Way back in 2013 I told the world about my discovery of a lost masterpiece, Alexander Veltman’s Странник [The Wanderer], and last year I posted about Stephen Bruce’s forthcoming translation, originally inspired by that post. Now it has come forth and the never-to-be-sufficiently-praised Northwestern University Press has sent me a copy, and it is every bit as good as I hoped and expected, from the gorgeous cover (featuring Karl Bryullov’s Portrait of V. A. Perovsky on Column Capitals) to the fifty pages of detailed end notes. Reading through it, I quickly gave up comparing it with the Russian (Bruce’s translation is thoroughly reliable) and simply enjoyed the ride; the fact is, I didn’t feel any great loss, because Veltman is not a stylist like Bunin or Nabokov (though his prose is thoroughly enjoyable), he is a raconteur, and his rambling storytelling can be enjoyed in any language. As a matter of fact (and I feel bad about even saying this — sorry, Alexandr Fomich!), I actually enjoy the many poems more in translation; in Russian they annoy me slightly by their tossed-off salon-verse style, but Bruce has made them sound fluent and charming in English, with natural-sounding rhyme and meter, which must have taken a lot of work to pull off.
And reading it consecutively in my native language, without stopping to look things up or figure out a complicated Russian construction, I find myself enjoying it in a different way, and making what feels like an important discovery: the ground theme of the novel is freedom. He starts by saying that with determination and imagination “we shall be everywhere and learn everything,” and in the context of the Russian Empire, where nobody was allowed to go anywhere the autocracy didn’t want them to go (Pushkin’s Journey to Arzrum, which came out around the same time, in the early 1830s, is about this), that was a daring idea. He says that using the flying carpet of imagination we can go anywhere we want, and no one can stop us. I suspect it’s only his jolly style and his neverending divagations into inoffensive topics like wine, women, and song that kept him out of trouble. In any event, it’s a charming and invigorating read, not like anything else in Russian literature, and I am pleased as punch that it has made its appearance in English; I devoutly hope it is just the start of a series of Veltman translations. If it is, Veltman is in good hands with Bruce and NUP, and I hope I can report on future volumes. If you want to be an early adopter and help promote the Veltmanic future, you can order it at the publisher’s page (hint: Christmas is just around the corner), and a little bird tells me that if you enter the code WANDERER at checkout you get 30% off through the end of February.
I can’t resist quoting the start of the acknowledgments:
This translation began over a decade ago as a hobby, a welcome distraction from the rigors of graduate school, rather than a project with a clear path to publication. I owe my initial discovery of Veltman and The Wanderer to Stephen Dodson, whose blog Language Hat introduced me to this fascinating work. His continued interest, along with insightful suggestions from his readers, has helped clarify some of the book’s more obscure references.
So you, the Varied Reader, have gotten your due as well!
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