A translator's tale, Part Three of Three

Early in the first volume of The Lord of the Rings, there is a wonderful passage I have never been able to forget. Frodo and his friends are being hunted by the Black Riders; though ignorant of the latter's true purpose, the hobbits are intuitive enough to hide. Here are the lines that lodged in my imagination:

Frodo crawled to the edge of the road and watched the rider, until he dwindled into the distance. He could not be quite sure, but it seemed to him that suddenly, before it passed out of sight, the horse turned aside and went into the trees on the right.

There it is, that beautiful detail: 'suddenly, before it passed out of sight, the horse turned aside and went into the trees on the right'. There's been no lack of signals that the Riders are not good chaps: we've had psychic Ring-muttering, odd compulsions, strange intuitions (and of course they're wearing black, with black hoods, on enormous black horses, so they're probably not fundraising for Save the Children). Nor is there any later plot justification for the Rider leaving the road for the forest (the Black Horses preferring to feed on tree lichen or subarboreal moss, for example). And Frodo isn't even sure what he's seen. It's the uncertainty itself that signals, in mental neon, that we should all be very afraid. Nor does it really matter whether the horse goes into the trees, or into the air, or joins Cristina Aguilera in a pink Daimler. What matters is the apparent fact of action we don't understand and can't explain (why would the stranger ride into the trees?). The uncertainty of Frodo's perception both augments and aggravates the froideur of the moment.

Bring on Todorov and his definition of the literary fantastic as unresolved hesitation between the real and the unreal (and his wonderfully baroque, increasingly obscure examples from French Romanticism and Jan Potocki). Bring on the Master's slightly less well-known prescription for ghost-story writers: that is, M.R. James's recommendation that 'Reticence may be an elderly doctrine to preach, yet from the artistic point of view I am sure it is a sound one. Reticence conduces to effect, blatancy ruins it'. James, whom Lovecraft called 'an artist in incident and arrangement', and who once concisely scolded E.F. Benson for the sin of occasionally 'stepping over the line of legitimate horridness', is my gold standard in ghostly fiction. His ghosts and ghouls (and occasionally worse) are rarely seen; if seen, more rarely recognized. Think of the gown-ripping, night-howling nasty of 'An Episode of Cathedral History', whose existence the Dean of Chapter steadfastly refuses to acknowledge despite its brief reign of terror, or the hideous guardian invoked in 'The Treasure of Abbot Thomas'. Yet once these creatures are glimpsed, heard, touched, or smelt, there is a (brief) instant of apocalyptic anagnorisis that compensates by a bolt of terror for the narrator's archly understated tone: 'But of the face which was now rising to within a few inches of his own no feature was discernible, only hair' ('The Diary of Mr Poynter').*

Uncertainty and reticence are my own criteria for perfect ghost stories, and although I will condone forays into illegitimate horridness, I prefer the inferred to the explicit. Many years ago, when I was casting around for a thesis topic during a sunny Lent term in Cambridge, a diplodocus friend pointed out that I liked both ghost stories and Russian. I tended to read one instead of studying the other. Why not, he suggested, study Russian ghost stories? Almost ten years and one doctorate later, Stalin's Ghosts came along, a book which argues that Russian Socialist Realism was 'multiply vulnerable to phantomization', the more so because of its neoclassicist aesthetics and aggressive positivism. Not only was it impossible for Soviet writers to seamlessly discard Russia's rich Gothic-fantastic literary tradition, any programmatic hyperrealism is spectral by default - because it describes a non-existent world. I supported my argument by tracing the use of Gothic-fantastic tropes (villains, monsters, haunted properties) through the fiction of well-known early Soviet-era writers like Bulgakov, Gladkov, Platonov and Zamiatin; I also looked at uncanny technologies (Fedorovian resurrection fantasies, Lenin's tomb, rejuvenation, hybridity and eugenics) which flourished in Soviet children's literature, Red Pinkertons, and science fiction. And I rediscovered the intriguing forgotten writers discussed in a previous post, whose prose eventually deserved a book of its own. One of the pleasures of simultaneously editing two thematically related books was being able to cite my own translation when performing a close reading in Stalin's Ghosts, with my favourite example being my analysis of Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii's The Phantom, a major story that deserves more critical attention. One of the mixed pleasures ofsimultaneously publishing two books is watching helplessly as critics favour one child.* Greg Afinogenov's LRB review, for example, is extremely kind to Red Spectres - but allots Stalin's Ghosts only one sentence (surprising, since I thought the LRB reviewers get about 15 000 words per book). Since Afinogenov is a doctoral candidate, he may yet feel the same pangs a few years down the line when reviewers pass over his doctoral opus for the baseball team.

Although Stalin's Ghosts risks being overshadowed by the Gothic glamour it shares with Red Spectres, I'd be happiest if it were read as a reinterpretation of early Socialist Realism and contemporaneous Soviet genres. There is a new school of such books emerging, including the lovely and learned Boris Dralyuk's recent Western Crime Fiction Goes East on the Red Pinkerton phenomenon and Eric Laursen's brand-new Toxic Voices (Northwestern University Press, 2013), an analysis of pre-war Soviet prose villains. Despite my grouchiness, however, at times the Gothic does merge with real life scholarship, and happily. When finishing the final draft of Stalin's Ghosts in Petersburg in summer 2012, I was casting (!) about for an anecdote to kick-start Chapter One. Then I remembered the large box I passed every day on my way to my shared office in Pushkinskii Dom, one of Petersburg's many literary institutes. I asked my colleagues to tell me the story behind the box, and more or less as they recounted it, I translated and wrote my chapter opening:

In a neglected annexe of Pushkin House, the Institute of Russian Literature in St Petersburg, there is a shadowy first-floor landing where literary scholars gather to smoke. A large unlabelled plywood box, festooned with spider plants, towers over their ashtrays. Unseen inside the box lingers the bottom half of a plaster cast for a statue of Maksim Gorky, the mentor, godfather, and chief standard-bearer of Soviet Socialist Realism. The reasons behind Gorky’s exile to a box on the stairs are already obscure. The post-Soviet decades were hostile to statues of Soviet icons; and although Gorky, originally
commissioned for the Institute’s Literary Museum, remained museum property and could not be discarded, nothing was done to repair or maintain his cast. First Gorky’s arms crumbled away; next his head disintegrated; and finally, only the legs remained, preserved perhaps by some superior
ingredient in the plaster. Since Gorky’s remains, however grotesque, could not be buried, they were boxed up instead and relegated to a semi-spectral afterlife on the landing. Gorky’s artistic influence may be defunct, but his legs still invisibly preside over modern scholars of Russian literature, like
an ancestral skeleton content to remain in its closet. 

The aesthetic experiment that was Socialist Realism – a national neoclassicist ideal, designed for an impossible cohort of ineffably perfect citizens – was multiply vulnerable to phantomization.

This posts ends my triad of translator's tales, although I will continue to translate actively and post on related topics - my publisher and I are currently laying groundwork for a sequel to Red Spectres. Ghost story lovers not averse to crossing a $5 paywall can read my newest translation of Georgii Peskov's chilling 'Kum' here. As I remain busy with the giant saurian gene preservation project, and as I am currently starting a new university lectureship, I will continue to post irregularly. Lots of new reviews and commentary coming up as and when, including a new translation of my all-time favourite Gazdanov novel, and some controversial Bulgakov and classical Tolstoy!

*Never base your wallpaper design on human hair.
*This is mere grumbling. I remain pathetically grateful that anyone, ever, has read even one of my books.

A translator's tale, Part Two

In the current (Spring #13) issue of the New Ohio Review, Rosamund Bartlett has a delightful short piece about the tribulations of translating Tolstoy. (She is currently completing a new version of Anna Karenina for Oxford World's Classics.) It describes her experience of 'spending a long time staring' at Tolstoy's 'inimitable, participle-laden, congested sentences'; two passages on bees prove particularly convoluted. Previous translators of AK produced their own unique versions of each sentence; they couldn't all be right. In the end, it was Bartlett's prior research into Tolstoy's hobbies (including, for some time, beekeeping) for her biography that helped her to unlock his prose: two peculiar verbs were exposed as highly specific beekeeping terminology, rather than ambiguous grammar. Another problem was Tolstoy's use of the singular noun pchela (bee) in a context that suggested multiple bees. Finally her 'apiarial research' led to the revelation that Tolstoy was, unusually but correctly, using pchela to signify an entire hive rather than a solitary insect. This insight allowed her to translate the 'bee passage' from Chapter Twelve of Part Two correctly, perhaps for the first time in the history of Tolstoy translation. One wonders what she would make of the Moscow/beehive passage in War and Peace.

I can't claim similarly research-intensive breakthroughs in my translation of Aleksandr Chayanov or the other authors featured in Red Spectres. However, I did repeatedly confront three perennial problems of translation: what do you do when your author's prose just isn't that good? How can you be sure you're getting it right? And, last but not least, how can you check whether to pay copyright fees? As every translator can be sure to stumble up against at least two of these, I'll describe my (fairly Jurassic) approach to all three.

First off, the aesthetic conundrum. Dons may sneer at Tolstoy's grammar, but no-one would dare to call him a bad writer. I was not so lucky with my chosen translatee, Aleksandr Chayanov. It helped that I knew he was writing pastiche, and that I enjoyed the prose he was pastiching - the best of Gogol, Hoffmann, Odoevsky, and others. Nonetheless, this still meant that I had to translate pastiche, sandwiching multiple levels of intercultural interpretation. In pragmatic terms, I learned to channel Bulwer-Lytton as I wrote. Chayanov was rocking a certain high-Victorian groove, with considerable panache and a level of irony that frequently collapsed under his own unrelenting intellectual curiosity. Those chapter intertitles in The Venetian Mirror (CHAPTER THREE: Being relatively peaceful, thus affording a pause not only for the author and the heroes of his tale, but also for the reader) are charming if you like that sort of thing, infuriating if you don't. But take Chayanov's first story, The Hairdresser's Mannequin, a wonderfully off-beat tale of a successful Moscow architect who falls in love with a shop-window mannequin and sets off on a quest to find its original - who just happens to be one half of a pair of Siamese twins.  At the tragic climax, as the love-child is born in Venice, Chayanov's hero takes a train to Piacenza to visit an agricultural show. Here's a typical paragraph from that section: 'Stocky, sturdy tillers of the soil laughed and chatted loudly about super-phosphates and Randall’s disc harrows, complained about their agronomist, referred respectfully to men called Bizzozero, Luzzatti and Poggio, and swore loudly, spitting on the floor, about a breed of horned cattle, which they called the bergamasco.' Did I mention that Chayanov's day job was agronomy? Sometimes it shows. A more pedestrian variant on the issue of stylistic quality is what the translator should do when an author keeps re-using a word or phrase (in my limited experience, every writer has a favourite verbal crutch). Even in Russian, where it may have more nuances of meaning than its direct English equivalent, repetition of the same word weakens literary prose. Only Dostoevsky, as Oliver Ready has argued, can make this a strength. Chayanov often fell into this sin, forcing me to choose between translating absolutely honestly (matching the repeated word with a repeated word in translation) or tweaking (choosing, each time, from a range of words similar in meaning to the original) to improve the text. I wanted my readers to like Chayanov, so I tweaked. A related problem is how to renew a pre-existing translation: Bulgakov's The Red Crown (Krasnaia korona) is one of only two previously translated tales in the collection. The narrator, a former White officer living on a psychiatric ward, regularly hallucinates the sound of heavy artillery. He uses the phrase 'chastyi, chastyi stuk'. I translated this as 'endless thudding', not because it was necessarily the best translation - stuk gives numerous possibilities, from tapping to knocking and thumping - but in order to distance my own opening lines from others' versions. The worst passages in Red Spectres, the ones that tortured me most, belong to Aleksandr Grin's The Grey Motor-Car. This story begins:

On the evening of July 16th I went to the cinema, hoping to banish the unpleasant impression lingering from my latest conversation with Corrida. I had encountered her as she was crossing the boulevard. From some way off I had recognized her energetic stride and her distinctive way of swinging her left arm. I had bowed, trying to discern a shade of friendliness in those large, slightly surprised-looking eyes, gazing so sternly from under the proud curve of her hat.

I have lost count of the number of times I revised that %$£""!!! 'left arm'. 'Distinctive' is too fine a word for Grin's phraseology here. Let alone the awkwardness of the clause structure, and the ambiguity of Russian (where ruka can mean either 'hand' or 'arm'), how can anyone turn the phrase 'Еще издали я узнал ее порывистую походку и характерное размахивание левой рукой' into elegant English? I eventually reasoned that Grin's propensity for dry, torturous syntax in this story was intended to convey the 'distinctive' character of his high-functioning, Aspergerish narrator (convinced that the woman he loves is an animate, escaped wax mannequin). So, what should you do if an author's prose is simply not very good? Either hope the remainder of the story justifies the bad patch, or don't translate the piece in the first place.

Second question: getting it right. I can candidly admit that Red Spectres would be a tassel of embarrassing errors were it not for the generous efforts of those friends and colleagues, including my editor, who read and re-read each of the stories, catching my mistakes. For example, in Peskov's The Messenger I originally translated 'vylo v trube' ('the wind was howling in the chimney') as 'as if the wind were blowing through a trumpet'. Truba can, of course, mean 'trumpet' or 'chimney-pipe', but I think I was subconsciously over-influenced by the homonym with 'tuba'. When working on Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii's grimly grotesque The Phantom, however, I had to defend one of my lines from nearly every reader who saw it: they objected to my version of the narrator's disclaimer 'Впрочем, я буду лишь пересказчиком:  мне принадлежат только слова, а факты  ему' as 'As it happens, I am no more than the retailer of this tale; I provide only the words, while the facts are his'. It was that phrase 'retailer of this tale' that stuck out: they just didn't like it. But I did, and I fought to keep it in because I knew Krzhizhanovskii for an angular and pun-happy composer of sentences (as his premier translator Joanne Turnbull can confirm). I also liked how 'retailer' contains a double pun on 're-telling' and 'retailing', evoking the faintly monetary notion that the owner of experiential facts can sell them on to a word-dealer. (Perhaps an analogy for the writer/translator relationship). The passage on the high-stakes poker game in  Grin's The Grey Motor-Car was read by one of my first-year students who, it emerged, had been something of a poker champion at his public school. His corrections proved invaluable. On the other hand, when we reached the final proof stage, my editor consulted a family friend with a PhD in electrical engineering with a view to adjusting Pavel Perov's 1924 scientific shocker Professor Knop's Experiment. Professor Knop's plan to achieve immortality involves much bandying of terms like 'nuclei', 'current', 'electrons', and 'static' and 'positive electricity'. My editor wanted to correct Knop's terminology for the sake of consistency and clarity. I resisted, as I strongly felt that Western stories of a similar epoch and theme were just as merrily incompetent with technical terms. This returns us to my argument in the previous paragraph that a translator should not over-improve. Indeed, while I was translating yet another Red Spectres tale, a teacup-tempest broke out on the Slavic Studies mailing list SEELANGS over how one should translate the word fortochka - is it a small window, part of a windowpane, or part of a door? In Russian winters, when glass has to be sealed for insulation, the fortochka remains accessible as a crucial channel for communication and occasional airing. Lacking the energy for the apiarial approach pace Bartlett, I guiltily continued translating this as 'the small window'.

The final problem, how to secure copyright, is one of the most entertaining - and often insoluble. When it came to the more obscure authors such as Pavel Perov, who boasts just one incomplete entry in one émigré authors' dictionary, my publisher, Angel Classics, and I simply covered our rumps by stating that we had made every attempt to secure copyright. In other cases, the path to establishing copyright is all too clear: would-be translators of Krzhzizhanovskii should be aware that copyright is held by the French publishing firm Verdier, who nipped in quick while the Anglophone world were still indifferent to the rediscovery of this major writer. Verdier must therefore receive an agreed fee for every new translation. With still other authors, one feels almost like a missing persons agency. Georgii Peskov (the pen name of Elena Deisha) was, with Perov, my jointly most obscure author. An early émigrée to Paris, she published one novel and several dozen delicately spooky, psychological ghost thrillers, mostly about middle-class Russians struggling with the economic and emotional damage of revolution and emigration. I was in St Petersburg researching an unrelated article when I discovered a detailed biographical dictionary of Russian émigrés in France, including not only my author, but short bios of her son and granddaughter, both of whom were very much alive. This meant they still held Peskov's copyright. As we were on the verge of going to press, I scrambled to contact the latter at her work address, the Orthodox Institut St Serge, Paris. Unfortunately, it was August, when everyone in Paris disappears en vacances. Panic! When we did contact Mlle Deisha, she very generously waived a fee, expressed her pleasure that her grandmother was still being read today, and graciously pointed out that I had mistyped said ancestor's year of birth, aging her a decade (we still had time to fix that, just about).

Picture credit  http://thenoiseoftime.blogspot.co.uk

In my next and final post on writing Red Spectres, I'll talk about why I wandered into the ghost story business, and what happens next.

Delivering Phantoms with Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii

I'm currently working on a translation of a 1926 short story called Фантом (Phantom) by the Russian author Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii. (You can read it in Russian here). Krzhizhanovskii is one of the most obscure and most challenging twentieth-century Russian authors you can choose to read; in fact, his life's work - thousands of pages of unpublished manuscripts - was very nearly forgotten after his death. When researching another writer (Georgii Shengeli), the Russian researcher Vadim Perel'muter accidentally discovered a treasure trove of short fiction, criticism, letters, and even several novellas in the state archive RGALI (Moscow). Perel'muter was intrigued by this unknown yet prolific author's unique style, and has heroically devoted the three decades since his find to editing and publishing Krzhizhanovskii's fiction with extensive annotations. Krzhizhanovskii is an intellectually demanding writer, often referencing Kant, Schopenhauer, Leibnitz and other less well-known continental philosophers; his vocabulary was exhaustive and frankly exhausting, especially for the translator. Joanne Turnbull, Krzhizhanovskii's main English translator, calls him 'an otherworldly man of enormous erudition [...] who was constitutionally incapable of accommodating the coarse commissars of Soviet culture'.  A self-avowed misfit in the grey and forced conformity of Stalinist Russia, Krzhizhanovskii nevertheless wrote with the helpless freneticism of a graphomaniac.  He wrote encyclopedia articles, book reviews, screenplays, even a study on the significance of titles: and meanwhile, he constantly referenced other worlds, Hadean, Stygian, futuristic, hyperborean, transatlantic. Krzhizhanovskii was an admirer of G.K. Chesterton, Nikolai Gogol, Charles Dickens and Jonathan Swift; his work is frequently compared by critics to Borges, Beckett and Kafka.

While Квадратурин (Quadraturin) (1926) has become his most frequently anthologized short story (and deservedly - it's a classic of psychological horror), I feel that Phantom is equally terrifying. It's a story that resonates with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and with the Faust legend (Marlowe's rather than Goethe's) and with Greek tragedy, but it also comes about as close as Krzhizhanovskii ever does to direct historical critique. The word phantom, as the Oxford English Dictionary will tell you, has the additional meaning of 'a model of the body or of a body part or organ, esp. one used to demonstrate the progression of the fetus through the birth canal'. This is the definition Krzhizhanovskii uses to construct his short and horrible tale. In pre-revolutionary Russia, a stressed-out medical student is asked to demonstrate a forceps birth during his final exams. As he manoeuvres the preserved corpse of an aborted foetus through the pelvis of a wooden mannequin, he imagines that the little 'phantom' gives a cry and starts to move. Eventually he persuades himself that he's experienced an hallucination; he forgets the incident and moves far away. The Russian Civil War ensues and, in the midst of its turmoil, the young doctor is confronted by the phantom 'son' he rejected at its birth. Now grown up, the phantom has tracked him down in order to commit an act of quasi-Oedipal patricide - but not before expatiating on its comically grotesque existence as a living corpse. One of the more obvious ironies of the story is that the Russian Revolution is the real 'phantom' child of the story - cynically destroying its human progenitors to prolong its own unnatural existence - and the young doctor's casual creation of a monster is exemplary of the culpable carelessness of other intellectuals of his generation.

In my next blog, I'll talk a little more about the difficulties - and the fascination - of my translation of this Krzhizhanovskii story. While it will be published in due course (probably 2012), the translation is very much a work-in-progress right now.

If you would like to read Krzhizhanovskii's other stories in Joanne Turnbull's wonderful English translations, try either her original collection Seven Stories (Glas, 2006), or her latest, even more rewarding selection, Memories of the Future, published in 2009 by NYRB Classics. (See a review here).