Digested Dostoevsky

I can't resist offering a quick 'digested read' of Crime and Punishment: not of the book itself, but of the introductory essay to his new Penguin translation of Dostoevsky's novel by Oliver Ready. The three-page spread dominates today's TLS, boosted by one of Mikhail Shemiakin's surreal illustrations (also used for the new translation) on the front cover.

Keen Dostoevsky watchers will be aware that this translation comes out on Feb 27th, and that there will be a formal launch in Pushkin House, London, in the same month. Alas, my current location on the Jurassic Coast - as paleontologically appropriate as it is geographically remote - prevents me from galumphing down to London for this star-studded event. Yet Crime and Punishment is more than ever on my mind as I'm once again teaching it to undergraduates, using the David McDuff translation (Oliver's immediate predecessor at Penguin). So I devoured Oliver's TLS essay instead of dinner, most of which my dinosaur hatchling managed to steal unobserved.

This is a genuinely interesting essay which manages to speak to both the academic and the general reader. It situates Crime and Punishment in its historical, political, and philosophical context as well as any previous translator's introduction, with intriguing snapshots of the elderly Tolstoy as 'aggressively teetotal' (because he ascribes Raskolnikov's mental confusion to that beer he downs with Marmeladov), of Pisarev and Chernyshevsky as hard-bitten types for whom prison was, ominously, 'more than a metaphor'. Dostoevsky managed to pastiche and plagiarize the words and slogans of the latter two in his novel: hence the contemporary perception of Raskolnikov's moral dilemma as hackneyed, even trite. Risking even greater triteness, no introduction to the novel can avoid taxonomising the murderer's motives. Oliver not only minimizes the inevitable recapitulation of these, he proposes a new condition (rather than a motive per se) which makes the murder inevitable: pathological passivity.

This passivity is a state of spiritual death, and that is what enables the crime. Dostoevsky shows how a man who feels as if he is not alive and not truly capable of affecting reality will affect it for precisely that reason – and with catastrophic results. In his own estranged perception, not only is his sense of his own reality attenuated, so too is his sense of the reality of his fellow human beings, and of the boundaries between separate lives. The eerie astonishment that overcomes Raskolnikov throughout his crime is the eeriness of a dead man meeting and muffling life.

To understand the source of this self-suffocation in a talented and vital young man, Oliver argues, would be to answer the true '“enigma”' of the novel.

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Oliver's big take-home point is that Crime and Punishment is a profoundly 'self-reflexive' novel, a text obsessed with its own textuality, imbricated in a modern genealogy of self-referential literature:

Raskolnikov is himself a textual sleuth, an inveterate literary critic. Before and after his crime he shows an uncommon analytical interest in written communications, which are shared with the reader in their entirety: a ten-page letter from his mother, a much curter missive from his sister’s odious suitor. He reads between the lines (thereby encouraging us, as readers, to do the same) and judges character by style, surprising those around him by picking on apparently trivial choices of words and phrase at moments when far weightier issues seem to be at stake. For Raskolnikov, life is a text to be understood, and even, at times, a text that has already been written.

Finally, Oliver manages to throw new light on Dostoevsky, reminding us how poorly we understand his true intentions and beliefs while mentioning the access we do have through Dostoevsky's various pseudonymous commentaries in Diary of a Writer and his letters to his brother Mikhail (his 'soulmate') and others. To some extent, this opacity is the consequence of the 'strategy of ambivalence' Dostoevsky practised in both art and life. As tactfully as a Hello! photographer, Oliver allows his subject to slip away, facade intact, at the end of his essay: as the last fascicles of Crime and Punishment are bound for Russian Messenger, Dostoevsky and his new bride Anna Snitkina disappear into the sunset.

Crime in Translation, or Fibbing like a Horse

Me and the Capitol

To my regret, no blogging has happened for a while - I have been lecturing and world travelling (if successive trips to Norway, Ireland, and Washington DC qualify as such), and my adventures left me very little time to write. But tonight I attended two unrelated and very disparate cultural events which sent me back to my keyboard.

The first was a talk by Oxford-based academic and translator Oliver Ready. Oliver is currently revising his forthcoming translation of Crime and Punishment, and he spoke to the Russian Graduate Seminar about his travails. Oliver's talk pointed up some general, almost philosophical issues faced by all translators as well as some Dostoevsky-specific problems. His title, for instance, 'Suddenly, Somehow, Even - On Retranslating Crime and Punishment', emphasized the misleadingly superfluous, apparently almost meaningless adverbial qualifiers and particles with which Dostoevsky scatters his prose. 'Dazhe', meaning 'even', is a favourite in Crime and Punishment; I seem to remember that 'davecha', 'just now', abounds throughout The Idiot. But do these words deserve translation, and, further, do they deserve a literal (equally meaningless) translation? Or should the translator choose to reduce and/or intensify them in order to achieve a more coherent paragraph? Similarly, should Dostoevsky's tendency to recycle different versions of the same verb, or cognates of the same root, in a single paragraph or sentence be reinforced or amended by the translator? And a very Russian conundrum - if different aspects of one verb are used in a single sentence, should they be translated by different verbs in English, or by different tenses of the same verb?

Oliver Ready

Oliver revealed that he keeps, perforce, a personal dictionary of Dostoevsky's 'fillers' - the 'suddenlys', 'somehows', and 'evens' - in order to make his translations consistent. Overall, any translator has to choose whether to accept the apparent incoherence, or the lexical limitation, as a deliberate aesthetic effect of a given text - or whether to 'correct' it. With Dostoevsky's writing, in addition to this nearly ethical responsibility, should we ascribe the hurried, jumbled style and plot to the pressures the writer suffered? Or, alternately, were they deliberately calculated to enthrall, confuse, and even moderately torment the reader? Was Dostoevsky a divinely inspired vaticinator, or just another talented hack with a deadline?  Literary scholars locked horns over this long ago, and the innocent translator risks getting trapped in a fight with no winners.

A general problem affecting nineteenth-century classics: whether the translation should provide matching 'vintage' style (as David McDuff apparently opted to do in his 1991 Penguin Classics translation, which has a consciously Dickensian, and therefore relatively verbose, tone) or whether it should be updated, risking anachronism. Oliver, to his credit, hasn't picked - yet - a single narrative tone for a novel that (he claims) still lacks a definitive English translation. Nor does he yet have final or consistent answers to the many specific translation problems that he posed. What he did offer, intriguingly, was a selection of choice passages from Crime and Punishment - followed by different translators' efforts to convey their meaning. This was a revealing and often amusing exercise. For instance, here's Razumikhin on 'lying like a horse':

• 'Ну, конечно, бабушкин сон рассказывает, врет как лошадь, потому я этого Душкина знаю’
• Garnett: ‘Of course, that's all taradiddle; he lies like a horse, for I know this Dushkin’
• Pevear/Volokhonsky: ‘Well, of course, that’s all his old granny’s dream, he’s lying like a rug’
• McDuff: ‘Well, of course, this was all a load of moonshine, he was lying like a horse’
• Oliver: ‘Well, this is all just an old woman’s dream, of course; he’s fibbing like a horse’.

The idiom of the mendacious equine sounds bizarre, and seems to lack precedents in either Russian or English; but as Oliver pointed out, the horse, whether truthful or not, is a central image in the novel (and certainly shouldn't be prematurely converted into a rug).  

Perhaps one of the most important findings expressed in Oliver's talk was the significance of just such isolated words - such as 'delo', 'business' or 'matter', and 'konets', meaning 'end' - as markers of hidden purpose in the many-layered fabric of C and P. These recurring individual words, and their cognates, carry greater meaning than the rapid reader or the careless translator ever suspects. They betray the secret, unrealized obsessions of characters; their lexical shifts reflect psychological transitions, and they may point the way to ethical resolutions. Repetitiousness - one of Dostoevsky's most publicly criticized failings - may in fact be central to his moral and psychological message. Oliver retold the old Russian joke about this particular novel: 'Not to have read it is a crime, and reading it, is the punishment'. From what I've heard to date, I'm convinced that his new translation will take the punishment out of the sentence (if not yet out of the title).

My second cultural adventure of the day - a trip to the cinema to see a performance of John Hodge's new play The Collaborators, beamed in from the National Theatre - will have to wait for its own post. Don't bring impressionable young Bulgakov fans to see this play, however; they may throw stones.