Anne O. Fisher has done a translation of Ilf and Petrov’s Zolotoi telyonok called The Little Golden Calf, and she was kind enough to send me a copy (even though I tried to dissuade her, telling her I was too busy reading other things!). I’ve been reading it to my wife in the evenings, and we’re enjoying it terrifically; the story is great, the translation is fluent and accurate, and best of all (from my admittedly peculiar point of view) it’s got all the apparatus you could want: over 300 endnotes explaining cultural references, an introduction by Alexandra Ilf, Fisher’s own foreword, a bibliography, an appendix explaining characters’ names, and (mirabile dictu) a bilingual appendix of phrases from the novel that have become popular among Russians. You can, of course, skip all that (I’m not burdening my wife with footnotes), but if you want to understand the book in its full cultural and historical context, this is an ideal version. Fisher is a scholar of Ilf and Petrov, and she is in the middle of working on a translation of I&P’s Dvenadtsat stulev (The twelve chairs), which should be equally good.
There’s a blog post by Anna Clark in which she reproduces a long and interesting letter from Fisher, and if you like tempests in teapots you can read the dustup between Fisher’s publishers Russian Life Books (1, 2) and Chad W. Post, who published a rival translation by Konstantin Gurevich and Helen Anderson almost simultaneously at Open Letter Books (hopping-mad response). The more translations, the better, of course; I’m just glad to see the masters of Soviet satire getting something of their due.
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