Burning Bush.

I’ve finished Mikhail Shishkin’s 1999 novel Взятие Измаила [The taking of Izmail] — see this post for previous Shishkin — and I find I don’t have anything coherent to say about it except that it’s long and difficult and I’ll doubtless need to reread it to get anything useful from it (as advised by The Untranslated in this post, which you should consult if you want to get an idea of what the novel is like, not to mention what the title means). Here I’ll just quote a brief passage from the end of the first part with some thoughts on translatability:

The human lifespan is a dot. Nature is fluid. Feelings are dark. The linking of the whole body is corruptible. The soul is a top. Fate is incomprehensible. The teacher is orphaned. The soldier is barefoot. The plowman is naked. The veteran is inconsolable. The sickly person is fierce. Pindar is unwashed. The moaning is musical. The roads are hopeless. The far-off is befouled. Weekdays are humiliating. The festivities are drunken. The neighbor is very bitter. The publican is negligent. The huntsman is venal. Power is stinking. The law is good-for-nothing. The verb is all-powerful. Prison is all-devouring. The cop on duty is selfless. The corpse is unidentified. The war is daily. The Chechen is quick to forgive. The Sami is swaggering. Geography is jumpy. History is whorish. The tsarevitch is murdered. The past is a shame. Love for the paternal graves is captivating. The bush is burning. The sky is snowy. The future is entrancing.

Срок человеческой жизни — точка. Естество текуче. Ощущения темны. Соединение целого тела тленно. Душа юла. Судьба непостижима. Учитель сир. Солдат бос. Пахарь наг. Ветеран безутешен. Немощный лют. Пиндар немыт. Стон музыкален. Дороги безнадежны. Даль загажена. Будни унизительны. Торжества пьяны. Ближний прегорек. Мытарь нерадив. Псарь продажен. Власть смердяща. Закон никчемен. Глагол всевластен. Тюрьма всеядна. Постовой самозабвенен. Труп неопознан. Война ежедневна. Чечен отходчив. Лопарь чванлив. География прыгуча. История блудлива. Царевич умерщвлен. Прошлое срамно. Любовь к отеческим гробам пленяюща. Купина неопалима. Небо снежно. Будущее восхитительно.

This seems to me clearly modeled on the epigraph to Nabokov’s Дар (The Gift), ending Смерть неизбежна [Death is inevitable]; see this LH post. There are several types of translation problems here. The simplest is represented by Душа юла, which I have rendered “The soul is a top” because “top” is what I call this toy in my brand of English; unfortunately, “top” is ambiguous and could be confusing. I could disambiguate it by saying “spinning top,” but that would introduce a distracting extra word and imply some reference to spinning in the original, which is very short and simple: Dushá yulá. If I spoke another variety of English, I could use “whirligig,” but that sounds silly to me. In Глагол всевластен, I’ve translated глагол in its modern sense ‘verb,’ but Shishkin may very well have intended its archaic sense of ‘word, speech’

Another problem is История блудлива, my “History is whorish”; here the trouble is that блудливый has too many senses. My Oxford dictionary says: “1. lascivious, lecherous. 2. mischievous, roguish; thievish.” That “thievish” sense is used for animals, usually cats (блудлив как кот ‘thievish as a cat’). I really don’t know what Shishkin had in mind in such an abstract context, but the word is based on Old Church Slavic блѫдъ ‘fornication,’ so I thought “whorish” was both suitable and nicely alliterative (matching “Geography is jumpy”).

But the trickiest one is Купина неопалима. I mean, there’s an obvious translation for it, which I used: “The bush is burning.” The first problem is that the English phrase “burning bush” is perfectly banal, with two common words whose power derives entirely from their conjoined occurrence in the Bible (see the Wikipedia article). The Russian phrase, on the other hand, contains two very recondite words: both купина ‘bush’ and неопалимый ‘that cannot be burned (affected by fire)’ are used almost exclusively in this expression (and I wonder how many Russians could tell you what it means). The result is that the Russian can only refer to the biblical story, whereas the English could be talking about any old bush. Furthermore, as you can see, whereas English focuses on the burning of the bush, Russian emphasizes the fact that the fire doesn’t harm the bush, making for different implications. To quote that Wikipedia article:

In Eastern Orthodoxy a tradition exists, originating in the early Christian Church Fathers and its Ecumenical Synods (or Councils), that the flame Moses saw was in fact God’s Uncreated Energies/Glory, manifested as light, thus explaining why the bush was not consumed. It is viewed as Moses being permitted to see these Uncreated Energies/Glory, which are considered to be eternal things; the Orthodox definition of salvation is this vision of the Uncreated Energies/Glory, and it is a recurring theme in the works of Greek Orthodox theologians such as John S. Romanides.

In Eastern Orthodox parlance, the preferred name for the event is The Unburnt Bush, and the theology and hymnography of the church view it as prefiguring the virgin birth of Jesus; Eastern Orthodox theology refers to Mary, the mother of Jesus as the Theotokos (“God bearer”), viewing her as having given birth to Incarnate God without suffering any harm, or loss of virginity, in parallel to the bush being burnt without being consumed. There is an Icon by the name of the Unburnt Bush, which portrays Mary in the guise of God bearer; the icon’s feast day is held on 4 September (Russian: Неопалимая Купина, romanized: Neopalimaya Kupina).

All of which means that translating the bare words doesn’t carry over many of the connotations of the original. I don’t envy whoever eventually translates the novel!

Comments

  1. I don’t think it’s modeled specifically on Nabokov’s epigraph, rather on the genre of grammar exercises in general.
    And the history, next to the jumpy geography, seems to me ‘rambling’ (блужда́ть).

  2. Ah, you may well be right on both points — though I’m sure Shishkin would have been aware of the Nabokov epigraph.

  3. Душа юла

    ‘Are you a child or a teetotum?’ the Sheep said, as she took up another pair of needles. ‘You’ll make me giddy soon, if you go on turning round like that.’

  4. Now I’m tempted by “The soul is a teetotum”…

  5. Пиндар немыт.

    Who’s Pindar? I’ve heard the word first time (seeking consolation in watching Ukrainian propaganda videos shortly after the war started) from an Ukrainian soldier. in a sentence mostly consisting of expletives. Therefore I assumed that “Pindari” is a derogatory term for Russians. Is it so?

  6. You’ve done as good a translation as can be expected with the obvious understanding that “translation is impossible” (which should have been included in the list of laments) because half of the words are of obs. or close to it category. A few nits (how can I resist 🙂 )

    Естество refers to specifically human nature, maybe condition is better.
    Ощущения probably senses is better in this case.
    Стон, why translate it as gerund? Moan seems to be right for the purpose.
    Даль. I would say vista
    Мытарь is a taxman.
    самозабвенен selfless is not quite what it means. This is a situation when one is completely lost in what they are doing. Maybe inspired or devoted or ecstatic. Something along these lines.
    чванлив I would have used contemptuous

  7. Thanks, I love picking nits!

  8. But:

    Естество refers to specifically human nature, maybe condition is better.

    Not from what I can see; Wiktionary: 1. книжн. природное свойство, основная сущность (“essence”), 2. устар. природа, всё живое (“nature, all living things”). Quotes where it clearly doesn’t mean ‘human nature’: from 2013, “Итак, хотя естество Вселенной для нас по-прежнему остается загадкой, мы все же лучше представляем себе структуру мироздания”; from 2011, “Да, вхруст ломая плавники, в кровь стесывая чешую ― в воду, в естество, в свободу.”

    Мытарь is a taxman.

    So is publican, in its original sense (“A person who farms the public taxes; a tax-gatherer”). Using “taxman” would imply the Russian is the normal word for a tax collector, which it’s not.

  9. Who’s Pindar?

    Pindar.

    I’ve heard the word first time (seeking consolation in watching Ukrainian propaganda videos shortly after the war started) from an Ukrainian soldier. in a sentence mostly consisting of expletives. Therefore I assumed that “Pindari” is a derogatory term for Russians. Is it so?

    That would have been a play on пиндос.

  10. J.W. Brewer says

    What’s the modern Russian word used for talking about non-Biblical bushes (that might in principle catch on fire)? I am pleased to learn that ку̀пина/kupina is the FYLOSC word for “blackberry” and wonder about further cognates extant in any other modern Slavic tongues.

  11. Естество … Not from what I can see

    In general, yes. But here the list obviously starts with 7 propositions about human condition.

    publican ok. It’s in KJV which means it’s the correct translation.

  12. What’s the modern Russian word used for talking about non-Biblical bushes (that might in principle catch on fire)?

    куст

  13. Actually, if I were to change my translation of Естество, it would be to “Essence.”

  14. You are the translator, your choice. But I see естество as physical nature, body and euphemistically the reproductive parts.

    Re: куст/bush. As an old army joke goes, a textbook on tactics ones defined bush as “several branches put into the ground close to each other”.

  15. @J.W. Brewer,
    when I first learned the phrase, the word was new to me. That an unique word for an unique item (whatever it is) is further restricted by an adjective “unburnt” (неопалимая is not a normal russian word either, but one can guess that it must “one that can’t receive burns” ) seemed strange.

    Now I read it as singulative -ina from *kupa or pl. *kupy.

    There is a word kupa, and it is often applied to groups of trees in modern Russian, the problem is that it has -u-, while kǫpina has a nasal ( merged with -u- in Russian).

  16. “The human lifespan is a dot. Nature is fluid. Feelings are dark. The linking of the whole body is corruptible. The soul is a top. Fate is incomprehensible.”

    Compare Marcus Aurelius, “The Meditations,” Book 2:

    “Of human life the time is a point, and the substance is in a flux, and the perception dull, and the composition of the whole body subject to putrefaction, and the soul a whirl, and fortune hard to divine, and fame a thing devoid of judgement.”

  17. Good lord, that’s got to be the source — many thanks! (The novel is full of unacknowledged quotations from earlier works.) The original Greek (ch. 2; scroll down to 17):

    Τοῦ ἀνθρωπίνου βίου ὁ μὲν χρόνος στιγμή, ἡ δὲ οὐσία ῥέουσα, ἡ δὲ αἴσθησις ἀμυδρά, ἡ δὲ ὅλου τοῦ σώματος σύγκρισις εὔσηπτος, ἡ δὲ ψυχὴ ῥεμβός, ἡ δὲ τύχη δυστέκμαρτον, ἡ δὲ φήμη ἄκριτον˙

    Obviously any translator of Shishkin has to take this into account, but how far do you go in equating it with the Marcus Aurelius? Quandaries, quandaries…

  18. J.W. Brewer says

    NB that in English you could argue that “is burning” is perhaps ambiguous in terms of whether what is being primarily described is “is currently engulfed in flames” or “is being destroyed – or if you prefer chemically transformed from its prior structural/molecular configuration into smoke and ash – by the rapid oxidation process that has manifested the aforementioned flames.” In non-supernatural contexts these two somewhat different things tend to coincide, of course, meaning there is generally no need to disambiguate. Although OTOH when you say “the house is burning down” you are perhaps focusing on the destruction aspect more than if you just said “the house is burning”? Does “the bush is on fire” mean or implicaturate something subtly different from “the bush is burning”?

  19. All of that is moot if you understand it as referring to the Biblical passage, but unfortunately in English, as opposed to Russian, there’s no way to make sure of that.

  20. J.W. Brewer says

    @hat: it’s perhaps a bit heavy handed, but if you initial-cap it as the Burning Bush that will probably disambiguate from any generic non-Biblical bush that may happen to be burning. Not to be confused with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_Tree_Club

  21. The Bush is Burning? Looks silly.

  22. John Cowan says

    I’m with J.W.B. “Burning bush” definitely suggests Moses to me, and although googling it gives you a lot of confounds for Euonymus alatus (whose common name it is) but the rest of the hits (including the second one) are Biblical.

  23. You both seem to be ignoring the fact that I can’t use “Burning bush” given the structure of the passage — it has to be “the X is Y,” and there’s no way to make that unambiguously biblical.

  24. J.W. Brewer says

    “The Burning Bush is doing just that”? I don’t see why you are necessarily required to slavishly follow the source language’s alleged “X is Y” structure in translation. Which isn’t actually an “X is Y” structure because you’re already doing damage to the purity of the Slavic original by adding copulae that are absent there, aren’t you? So you’re gonna have to claim that it’s an “X [is] Y” structure with the copula hiding in the Deep Structure or something.

  25. KJV seems to be the correct “register” here

    Ex. 3:2-3: And the angel of the Lord appeared unto him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush: and he looked, and, behold, the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.

    And Moses said, I will now turn aside, and see this great sight, why the bush is not burnt.

    That would suggest that “The bush is not burnt” is a good translation. The only problem is that неопалимая is absent from the Slavic text

    Явися же ему ангел господень в пламени огненне из купины: и видит, яко купина горит огнем, купина же не сгараше.

    Рече же моисей: мимошед увижду видение великое сие, яко не сгарает купина.

    It means that неопалимая купина refers specifically to the icon. Because Western/English analog is not available “translation is impossible”.

  26. J.W. Brewer says

    “The bush is unburnt” is maybe not good in isolation because (unless the Biblical allusion is clear) it doesn’t fully convey that the bush was burning-yet-unburnt as opposed to having never been touched by fire in the first place. That seeming paradox is what makes it interesting. Re “translation is impossible,” it is certainly *possible* to write specifically about the icon in English although the substance, style, and register of this suggest a fairly literal translation of a Russian original with no attempt to Westernize or Anglicize the approach taken stylistically. https://www.oca.org/saints/lives/2022/09/04/102500-unburnt-bush-icon-of-the-mother-of-god

  27. David Eddyshaw says

    Nec tamen consumebatur, as they say in Scotland.

  28. from the modern Russian ne-o-pal-i-m-a-ya reads as ne- “not”, pal-i-t’ “to set on fire, to burn, to lit”, o- “around”, o-pal-i-t’ “to expose the surface of something to fire/heat for a while, affecting it”, e.g. when the flame burned your eybrows., -m- passive participle and also adjectives with the meaning “capable of being …. -ed” (as in defeatable etc.), -a-ya feminine adjective.
    In other words, as a kupina that can’t possible receive burns:/

  29. @LH: “Obviously any translator of Shishkin has to take this into account, but how far do you go in equating it with the Marcus Aurelius?”

    Pretty far. From the Russian translation published in 1985 in the Литпамятники series:

    Срок человеческой жизни — точка; естество — текуче; ощущения — темны, соединение целого тела — тленно; душа — волчок, судьба — непостижима, слава — невзыскательна.

    “Душа юла” made me suspect a late ancient philosopher. It kind of rhymes with Hadrian’s vagula. Then I googled “a alma é um pião” and it worked.

  30. Wow. Case closed! Thanks for that impressive research.

  31. Pindar the Unwashed is still a mystery.

  32. David Eddyshaw says

    ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ …

    Perhaps it was just too good to waste on washing

  33. I googled [Πίνδαρος ἄλουτος] without result.

  34. But I am informed that there is a German translation of the novel, done in collaboration with Shishkin, with copious footnotes (natürlich); if one could access it, one might find answers to such questions.

  35. David Eddyshaw says

    Perhaps an unwashed Pindar is something like a mute Milton? (Or the cobbler who alone goes barefoot …)

  36. @LH: “But I am informed that there is a German translation of the novel, done in collaboration with Shishkin, with copious footnotes…”

    I’ve taken a peek at it. The notes aren’t copious enough for our purposes, and there’s no Pindar at all in the translation! In his stead, there’s Sandmann, and he’s “staubig” (dusty?). But the prose is more like a modernist poem than the Russian version:

    Der Lehrer ist arm. Der Landser ist barfuß. Der Landmann ist nackt. Der Veteran ist gram. Der Sieche ist grantig. Der Sandmann ist staubig. Stöhnen ist sonor.

  37. J.W. Brewer says

    German wikipedia has a disambiguation page for Sandmann … https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandmann_(Begriffskl%C3%A4rung)

    Indeed, Russian wikipedia has a disambiguation page for Пиндар:
    https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9F%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B4%D0%B0%D1%80_(%D0%B7%D0%BD%D0%B0%D1%87%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%8F)

  38. I’ve taken a peek at it. The notes aren’t copious enough for our purposes, and there’s no Pindar at all in the translation! In his stead, there’s Sandmann, and he’s “staubig” (dusty?).

    Rats!

  39. Пиндар немыт.

    It would seem that ultimately, this is based on the first part of the priamel of the Pindar’s first Olympian Ode, ἄριστον μὲν ὕδωρ “water is best”, as well as Pindar’s frequent use of water imagery elsewhere. I wonder if it derives specifically from an epigram on a public bath by Joannes Barbucallus in the Greek Anthology (9.629) that invokes Pindar:

    αἴθε σέ, Πίνδαρε, μᾶλλον ἐμοῖς ἐκάθηρα ῥεέθροις,
    καί κεν ἄριστον ὕδωρ τοὐμὸν ἔφησθα μόνον.

    Would, Pindar, that I rather than others had cleansed/purified you in my streams. Then you would have called my water alone “best”.

    (Compare 9.809, by Cyrus the Consul, on a statue of Pindar set up by the water.)

    But I still feel as if I am not remembering some other reference…

  40. That’s certainly a useful one; thanks!

  41. David Marjanović says

    Yes, dusty.

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