But, since it was the one and only dish being served by his hostess for his supper to an honoured guest of higher social rank who was showing a promising interest in her unmarried daughter, it was hard for me to believe that this meal really consisted entirely of some form of soured cream. However, all my sources concurred in this definition, and I felt that readers of the translation would also find such ungenerous and grudging hospitality a baffling incongruity, especially since the Count, the guest in question, is then described as eating it with a hearty appetite.
Further research revealed that it would not have been at all uncommon, in that society and at that time, for this dish alone to be served as the last meal of the day – partly, I believe, on the grounds that this kind of dairy product was good for the digestion. Feeling, as I did, that a lengthy footnote to this effect would be too much of distraction to the reader, I decided to compromise with a word which, although on the archaic side, would at least be recognizable to the reader – if only because of Miss Muffet – and was at least in close culinary and semantic proximity to “prostokvasha”.
Now that food has reared its ugly head, something should be said about some of the other…
Specifics of Everyday Life
In nineteenth-century Russia, people travelled in a wide variety of vehicles, practically none of which have counterparts in the English-speaking world today – except for trains in the latter part of the century. Since these conveyances are for the most part mentioned purely for the narrative purpose of getting the dramatis personae from one place to another, and it is clear that they have wheels (runners in winter) and are drawn by horses, and are driven by coachmen rather than their owners, and come in almost as bewildering a variety as the cars we travel in today, I believe that readers rarely need to be told anything else about them. If they did need to know, only an illustration, or a paragraph-length description would serve the none-too-relevant purpose.
They also wore a wide variety of garments, only some of which happen to coincide with or resemble what today’s English speakers are wearing, while there are other items of clothing which simply have no counterpart today in the target culture, partly because of climatic differences, partly because of changes of fashion and mores, and partly because modern English-speaking countries have long since shed their peasantry.
Dialogue
…which is one of Goncharov’s great strengths, and which figures prominently in this novel, poses distinctive problems of its own.
To mention but one: sometimes, in dialogue, Russian can be very elliptical and laconic, but an interlocutor of the relevant time and place would have enjoyed the benefit of the speaker’s tone, intonation, gestures, facial expression and body language in order to capture the full flavour of the words themselves. Therefore, in order to offset that disadvantage, and to maintain equivalence, more – sometimes many more – words have to be used in the translation.
* * *
Have you ever found yourself reading a book for the second time, and noticing things you missed the first time – as happens with plays and films? And it’s not just the things that you consciously skipped – or skimmed – the first time!
I had read this book several years before, but in the course of translating it, I was astonished to discover that my memory of it was not only impressionist, but positively pointillist – actually, more like a particularly porous sieve!
I come away from this experience with the profound conviction that you haven’t really read a book unless you’ve translated it!
Acknowledgements
My heartfelt gratitude to Margarita Razenkova, whose unstinting, tireless, loyal and painstaking assistance went far beyond the call of duty.
Many thanks to Victor Prokofiev, Oleg Semyonov and Marina Kuzina for their corroboration and guidance at moments of doubt.
And belated thanks here, instead of at the right time and in the right place, to my good friend, Jennifer Klopp, for her contribution to my work on Oblomov.
The publisher would like to thank the Institute for Literary Translation, Russia – in particular Evgeniy Reznichenko and Maria Skachkova – for making this project possible.
The Same Old Story Page 44
