Venya Gushchin reviews (for the Brooklyn Rail, “an independent forum for arts, culture, and politics throughout New York City and far beyond”) what sounds like an interesting translation-cum-adaptation of one of the most famous works of Russian literature:
The plot of Eugene Onegin, Aleksandr Pushkin’s famous novel-in-verse, is barebones. Our eponymous hero is a Byronic fop, bored by aristocratic life in early nineteenth-century Saint Petersburg. After moving to his inherited estate, he meets his friend Vladimir Lensky’s fiancée’s sister Tatiana Larin. She falls in love with Eugene Onegin, who condescendingly rejects her. After an ill-fated ball, Onegin kills Lensky in a duel. Years later, back in Saint Petersburg, Onegin sees a now married Tatiana. Now it’s his turn to confess his love and be symmetrically rejected. Unlike in the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, there is no intricate network of characters, no metaphysical quest for the meaning of life itself.
Instead, Pushkin gives us sparkling, encyclopedic digressions on urban and countryside Russian life. The poet-narrator is as much a character as those outlined above, his asides and personality at times overtaking narration in feats of dexterous versification. Most famous among these digressions is his stylistically varied confession to a foot fetish. […]
I quote these nimble variations on a theme from Robert E. Tanner’s recent Ambivalent Souls: A True Translation of Alexander Pushkin’s ‘Eugene Onegin’. […] In Ambivalent Souls is not a timeless classic, but a messy, constantly shifting text, always approached from a particular historical perspective. […] With notable exceptions like Boris Dralyuk’s My Hollywood and Maggie Millner’s Couplets, contemporary formal verse can sound archaic or child-like. Vladimir Nabokov’s infamous literal translation of Eugene Onegin dispenses with form altogether, the text’s “greatness” conveyed instead through two volumes of commentary. Formal fidelity, chosen by others like Charles Johnston, can at times result in accurate but dated versions that fail to capture the narrator’s chattiness. Tanner makes Pushkin as fluid and glittering in English as he is to contemporary Russian readers.
So why the change of title? Eugene Onegin has multiple stanzas and lines omitted in standard editions of text, seemingly the result of self- and tsarist censorship. Tanner fills in each of the omitted lines and stanzas with his own reflections on the novel through the lens of Nabokov’s translation and commentary, his personal experience learning Russian, and early 2020s America—keeping the form all the way through. These additional digressions contribute to the cheeky and glancing rhythm that defines the original. From the foot fetish digression, the italics marking Tanner’s additions:
… I love their feet
(or legs – for Russian lacks discrete
expressions. Really. And in folly
I wonder, where did Pushkin stare
when claiming but three shapely pair
in all of Russia?) Melancholy,
cool, he remembers yet each one,
and in his dream his heart’s undone.A side-by-side comparison of Ambivalent Souls and Eugene Onegin shows the translator adding where no lines were omitted. […] When I described Ambivalent Souls to my colleagues, they responded with some version of “Oh, so it’s more of an adaptation.” However, Tanner’s text, true to its subtitle, is a translation. In his recent The Philosophy of Translation, Damion Searls argues that, rather than providing a word-for-word reproduction of a text in another language, a translation is a record of a reader’s experience of the original. Ambivalent Souls captures Tanner’s experience of Eugene Onegin, including the multiple historical layers that separate him from the original and his means of making sense of it.
Last semester, I took a risk and assigned Tanner’s “true translation” for an undergraduate survey course on Russian literature and culture—to great success (“I normally don’t read anything poetic, but this was cool,” etc.). In the classroom, Ambivalent Souls allowed me to demonstrate the deadening effects of canonization, how revering texts puts them behind cabinet glass and limits our experience of them. What Tanner does for Pushkin should be done for all “great writers”—beyond translations, think of Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet or Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea as a post-colonial prequel to Jane Eyre. The translator’s self-insertions rescue Pushkin’s novel-in-verse, foot fetish and all, from the stuffy air of “greatness” and brings its voice back to life.
Once upon a time I would have shuddered at the idea, but (perhaps prompted by Christopher Logue’s “accounts” of the Iliad — see this 2003 post) I’ve come to not only tolerate but welcome such transmogrifications. Let a hundred Homers, and Onegins, bloom; what’s important is that people keep being suckered in by the changing barkers at the tent, and once they’re inside they can absorb as much as they want of the Crazed Achilles (see him rage!) and the Petersburg Fop (see him beg forgiveness at the feet of the woman he scorned!). Come one, come all! Literature is news that STAYS news!
War Music is indeed terrific.
(For example, as I once mentioned before, Logue’s rendering of Athene’s epithet παρθένος as “teenage” at first makes you go “Wha??” and then makes you go “Oh. I see. Yes.”)
Gushchin: In his recent The Philosophy of Translation, Damion Searls argues that, rather than providing a word-for-word reproduction of a text in another language, a translation is a record of a reader’s experience of the original.
I hope he argues that, rather than necessarily providing a word-for-word or phrase-for-phrase or sentence-for-sentence, etc. reproduction of a text in another language, a translation can also be a record of a reader’s experience of the original.
Incidentally, I applaud the creators of these adaptations for giving their works new titles.
Imagine thinking that “a reader’s experience of the original” is a stable and knowable thing that can itself be accurately rendered in a different language.
I’m not sure the paraphrase of Searls (who has been discussed here many times, as in the thread starting with his translation of Jon Fosse) presupposes that. I guess if I want to find out whether he considers changes in the translator’s experience of the original, for instance, I should read his book.
i tend to think the “a” in “a reader’s experience…” should be read (perhaps against the grain) as particular rather than abstract: the experience of this specific reader, who is now acting as psychopomp for the work’s language-crossing.
I agree that rozele’s emphasis on the distinction between the experience of a specific reader versus that of an abstract/generic reader is an important one, but of course the risk is that since objectivity is in principle (for a sufficiently demanding standard for it) impossible to achieve some react to that impossibility by saying that since *some* subjectivity is inevitable why not lean into that, foreground my own subjectivity, and inflict it on the world.
Why “inflict”? Basically that’s what all writers are doing; if you don’t like their subjectivity you don’t have to read their books, but I don’t understand the hostility to the very idea.
I definitely felt like Romeo + Juliet was “inflicted” on me.
@hat: Perhaps it’s not hostility to having a particular kind of subjectivity “inflicted” on you. On the contrary, it may be gratitude for yet another pretext to play the victim. The details are less important than the opportunity for resentment.
Jerry F.: Searls (who has been discussed here many times, as in the thread starting with his translation of Jon Fosse)
D’oh. I knew I should know where I knew his name from.
@Hat: Basically that’s what all writers are doing; if you don’t like their subjectivity you don’t have to read their books, but I don’t understand the hostility to the very idea.
Not speaking for J.W.B., but one might want to experience the original author’s subjectivity with as little of the translator’s as possible, particularly if the original author is much more admired than the translator.
i quite like translations that don’t pretend that ‘the author’s sensibility’ is reproducible in words other than the ones the writer put on paper in the particular lect they used. regardless of the relative general ‘admiration’ for the author and translator (which is generally a measure of length of a text’s canonical status, rather than anything about the work in itself), that approach to translation tends to avoid the flatness and lack of flavor (not to say mediocrity) that often results from aspirations to ‘objectivity’, no matter how hedged by nods to its impossibility. sometimes the result is bad, certainly – but generally bad in clear and immediately noticable ways, rather than the creeping dullness that afflicts the other path.
i tend to think that successful nominally ‘faithful’ translations are in fact deeply shaped by the translators’ sensibilities, they (and, even more so, their admirers) are just less forthcoming (not to say honest) about it.
I endorse Jerry F.’s statement of the aspiration, while acknowledging claims that it is impossible. Because even loose-to-free translations are for marketing purposes generally benefiting from the naive-but-widespread notion that translation is in fact possible, and they probably would not sell as many copies if their authors freely acknowledged that they were just making shit up and pretending it came from some author in some other language. If your new work in the new language is good, so be it, and market it that way. There’s a market for West Side Story, but don’t sell it as a “translation” of Romeo & Juliet to people who do not have access to Romeo & Juliet.
One interesting alternative approach is to “translate” into a radically different form. E.g. Chapman’s Homer – it is impossible to “faithfully” translate the Homeric texts into rhymed heroick couplets, and as long as the reader knows enough to understand that, everyone is clear about what the translator is actually doing.
Oh, and back to translations of this Pushkin work – it famously served as the basis of the libretto for Tchaikovsky’s most-performed (at least in recent generations) opera. As I understand it the Russian text is mostly just selective quotations of Pushkin’s words, although with various small emendations to make them “fit” in context, and is also a pretty small selection – the “plot” of the opera is sort of “various scenes from” the original rather than an attempt to duplicate the whole story. But apparently at various historical times the opera has been performed in other languages with a translated libretto and in fact its debut U.S. performance (1920) was sung in Italian.
It would be interesting to know how those other versions of the libretto rank if considered translations of Pushkin’s poem or if the practical needs of performance and fitting-the-music mean they are pretty lousy doggerel, as opera libretti are wont to be. The 1892 London premiere was sung in English (sez the internet) in a version by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Sutherland_Edwards.
one might want to experience the original author’s subjectivity with as little of the translator’s as possible, particularly if the original author is much more admired than the translator.
Then one should learn the language of the original. Failing that, it’s just silly to pretend any given translator has no “subjectivity”; I am in entire agreement with rozele. And on what basis, exactly, do you come to a particular degree of admiration of translators?
they probably would not sell as many copies if their authors freely acknowledged that they were just making shit up and pretending it came from some author in some other language.
If you’re implying that’s true of the reviewed book, you’re the one who is making shit up. Tanner is quite open about what he’s doing, which has an honored history going back through Logue and Lowell to the ancients. If you would rather read yet another boring pseudo-literal rendering of an iconic original, like Lattimore’s once-inescapable Homer, be my guest, but you are losing a lot. And as I say, if you want the “real” Homer, learn Greek.
“Just learn the original” is always in some sense the best advice, however impractical, but why read any translation at all rather than simply wallow in the misery caused by ones failure to have learned whatever language is at issue? (I like Lattimore, FWIW, and reading Homer in Greek gave me a greater appreciation of him.)
I was just hearing that the current version of the Eugene Onegin opera being performed in NYC is a revival of the Smith* production of 20xx rather than of the often-thought-superior Jones* production of 19xx, which is apparently a Very Controversial choice by the Met’s beleaguered current management. I assume the libretto is the same in both, though.
*Not the actual names of the rival versions – you can google to find out the actual details.
Imagine a perfectly bilingual person. They read an original text, provoking reaction x. They read 6 different translations, provoking reactions y1…y6. Obviously, the best translation is the n that minimises abs(yn–x). It’s just linear programming, I’m vibe-coding an app for it.
It’s quite possible to be able to read the original and still appreciate a good translation; perhaps more so, though, where the translator has the courage not to be at all literal. Homer and Logue, Propertius and Pound … though it’s a bit of a question whether you could actually call those translations. They do have a sort of family resemblance to translations, at any rate. Translation-ish.
Headley’s Beowulf deserves an honourable mention, too, now I think of it.
FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát might count if I could actually read Persian …
But translations do not all serve the same purpose anyway, and different genres of original lend themselves to quite different approaches. Generalising about “translation” in the abstract is pointless.
As much as I love Nabokov, I find his translation of Onegin unreadable. It feels like trying to enjoy the view from a car driving on a dirt road full of rocks and potholes. The only use I would have for it would be to check how literal some other translation is.
But translations do not all serve the same purpose anyway, and different genres of original lend themselves to quite different approaches. Generalising about “translation” in the abstract is pointless.
Exactly.
As much as I love Nabokov, I find his translation of Onegin unreadable. It feels like trying to enjoy the view from a car driving on a dirt road full of rocks and potholes. The only use I would have for it would be to check how literal some other translation is.
True and well put. I frankly don’t believe those reviewers of the day who gushed about how wonderful his translation was; I think they simply didn’t dare offend the Great (and notoriously Sharp-Tongued) Man. Happily, the licked-boot approach seems to have faded since the G(anST)M’s death; I don’t recall seeing such encomiums in decades.
It’s quite possible to be able to read the original and still appreciate a good translation…
this is very much my starting point. with my yiddish and english, i can get a fair amount from celan’s Todesfuge in its original form. and that certainly helps me know that i don’t much like the decisions that rothenberg (“gang-boss”? “dusktime”?) and weimar (“coal-black”?) make in their translations, and that i prefer hamburger’s because it feels ‘more faithful’. but to me, felstiner’s far more ‘subjective’ and ‘unfaithful’ rendering’s slide from english into german is bone-chilling in ways that i think the original should be, but isn’t for me, whether or not it would affect me that way if german were my cradle-tongue.
and in a rather different direction, though the usual u.s. english version is bone-deep in me, i’ve known the french original for decades, and have spent time thinking about the various yiddish versions, there’s something so damn precise about dan kahn’s cthonic version of L’Internationale that often makes it the one i want people to hear*.
and even for languages and scripts that i don’t read, i hate a translation that isn’t side-by-side (and, even more, hate the economic pressure that makes that impractical for, say, headley’s Beowulf). i want to be able to see the difference in the shapes of the stanzas and lines between (for example) adonis’ original and shawkat m. toorawa’s english rendering of what i can only name as A Time Between Ashes and Roses; that helps me feel at least some of what’s carried over and what’s been found and lost in the process.
.
* it’s also, i think, precisely through its subjectivity and schrödinger’s-parody quality, the translation that gets closest to the literary flavor of the original – partly because it preserves the specifics of the imagery that other translations elide, highlighting the pervasive gothic qualities of 19thC socialist writing (from marx & engels’ hobgoblin/specter/ha’nt to all those vampires and krakens).
Exactly.
Precisely.
True and well put. I frankly don’t believe those reviewers of the day who gushed about how wonderful his translation was; I think they simply didn’t dare offend the Great (and notoriously Sharp-Tongued) Man. Happily, the licked-boot approach seems to have faded since the G(anST)M’s death; I don’t recall seeing such encomiums in decades.
I think there’s a smooth transition between the licked-boot approach and “He’s a great man, and he put a great deal of work into this, so it must be great—and I can see the greatness, I can.” And probably similar things.
And on the subject of different purposes, I think Nabokov did say that his purpose, or one of his main purposes, was for his translation and commentary to serve students as a “pony”. I got started learning Spanish from the translations of Neruda and Vallejo in a volume edited by Robert Bly.
Oh, sure. Credit where credit is due: Nabby himself never claimed his translation was in any sense poetry, in fact he proudly announced that whenever he read over a bit and it sounded too poetic, he rewrote it until it was properly rebarbative (or words to that effect). But the reviewers, clueless as reviewers generally are (especially about Russian literature), assumed that since a Great Russian Writer was translating the Great Russian Poem, the result must be doubly Great. I doubt any of them except Edmund Wilson actually read the whole thing, and his NYRB review was notoriously negative:
The review, both accurate and pointed, ended their long friendship.
David Eddyshaw: It’s quite possible to be able to read the original and still appreciate a good translation; …
Generalising about “translation” in the abstract is pointless.
I agree, although translators have a habit of doing this all the time, as I will now do.
mollymooly: Imagine a perfectly bilingual person. They read an original text, provoking reaction x. They read 6 different translations, provoking reactions y1…y6. Obviously, the best translation is the n that minimises abs(yn–x).
Mmm, if only one translation is ever going to be read, okay. But given that lots of people are saying that the best thing of all is to read the original, as if that were a given, I feel entitled to argue that the even better thing is to read the original plus the six translations. I know that in the real world this is unlikely to happen, but then again in the real world the former is often impossible, too. And even when I’m technically capable, I personally don’t always prefer the original to a good translation unless it’s a language I’m very strong in, because I’m sure as hell not going to pick up on as much as a good translator will. I mean, if I’m reading it in large part to improve my skills, fine, but that’s not why it was written and it’s a different thing from simply enjoying a piece of literature.
The thing is, translation is a form of reading, as Calvino said. Six monolingual people aren’t going to have the same reading of the original, either, as one learns pretty quickly when consulting a large group of source-language speakers about some difficult passage. And I’m not going to cheer on the death of the author, but having worked closely with more than a few (not even counting the ones who are just sloppy), they’re not always the “perfect” readers of their own texts either. They can be surprised by interpretations or associations that never crossed their minds, but which half of those six hypothetical readers are going to make, and which the author may even decide they like. Anyway, a translation has to make choices, and in my view a strong creative choice is often preferable to a weaker, safer waffling, which may not even be possible. Translations can age pretty fast, too, since the L1 reader’s position shifts with regard to the original and the positions of source language and target language shift in relation to each other. So even if a given translation could be objectively called ideal, it’s not going to stay that way.
Just on Biscia’s point re aging and shifting, I was intrigued by how the block quote in the OP asserts that “Tanner makes Pushkin as fluid and glittering in English as he is to contemporary Russian readers.” Just because of the unstated contrast between “as he is to contemporary Russian readers” and “as he was to Russian readers back when he was alive and publishing.” The “glittering” reminds me by free association of the Malevich painting sometimes known as Принцип мелькания (conventionally Englished as “principle of glittering”).
Okay, Pushkin-translation enthusiasts, should I see this “translation-of-a-translation” done by the ABT at Lincoln Center next month? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onegin_(Cranko)
I assume it’s wordless, which eliminates one set of problems.
The review, both accurate and pointed,
And deliberately nasty, with its faint praise for Nabokov’s writing and its sympathetic mentions of Arndt and Nabokov’s longtime bugbears Marx, Dostoevsky, and Sartre. (And as I recall, Wilson didn’t warn Nabokov in any way about his criticisms before they appeared in print.)
Imagine a perfectly bilingual person. They read an original text, provoking reaction x. They read 6 different translations, provoking reactions y1…y6. Obviously, the best translation is the n that minimises abs(yn–x).
🙂
But one thing this leaves out is the contextual knowledge that the perfectly monolingual reader may lack. For the bilingual reader, the translator doesn’t need to change “white as snow” to “white as egret’s feathers”, but for the monolingual reader they might. And I’m not sure I see how that change is part of “a record of a reader’s [the translator’s] experience of the original”, though again, that phrase may not do Searls’s book justice.
@Biscia: I too may prefer a good translation to the original, and I agree with a lot of what you say, but I’m going to pick on one thing I see differently.
Anyway, a translation has to make choices, and in my view a strong creative choice is often preferable to a weaker, safer waffling, which may not even be possible.
If you’re talking about ambiguity in the original, then as I recently said in the Facebook group you recommended to me (thanks!), as a translator I really enjoy making the translation ambiguous in the same way. Not safer, and I hope not weaker, just more like the original. Of course, as you say, it may not be possible. I certainly haven’t always managed.
And deliberately nasty
Which Nabokov, of all people, had no grounds for objecting to. If you can’t take it, you shouldn’t dish it out.
@Jerry Friedman: as a translator I really enjoy making the translation ambiguous in the same way
Oh, sure, I didn’t express myself very well there! I also care a lot about preserving ambiguity when the ambiguity is the whole point, as it often is in poetry. And about not getting too explainy, which is a slightly different thing.
I meant… well, this morning I was thinking about Hofmann’s translation of Berlin Alexanderplatz, which I loved. It’s been criticized for using tons of profanity that apparently (I don’t read German, but I can believe it) is not there in the original. But as far as I know, the Berliner city dialect and slang are a very distinctive part of the novel, and I think the translation does an amazing job of creating a very distinctive language. The book is brutal, the dialogue often needs to be equally brutal, and when you’re writing for modern-day Anglophone readers, that can be hard to achieve without a fair amount of profanity. In this case I preferred that kind of solution to the other (extreme) choice of simply ignoring the dialect, and I certainly preferred it to the waffling choice of throwing in a little eye dialect and film noir slang here and there and calling it quits. I’m not saying it would be the only solution. I’ve seen elegant ways of dealing with similar problems; Oonagh Stransky’s translation of Starnone’s The House on Via Gemito comes to mind, not that it would have worked for the other book.
That’s one example of why I think that when comparing, say, six translations of a brief passage – much as I love the exercise and useful as it can sometimes be in determining what edition I’m likely to prefer – it’s necessary to keep in mind that the individual choices are (hopefully) being made in a much, much broader context, if it’s a novel. You can’t just take the six different versions and say, well, this person got this right and that person got that right and if you could string all those separate, optimal choices together you’d have the optimal translation. Because you don’t know what’s happening before or after: maybe using this word instead of that one will introduce an ugly, unintentional rhyme, maybe there’s a repetition that has to be preserved and the translator has made a choice twenty pages back, for reasons, and this just happens to be the place where it seems a little more forced. Maybe it’s to help build a voice, maybe it’s to squeeze in some stylistic element or bit of information that was actually in the previous sentence but didn’t fit in there. The translator may not have to worry about making the damn thing hang together as a book in terms of plot or character and all that, but they do have to worry about making it hang together in other ways. I’ve been in workshops where you go line by line with everyone proposing their own solutions, and at the time the patchwork result seems brilliant; then you get home and look at it and feel like Frankenstein contemplating the monster he thought was so pretty. Not that those workshops aren’t fruitful, quite the opposite. But brainstorming and crowdsourcing are different things, and without a single person or at most a couple of people making the hard decisions, you get a flattening effect similar to AI. The degree of subsidiary auteurship the translator is comfortable with and the reader is comfortable with are both going to vary, but you don’t want to get rid of the second author’s human individuality, unless human art is just not your thing.
(Not that most of this is in reply to you, Jerry! I’m just shoving in stuff I didn’t ramble on about earlier.)
I enjoy and learn from your rambles!
I haven’t read the original or any translation, but what immediately comes to mind is that colloquial English uses profanity for fucking emphasis, and German fucking doesn’t, so to translate the kind of register the original is evidently in without introducing a ton of profanity would mean to move into a quite different register.
(This is yet another one of the uncanny things German shares with Hungarian: if you casually drop a kurva ország into your speech, that’s not emphasis, the main function of the K-Word in, say, Polish – no, you’re saying the country is corrupt.)
Thank you @Biscia, that “rambling” was particularly illuminating about Frankenstein and ‘flat’ AI translations.
@DM/all is colloquial BrE more likely to use profanity for emphasis than AmE? I noticed watching the five late-show hosts colloquium, John Oliver was the only one needing bleeping. And on Oliver’s own show, profanity for emphasis seems to be the main technique for stirring the audience into nervous laughter. (I’d argue Oliver isn’t that funny. Only Colbert is actually witty; the other three are bland. Letterman was tedious, dunno why Colbert keeps crediting him.)
UK English tends to use profanity to tutoyer, especially between male speakers. Dunno if this is true to the same extent in the US.
Hmm. Maybe less in AmEng? The cliched explanation is that we are not so paralyzed by class distinction etc. into being unable to to talk congenially to strangers, so we don’t need quite so ostentatious mechanisms to overcome the more modest barriers. Indeed, I believe it’s something of a stereotype that Americans are wont to strike up embarrassingly personal conversations with random strangers they’re seated next to on airplanes etc., thus discomfiting Euro senses of propriety.
Letterman is from a different archeological stratum of American tv than the current late-night-talk-show incumbents – being really funny was not supposed to be his primary skillset and he did not have a background doing “comedy” as such. His primary knack (not the only one) back in his prime was supposed to be getting the guests to be more interesting than they otherwise might be and almost by definition having what he said be less interesting that what he elicited from them. Having a background as a performer drawing all attention to yourself (as some of the more recent ones apparently do, although I tuned out a long time ago and lack much familiarity with any of them) is perhaps an obstacle to that goal, although obviously the genre itself may evolve and/or collapse.
John Oliver is on cable, which means there are essentially no rules against profanity. There is no notion on American broadcast television that beyond a certain hour, people are allowed to swear as much as they like—and that’s a big difference from Britain.
@Biscia: Thanks for the clarification and the interesting rambling. I’m at the low end of wanting the translator’s auteurship to show up, but I have the advantage that very few people who read one of my translations will think, “That’s just a Friedman poem with images from the original.”
UK English tends to use profanity to tutoyer, especially between male speakers. Dunno if this is true to the same extent in the US.
i think i agree with JWB that this is less central over here, though i think it depends a lot on context.
thinking about it is leading me to think about the ways that different deployments of profanity, rather than its presence or absence, are quite clear register / lect / social-group markers in u.s. english, and the ways that using them differently / “wrong” can mark a person as an outsider to a social/lect-marked space. in some of my circles, i’m unusual in basically never using (non-gender-specific) “bitch” as a central insult*, but that doesn’t mark me as an outsider the way that using “son of a bitch” in the same derogatory way about the same man would.
.
* or compliment, but the usage is more complicated than i’m going to try to parse out right now.
contrast between “as he is to contemporary Russian readers” and “as he was to Russian readers back when he was alive and publishing.”
equivalently, between “as he is to contemporary Russian readers” and “as he was to contemporary Russian readers”.
i think i agree with JWB that this is less central over here, though i think it depends a lot on context.
“Sandy—Sandy Hill—was from Chicago, but what with prep school and college and this place and vacation trips, he had probably not spent a hundred days in Chicago in the last seven years. In a bathing suit he was almost skinny, except his shoulders; he looked cold, he was so thin. But Mr. Price had seen him in action one night when one of the Portuguese fishermen came in drunk and got profane in a different way from the way the summer people did.”
John O’Hara, “Price’s Always Open” (1937)
Hello!
Sorry to arrive a bit late to the discussion, but thank you for mentioning the review! Strangely (or, perhaps, inevitably), part of what gave me “permission” to write such an unconventional translation was Christopher Logue’s translation of The Iliad, which, thinking back, I probably found out about from the aforementioned 2003 post on this blog (so thanks for that, as well!) And I even gave a shout-out to Logue in the poem:
I thought my goal was altruistic:
my Pushkin on a US shelf.
Ha. Yes, that “my” tells quite the story—
through Homer, Pope and Logue found glory—
but I’d as well as disappear
into the work, like clear Shakespeare
(too, arrogant by any measure),
and Pushkin’s wrong. It’s not the work.
The work won’t last, except by quirk.
For all we know, we have but pleasure,
and doubting, Pushkin’s grievous trope.
And, as for Nabokov, I really wanted to position this translation in opposition to his brobdingnagian “literal” translation, so my “true” translation has only one footnote and tries for the spirit and beauty of the original—and (again in the text) I direct those looking for conventional translations to Charles Johnston’s or James Falen’s, both of which are great.
Strangely (or, perhaps, inevitably), part of what gave me “permission” to write such an unconventional translation was Christopher Logue’s translation of The Iliad, which, thinking back, I probably found out about from the aforementioned 2003 post on this blog (so thanks for that, as well!)
I am delighted to hear it! Thanks for coming by and joining in, and I definitely want to read your own personal stroll with Pushkin.