the actual words, taken at face value, amount to commendation rather than a snide criticism.
In the event, my judgement call, or trade-off, was to leave the ipsissima verba exactly the way they are. Any other course would have been tantamount to an editorial comment or a lengthy footnote along the very lines of what I have just written.
“Straightforward Russian Words”
– and “Straying from Them”
A reviewer of Oblomov wrote: “Purists may object that Pearl has strayed too far from what are often straightforward Russian words.” Again, the only way of responding to this comment is to invite the “purists” into the labyrinth of the translator’s thought processes as he deconstructs the seemingly innocent and unexceptionable expression “straightforward Russian words”.
Clearly, here the reviewer is dissociating himself from this stricture. Whether the three words in question are his own, or the words of one of the “purists”, they require a great deal of elucidation, and would benefit greatly from reference to specific examples. Part of the problem lies precisely in the use of the word “words”. To put it briefly, the stricture implies that it is individual words that have to be translated, rather than a sequence of words in the form of a phrase or a sentence – especially in the course of literary translation, rather than, say, the Canadian weather forecast – one of the first machine translations (between English and French) to survive the process intact and usable. How one translates individual “words” depends heavily in their immediate as well as their larger context.
Furthermore, the notion of “straightforward” is not at all “straightforward”.
Even such an apparently “straightforward” word as an everyday concrete object like “кран” (“kran”) not only warrants half a dozen equivalents in my Russian-English dictionary, but even there its immediate context changes and determines its translation. No doubt the first English word that would come to any translator’s mind would be “tap”, but even this does not go without saying because of the peculiar feature of “English” as the world’s dominant language. “Tap” would not be the word that would come to an American translator’s mind. It would be “faucet”. I have no idea what it would be in the case of a Caribbean, Australian, Philippine or Indian translator.
As to the “immediate context” factor, my dictionary offers the following examples: “пожарный кран” (“fire cock”), “водоразборный кран” (“hydrant”), “плавучий кран” (“floating crane”), “подъёмный кран” (“hoisting crane”). A translator would have to travel very far afield to come up with the correct term for kran in all these different “immediate contexts”.
At the opposite extreme (whatever may be thought to be the opposite of “straightforward”) are chameleon, or “blank-cheque” words like “условный” (“uslovniy”), “вообще” (“voobshche”) and “деятель” (“deyatyel”), which cannot possibly offer an obvious, “straightforward” English equivalent. For “uslovniy”, dictionaries usually offer a choice of three “words” – “conditionally”, “provisionally” and “conventionally”, which could not be further from being exhaustive. On my list of “blank-cheque” words (that is, words whose “amount” is waiting to be
filled in according to context value), “uslovno” is one of the “blankest”, along with “voobshche”. Would the failure by a translator to translate “voobshche”, as “in general” or “on the whole” (as Tass translators did as a matter of course – and wrongly – in Soviet times), or “uslovniy” as “conditional”, “provisional” or “conventional”, be regarded accordingly as “straying too far…”? Dogs can only be described as having “strayed too far” if they have broken free of the leash by which they have been tethered, but the distance they are “free” to travel depends on the length of their leash. In the case of “straightforward Russian words”, the length of the leash varies – and varies considerably – depending on how “straightforward” they really are, not to mention the immediate context in which they are embedded. With a word like “тоска” (“toska”), even the tersest of Russian-English dictionaries can hardly offer fewer than seven “equivalents”. Smirnitsky has sixteen! And, it must be said, even these do not cover the whole spectrum of the nuances of this all-encompassing emotion or mood to which the Russian “soul” is so sensitive – and prone.
As an example of how unstraightforward a “straightforward Russian word” can become when it comes to translating it for readers or an audience, here is a case in point.
The “простокваша” (“prostokvasha”) problem
As a Russian word, this one is about as straightforward as they come.
And the problem?
First of all, it took this translator a good forty minutes of research to come up with its “straightforward” meaning in English, namely one of the many variations on the theme of “soured milk” which bulk so large in Russian cuisine.
The Same Old Story Page 43
