The Bookshelf: Kolyma Stories.

New York Review Books has sent me a review copy of Kolyma Stories by Varlam Shalamov, newly translated by Donald Rayfield. The publisher’s page accurately calls the collection “a masterpiece of twentieth-century literature”; Solzhenitsyn himself famously wrote “Shalamov’s experience in the camps was longer and more bitter than my own…I respectfully confess that to him and not me it was given to touch those depths of bestiality and despair toward which life in the camps dragged us all,” and if you have any interest in the Gulag, in how people react to the extremes of experience, or simply in great writing, you should try Shalamov, and this is part of the first complete edition in English: “This is the first of two volumes (the second to appear in 2019) that together will constitute the first complete English translation of Shalamov’s stories and the only one to be based on the authorized Russian text.” In short, this is a must-read.

Having said that, I’ll discuss the translation, comparing it both to the original and to the previous English version translated by John Glad (Penguin 1980, rev. ed. 1994). The first thing to note is that the Penguin has far fewer stories, and the stories are often cut; whether the cuts are the translator’s choice or reflect the then available Russian text, I don’t know, but it’s an unfortunate fact that emphasizes even more the importance of the new version. Furthermore, Glad makes too many errors and poor choices; in Сухим пайком [“Dry Rations” in Glad, “Field Rations” in Rayfield], for instance, he calls Butyrka “Butyr Prison,” has “fruits” for ягоды ‘berries,’ and renders положительному ‘positive’ as “decent.” When the narrator’s coworker Savelev starts fantasizing about a future neither of them believes in, he begins “Помечтаем,” which Rayfield correctly renders “let’s dream a bit”; Glad has “Just imagine,” which simply doesn’t work in this context. I don’t want to overemphasize this — every translation has errors, and I don’t understand Rayfield’s “standard” for заветный in “заветный мешочек,” which Glad renders “a small cherished bag” — but Glad seems to have more than the necessary minimum.

However, I’m not letting Rayfield off the hook entirely. He consistently uses a more formal register than I think is appropriate for the stark simplicity of the Russian, but that’s a matter of taste. More troubling is his tendency to overexplain. Every translator has to choose how much to fill out a minimalist original, and that too can be a matter of taste; I don’t like his “Trampling the Snow” for the title of the very short first story, По снегу (Glad’s “Through the Snow” is both more accurate and more to my taste), but I’m sure a lot of readers are fine with it. What truly bothers me is the way he ends the same story. It’s about how men create a road through virgin snow by walking back and forth over it; here are the last two sentences:

Из идущих по следу каждый, даже самый маленький, самый слабый, должен ступить на кусочек снежной целины, а не в чужой след. А на тракторах и лошадях ездят не писатели, а читатели.

I would render it literally:

Of those following the tracks, each, even the smallest, the weakest, has to walk on a piece of fresh snow, not in someone else’s tracks. On tractors and horses it is readers, not writers, who ride.

Glad has:

Each of them – even the smallest and weakest – must beat down a section of virgin snow, and not simply follow in another’s footsteps. Later will come tractors and horses driven by readers, instead of authors and poets.

Rayfield:

Of all the men following the trailblazer, even the smallest, the weakest must not just follow someone else’s footsteps but must walk a stretch of virgin snow himself. As for riding tractors or horses, that is the privilege of the bosses, not the underlings.

Glad’s ending is syntactically weak, but Rayfield’s is to my mind unacceptable. He feels that the читатель ‘reader’ is a subordinate because he only reads or obeys the rules, and the ‘writers’ are the bosses. I’ll let native speakers weigh in on whether that’s a reasonable interpretation, but whether it is or not, it’s the kind of thing that belongs in notes, not in the text, where the reader innocent of Russian can have no clue that it’s not what Shalamov wrote. Me, I’ve always admired the piece as a meditation on the difference between being a writer exploring new territory and a reader following in the trodden path, and I don’t like to see that entire aspect wiped out.

But I don’t want to end on a complaining note. Let me provide a brief passage in both translations for further help deciding whose style appeals to you more. It’s from the wonderful and heartbreaking Сука Тамара, which both translators render literally as “Tamara the Bitch” (she’s a dog who wanders into the camp area):

Скоро выяснилось, что Тамара берет пищу только из рук и ничего не трогает ни на кухне, ни в палатке, есть там люди или нет.

Эта твердость нравственная особенно умиляла видавших виды и бывавших во всяких переплетах жителей поселка.

Glad:

We soon learned that Tamara would take food only from our hands and, if no one was present, would touch nothing either in the kitchen or in the tent. This moral firmness touched the residents of our settlement, who had seen a lot of things in their lives and had been in a lot of scrapes.

Rayfield:

We soon realized that Tamara would only accept food she was given, that she never touched anything in the kitchen or the tent, whether there were people there or not. These firm moral principles were what won over the inhabitants of the settlement, men who had seen everything in their lives and had had a tough life.

I should add that the stories are compact, intense, frequently cruel, and occasionally almost unbearable (Andrei Sinyavsky wrote “Он пишет так, как если бы был мертвым” [He writes as if he were dead]), so I would advise not reading more than a couple at one go if you would prefer to avoid depression. But by all means read them.