"Playfulness and Beauty": Bryan Karetnyk on Translating Gazdanov

Russian Dinosaur interviews translator Bryan Karetnyk

As regular readers know, this blog loves Gaito Gazdanov, one of the most important - and least remembered - of Russian émigré novelists. Previous posts include this guest post by Gazdanov translator Justin Doherty, and my review of Bryan Karetnyk's version of The Spectre of Alexander Wolf (Pushkin Press, 2013). I'm therefore delighted to follow these up by interviewing Bryan Karetnyk himself. I believe in resisting extinction: Bryan K does just this on a literary scale, by turning a largely forgotten Russian writer into a contemporary publishing success. His Spectre garnered some splendid reviews, notably in the Guardian, the LRB, and the Independent. His translation of Gazdanov's 1950 novel The Buddha's Return (Возвращение Будды) is just out with Pushkin Press.

Bryan, welcome to the blog! Your work as a translator is very much in harmony with our interests. But what led you to choose Russian translation as a career? Tell us about your background.

Thank you for inviting me! As your more eagle-eyed readers will have no doubt spotted, my surname is a bit of a give-away. I have mixed Russian–Ukrainian heritage, and so on account of a youthful passion for language and literature, I went to read Russian (and Japanese) at Edinburgh. Since graduating, I’ve worked in various guises as a translator, and three years ago I moved into publishing, as an editor, with a large focus on classic and contemporary literature in translation, so the various strands have come together quite nicely over the past few years.

Why Gaito Gazdanov?

The literature of the Russian emigration has always fascinated me. I first came to this through Nabokov – without a doubt the best-known literary figure among Russian émigré authors, although he is now often considered apart from them because of his later success. I first came across Gazdanov while reading Nabokov’s ‘Torpid Smoke’, and immediately began to wonder about the identity of this author with a strange-sounding name, who merited a mention in Nabokov’s short story. By a chance collusion of events (a very Gazdanovian one, come to think of it), a month or so later, while browsing in a Russian bookshop in London, I came across the small Azbuka edition of Gazdanov’s first novel An Evening with Claire.

Gaito Gazdanov

I loved it and soon began tracking down editions of his other novels and short stories. I suppose what captivated my interest in Gazdanov’s work was not only the stories he tells and the way in which he tells them, but also the latent mix of autobiography and fiction in his writing. Gazdanov’s own life was fascinating, and he weaves so many aspects of it into a number of his works; more than that, he was an extremely complex figure, a man whose own life story went through so many of the vicissitudes that his characters endure, a man whose history contains so much by way of contrast and contradiction.

You’ve now translated two Gazdanov novels. What are the most difficult aspects of working with his prose? What do you find most rewarding?

A number of points in both respects can be made here. First, and more generally, I suppose, is trying to convey the particular rhythm and cadences of Gazdanov’s prose. We often see lengthy, complex, and often philosophical excursions contrasted against airy, often ironic and very well-characterised dialogue. Secondly, almost without exception, Gazdanov’s works are set predominantly in France, often among Russian expatriates living there; the characters slip in and out of French and much of the dialogue, at least notionally if not literally, takes place in French. (After years of living in Paris, Gazdanov acquired an exceptionally good command of French idiom.) In many ways, though, this can give a translator more options to play with: a particularly pleasing example came in The Buddha’s Return, where a night-club by the name ‘Золотая Звезда’ figures; after initially worrying that ‘The Golden Star’ sounded rather like a pub in East Anglia, it struck me that a French name, ‘L’Etoile d’Or’, would be much more appropriate – and far less pub-like.

You’ve published both your Gazdanov translations with Pushkin Press, a small but highly regarded publisher very active in publicizing less well-known authors from Antal Szerb to Teffi. How did you and Pushkin Press find each other?

 
They’re certainly a fantastic publisher to work with, and I can’t thank the whole team enough for having had such faith in Gazdanov and me from the very outset. As it happens, I’d been working with Pushkin for some time, even before Gazdanov came onto the scene. After the major success of Rosemarie Tietze’s translation of The Spectre of Alexander Wolf in Germany in 2012, we began to discuss the possibility of reintroducing him to the English-speaking world in a new translation, and things progressed from there.

You have worked in publishing yourself. What do you think the future holds for small publishers like Pushkin, Angel Classics, Noise Trade or And Other Stories, to name a few? Will they remain financially viable? How can they adapt to changing markets?

Publishers naturally have a lot to compete with, and they continually have to keep readers excited and engaged. I think that for small indy publishers like those you mention the future looks promising, so long as they maintain a high degree of innovation and creativity, as well as a commitment to publishing the best fiction around. There’s so much excellent writing out there, classic and contemporary, home-grown and from further afield, and that’s precisely what all the publishers you mention do – and do very well at that.

Reacting to the eBook-versus-paper debate, of course, you have to innovate and adapt to the market and changing reading habits; I think Pushkin in particular have reacted well to this, apprehending the need for both high-quality production and beautiful design: to make people part with hard-earned cash, you have to offer them something that looks and feels as good as it is to read; their books, as well as those from And Other Stories, are universally acclaimed for their design as well as content. As far as eBooks are concerned, they can actually be a great asset to publishers, if only they embrace them: the production costs are relatively low in comparison with print publishing (effectively there’s only a single production cost): the rest is revenue. There are also a lot of innovative things that can be – and indeed is being – done with eBooks: for example, multimedia formats, dramatic readings, commentary and expanded apparatuses… Just look at the iPad app Faber produced for Eliot’s The Waste Land.

As a translator, what’s your philosophy?

  

You must have a certain degree of daring, I think. There are so many layers to a text: first, the author and his (or her) voice, but also how this voice has developed along the author’s career; secondly, the world created by the book itself, and where the book is situated within the author’s oeuvre; finally, the rhythms, cadences, semantics and aesthetics of the text – all of this has to be accounted for in some way in a translation.

In striving for this, I always hold close two principles: invisibility (of the translator) and mirroring (of the text). By mirroring, I mean that the translation ought to be a reflection of the original in as much as it can be: if something sounds odd in the original, the English should sound equally odd; if it’s obscene, then make the English obscene (but always beware that an eye for an eye isn’t always equal in the world of ‘verbal transmigration’!). If we take Gazdanov, for example, his writing is very much situated in a specific time, place and literary tradition; of course, no modern-day translator is going to be able to recreate the prose a contemporary English writer might have produced – to strive to do so would be folly, I think – but that doesn’t mean that a translation cannot suggest all these things; you can hint at them through word choice, phrasing, and so on. It’s all about finding the appropriate tone.

Who’s your favourite translator – living or dead?

Nabokov has to be a favourite, if only for his vision of what a translator ought to be; naturally, however, the vision and its result were quite different when it came to translating his own works. But then, there’s quite a different magic involved in self-translation, which is wholly admissible.
That aside, the two translators I’d have to point to are Anthea Bell and Len Rix. Any readers unfamiliar with Bell’s work need only digest her recent interview in the Guardian to see why: her work has been so prolific and consistently inspired over the years as to humble every aspiring translator. And it is to Len Rix that we owe so much for bringing Antal Szerb so elegantly and sensitively into the literature he loved so well – English.

Can you share your forthcoming projects? Do you have a wish list of would-be translatees?

Well, what I can hint at for the moment is that readers will be seeing even more Gazdanov in the not-too-distant future, so watch this space! As for would-be translatees, the world of Russian émigré literature is such a treasure-trove of largely forgotten, but top-drawer authors, many of whom I’d love to translate further down the line. It’s so good to see that publishers are now taking a serious interest in them, especially with recent publications like Subtly Worded, a collection of short stories by Teffi, expertly translated by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler, Anne Marie Jackson and others.

Do you have a favourite writer – not necessarily Russian? Or perhaps a (very short) shortlist of favourite writers? 

Apart from Gazdanov, naturally? I’d be hard pushed to name just one, but what draws me to an author or a work is a sense of playfulness and beauty in the use of language and form. I’d have to say, in no particular order: Bunin, Nabokov, Spark, Tanizaki and Waugh.

Bryan Karetnyk

Thank you, Bryan!

You can read Bryan Karetnyk's translation of a Gazdanov short story here on Pushkin Press's website.

                                          

Rewriting the Female Orgasm: Translating Gazdanov

I remember reading my first edition of The Ghost of Alexander Wolf (Prizrak Aleksandra Vol’fa), a smooth-bound tome from a multi-volume set of Gaito Gazdanov’s novels, in the public library of Krasnoyarsk. Having ordered this book purely because it had the word ‘ghost’ in its title, I persevered evening after long winter evening, verb-surfing my way through a crumbling Russian-Russian dictionary (probably because the Russian-English dictionary was missing), surrounded by student teachers bemusedly blunting their English on the best of George Moore and Jack London. I also remember buying my first Russian copy of the novel, in a magazine kiosk in a metro station under a major junction in Moscow’s Garden Ring. It was a compact green Azbuka Klassika edition, with a more or less entirely inappropriate front cover image of Dali’s Partial Hallucination: Six Ghosts of Lenin on a Piano (probably also chosen for the word ‘ghost’ in its title). I forgave Gazdanov the long dictionary chases, and his publishers the awful cover, because for no reason that made sense, I loved this book. Enter Pushkin Press, an innovative small British publisher. They print new translations of obscure, usually foreign writers (think Antal Szerb) in cunningly designed palm-sized editions with discreet French flaps and Baskerville type. Here was my beloved book, suddenly, in a new translation (as The Spectre of Alexander Wolf) – and this time, what a cover! A soldier drooping in crumpled uniform, a pale horse, a blasted tree, an open volume whose red ribbon trailed into a voluptuous trickle of blood – in other words, a rare cover by an illustrator who understood the book’s odd rhythm. I flipped tremblingly to the first page. How had the book's first line, ideal for tormenting first year translation students because of its multiple clauses and unrelenting cadence, been rendered?

Из всех моих воспоминаний, из всего бесконечного количества ощущений моей жизни самым тягостным было воспоминание о единственном убийстве, которое я совершил.

Of all my memories, of all my life’s innumerable sensations, the most onerous was that of the single murder I had committed. 

Onerous for тягостный! What a stroke of sheer good sense! Reader, I bought it –  planning to enjoy one of my favourite Russian novels in a new medium that apparently matched its unique (and more than slightly eccentric) mood. Alexander Wolf makes little sense: it’s probably the least organized of Gazdanov’s major novels. After that thunderclap of an opening, the narrator recedes almost two decades into the past to describe an incident in Crimea at the tail end of the Civil War. Chap A shoots Chap B (it is never quite clear why). Chap B, who is not in fact wounded, shoots and kills Chap A and rides off on Chap A’s horse. Much later, now working as a jobbing journalist in France, Chap B (our narrator) reads a short story which recounts the shooting from Chap A’s perspective. Chap B makes exceptional efforts to trace the author, one Alexander Wolf, only to draw a blank with the latter’s publisher, who assures him that Wolf cannot possibly be a Russian exile, as he is undoubtedly an Englishman; then adds enigmatically that it was a shame all the same that Chap B hadn’t aimed better. Meanwhile, Chap B meets a girl at a boxing match he's reporting, whom he doesn’t realize is also Russian until she tells him (one senses Chap B isn’t very good at accents). This is rather like Nina Lecerf/Rechnoy in Nabokov’s The Real Life of Sebastian Knight - a book which resonates with Alexander Wolf on several levels - whose Russian identity is only betrayed to the narrator by a trick involving an imaginary spider on her neck. Meanwhile, in a Russian restaurant, Chap B falls in with a garrulous exile called Voznesensky, who retells the events of the original  shooting from yet a third perspective, that of ‘Sasha Wolf’s’ anarchist comrade-in-arms. Chap B's relationship with the girl, Elena, becomes passionate, although she admits she’s in hiding from a former lover who almost drove her to suicide through morphine and nihilism. She also admits that she likes our narrator because he’s the emotional antithesis of her ex. Voznesensky, unaware of Chap B’s role in Sasha Wolf’s near-demise, introduces the two men – and the narrator confesses his role in their shared history to the pale, reserved, elegantly funereal Alexander Wolf. A peculiar confidence develops between the two men; Wolf admits he’s come to Paris to solve a ‘complex psychological problem’ by, if necessary, ‘destroying’ its cause. The denouement, as abrupt as it is predictable, is artificially delayed by a non sequitur straight out of the film noir genre: Chap B witnesses a dangerous criminal shot to death by les flics.  

Alexander Wolf is perhaps the least organized of Gazdanov’s novels because it strives to embody them all: the social history of Night Roads, the Parisian roman and émigré nostalgia of An Evening with Claire, the absurdity of The Buddha’s Return, even the tragicomedy of Pilgrims. Neither its barely coherent heterogeneity nor its abuse of happenstance have prevented me from loving this book. There is even a particular Russian restaurant on Oxford’s Cowley Road where I like to imagine a modern-day Voznesensky might sit, flirting with the waitresses, sluicing vodka with a generous hand, and recounting Crimean derring-do with his old pal Sasha Wolf. The Guardian critic, Nicholas Lezard, felt the same way when he read the Pushkin Press edition, calling it a 'masterpiece' that 'will stay with you for the rest of your life'.

Hence I approached Bryan Karetnyk’s new translation with the trepidation one always feels when one has taken prior ownership of an artwork. And, as usually happens, I was mildly disappointed. Karetnyk has done an extremely thorough job (he had to cope with блатный Parisian argot as well as Gazdanov's rolling clause structures), and I cannot fault him for accuracy nor, in the majority of cases, for style. He should also be praised simply for returning a neglected postwar minor classic to currency (as a translator of even more obscure Russian writers, I appreciate the work of others in the field!). But I felt that all too often for my taste, Karetnyk became hypnotized - for want of a better word - by Gazdanov's complex syntax. Instead of using transposition or modulation to simplify the sentence structures, Karetnyk tended to produce something either still more involved or more wooden-sounding than the original. For example, take this passage immediately following the opening sentence:

С той минуты, что оно произошло, я не помню дня, когда бы я не испытывал сожаления об  этом. Никакое наказание мне никогда не угрожало,так как это случилось в очень исключительных обстоятельствах и было ясно, что я не мог поступить иначе.Никто, кроме меня, вдобавок, не знал об этом.

Ever since the moment it happened, I cannot remember one day passing when I haven't regretted it. No punishment for it ever threatened me, because it occurred in the most exceptional of circumstances and it was clear that I couldn't have acted otherwise. Moreover, no one other than I knew about it. 


The tone of the original is stiffly declarative, like a formal deposition. Why, then, enhance the rigidity with slightly awkward units like 'one day passing' rather than 'a single day', 'no one other than I' for 'no-one else/no-one but me', and the 'of' in 'most exceptional of circumstances'? I found multiple similar instances where Karetnyk voluntarily lengthened or formalized Gazdanov's lexical structures . Similarly, conversation, although generally quite true to register, sometimes seemed unduly leaden. Here's Yelena barging in on the narrator in the latter's Parisian garret:

- Здравствуй, - сказала она, осматривая комнату, в которой я работал, - я хотела застать тебя врасплох и, может быть, в чьих-нибудь объятиях.

"Hello", she said, looking around the room where I was working. "I wanted to catch you unawares and, perhaps, in another woman's embrace."

The Russian mixes the colloquial (врасплох) with the archly high-toned (в чьих-нибудь объятиях); the English, to my ear, feels to match this playfulness. The three units of Yelena's raillery - 'catch you unawares', 'perhaps', and 'in another woman's embrace' - sound overly formal and somewhat unnatural. Too often, I feel, we tolerate and even praise translations that never quite settle into an equivalent narrative 'voice' in the target language, like an instrument that's slightly out of key. We assume that all foreign authors write English with an accent, and we silently make allowances for their 'handicap' (the way nineteenth-century readers had to accept that Tolstoy, Turgenev and Dostoevsky all wrote fluent Constance Garnett). Karetnyk's translation falls victim to this tendency, albeit occasionally and unevenly - and to do Karetnyk credit, in many cases he is simply exposing the occasional turgidity (dare I say it?) of Gazdanov's prose. Here's a 'naughty' bit that's a particularly good example:

Ее нельзя было назвать - по крайней  мере, по отношению ко мне - замечательной любовницей, у нее были медлительные физические реакции, и последние секунды объятий нередко заставляли ее испытывать какую-то внутреннюю боль, - и тогда глаза ее закрывались и лицо делало невольную гримасу. 

She could never be called - at least as far as I'm concerned - an excellent lover; her physical reactions were sluggish, and the final seconds of embrace frequently caused her to experience some sort of internal pain; next her eyes would close and her face would involuntarily grimace.

(Hmmm - I think that's called an orgasm). This sort of bemusedly clinical approach to female sexuality, and female behaviour generally, is common among twentieth-century male authors voiced by male narrators (C.P. Snow's Strangers and Brothers series is full of it, to give a random example). Far from blaming Karetnyk for the torpidity of those lines, he should be hailed for refusing to translate объятий (here 'embrace') as 'congress'. That would just be too much seventies sex manual. Forget Alexander - let's hope the spectre of Naomi Wolf never catches up with Gazdanov in the afterlife.

Nerds' Corner: Selected bibliography of Gazdanov's major works in translation

Вечер у Клэр (1929)
            Jodi Daynard, An Evening with Claire (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1988)
Ночные дороги (1939-41)

            Elena Balzamo, Chemins nocturnes (Paris: Viviane Hamy, 1991)
            Justin Doherty, Night Roads (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2009)

Призрак Александра Вольфа (1947-8)         
            Nicholas Wreden, The Specter of Alexander Wolf (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co, 1950)
            Jean Sendy, Le spectre d'Alexandre Wolf (Paris: R. Laffont, 1951)
            Miguel A. Calzada, El espectro de Alejandro Wolf (Barcelona: Luis de Carralt, 1955)
            Rosemarie Tietze, Das Phantom des Alexander Wolf (Büchergilde Gutenberg, 2012)

            Bryan Karetnyk, The Spectre of Alexander Wolf  (London: Pushkin Press, 2013)
Возвращение Будды (1949-50)
            Nicholas Wreden, Buddha's Return (New York: E.P. Dutton &Co, 1951)
            Chantal Le Brun Kéris, Le retour de Bouddha (Paris: V. Hamy, 2002)
            Bryan Karetnyk, The Buddha's Return  (London: Pushkin Press, 2013)

 

 

Drunk on Cake with Andrei Bitov

Andrei Bitov is very proud of the discreet brothel in the courtyard of his St Petersburg flat ("там публичный дом - только скрытый"). It was one of the dostoprimechatel'nosti (local sights) he pointed out as soon as I arrived, still in shock from the telephone summons that had interrupted my post-library coffee. What sort of present does one bring a famous Russian writer when unexpectedly invited v gosti? I had a feeling that nothing short of alcohol would do, but I was in a cake shop. Life is compromise: I bought the most liquor-sodden cake in the place, a decadent chocolate creation called 'Drunken Cherry' (Пьяная вишня), had it wrapped in a white box with a pink ribbon, and beetled off down Nevsky Prospect towards the Moscow Station end.

As Bitov and his daughter Anna Andreevna plied me with rich Turkish coffee and praised the Drunken Cherry, I extemporized two respectable if stodgy questions to justify my visit. First, what advice would Bitov give to my students, exploring Russian literature for the first time? Looking pleased, he said they should consider themselves privileged that the classics of the Golden Age were, relatively speaking, short and compact. The best of Pushkin fits in a slim volume; the best of Lermontov is a novel and a few poems; Griboedov is remembered for one play. While I was still processing this reversal of the usual aphorism (ars brevis...), Bitov went off on a tangent: the best writing in any culture, he argued (referring generously to Irish literature), emerges from under an oppressive imperial shadow, self-challenged to catch up with the rest of the world. Pushkin and his peers were catching up with Western Europe; today, the best late- and post-Soviet writers are vanquishing the ethnic invisibility imposed by Russian hegemony. He listed the Ossetian Gaito Gazdanov, the Kirghiz novelist Chingiz Aitmatov, the Armenian Grant Matevosian, and the Kazakh poet (akyn) Dzhambul Dzhabaev as great writers interpreting a post-imperial legacy. "I like to promote other authors; I've managed to reach the world stage (мировое пространство)", said Andrei Georgievich modestly, "but not everyone who deserves to can do that." He rejoices in his own (distant) Circassian forebears.
Second question: what advice would Bitov give to a novice novelist (me)? This nonplussed him slightly. When he learned I was planning a historical novel (what else would a dinosaur write?), he offered one piece of advice: make the facts read like fiction, and the fiction like reality. "In Russia, and especially in Petersburg, we have a natural advantage with that," he smiled wryly, and was off again on his historical hobbyhorse: we should never forget the small moments, the unsignposted junctions, that change destinies. Apparently, the idea of importing a Dagestani boulder to Pirogov in order to simultaneously commemorate Tolstoy's inspiration for Hadji Murat and the life of the eponymous warrior had been Bitov's: nor was this his first off-beat memorial. If I made it to Pushkin's estate at Mikhailovskoe, he told me, I'd see a small statue of a hare beside the road, marking another sally into quixotic historicism. If a hare hadn't startled Pushkin's horse in 1825 and convinced the mercurial poet to turn back from the Moscow road, Pushkin might have been implicated in the Decembrist revolt - and, at the very least, exiled to Siberia for the rest of his natural life. 
I found Bitov to be a courteous and irrepressibly charming man. He kindly remembered me from our brief introduction in Yasnaya Polyana the previous month. Moreover, his invitation came at a sad time in his life: his first wife, who had owned the flat where we met, had died two weeks ago. He was newly returned from the funeral in her native Karelian village. Still more courteously, when he asked me the question I'd been dreading ("So have you read my Pushkin House?") he didn't condemn my laboured excuse - although I own it twice over in two languages, I lack time to read it in Russian. I added that while I might not have read his book, I had been working daily for the past two weeks in a third-floor office of the real Pushkin House, amidst conditions that could kindly be described as bardak (mess). Andrei Georgievich was delighted. "So you've seen the bardak!" he exulted. "You've seen what it's really like! Let me tell you, when I wrote my book, I'd never once been inside the place - and I first made it there ten years ago to present a copy to their archive". Suddenly I was an honourable fellow fraudster, and before I left, he presented me with a signed copy of the annotated edition (well worth acquiring for Stanislav Savitskii's deadpan essay on Pushkin House's pre-publication history, with reprints of the many rejection letters and reviewers' reports it garnered between 1971 and 1978, when Carl Proffer's Ardis Press brought out the first Russian edition - an English translation eventually followed ten years later. Mainstream Soviet publishing houses Sovetskii pisatel', Novyi mir and Druzhba narodov all rejected the manuscript with varying notes of polite regret; while in 1979 New York's Alfred A. Knopf turned it down on the basis that 'the novel is too long and relentlessly opaque, especially for a translation in the US, where most readers would not have the advantage of familiarity with all the Russian literary works Bitov is mentioning. Essentially, we think that Bitov is a talented writer, but THE PUSHKIN HOUSE is not an impressive book').
As I hurried out through that extraordinary courtyard with its tiny church and incognito brothel ("all modern Russian life is here", Bitov had said), I was half-alert for some symbolic encounter: Tolstoy's thistle, Pushkin's hare, drunken cherries. But I met no-one apart from a young man sawing a table in two and my landlady, who was convinced I'd been kidnapped and skinned by Singaporean handbag manufacturers. "That's right," I told her, "make your reality like fiction" - and went to bed to start reading Pushkin House.

*Image of Bitov courtesy of Russian Esquire [http://esquire.ru/wil/andrey-bitov]