Vinni Pukh.

Back in 2014, Sashura said “Even Russian Vinni Pukh is different from Winnie the Pooh.” Now Sabina Amanbayeva at the Jordan Center tells Тhе Story of the Russian “Winnie the Pooh” (Part I, Part II). It begins:

The story of the Russian Winnie the Pooh, or “Vinni Pukh,” is inextricably tied to the experience of readers who enjoyed the book in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as to viewers of eponymous cartoons released in 1969, 1971, and 1972. Vinni Pukh holds a special place in the hearts of many Russophones, but is a very different character than the one familiar to English speakers.

In fact, upon discovering the English-language Winnie the Pooh, many Russian speakers feel surprised and claim, justifiably or not, that “ours is better.” He is certainly more Russian. It is almost unimaginable to a Russian speaker that “another” Vinni Pukh exists. Just imagine that the American Star Wars turned out, in fact, to be an adaptation of a story based in a different culture. However “authentic” the “original,” fans of the “adaptation” are unlikely to care: Star Wars is, by now, well established as American. Similarly, Vinni Pukh has lodged himself so firmly in the Russian imaginary that most Russophones see him as a fundamentally Russian bear, though with an English connection.

The Russian Vinni Pukh “looks more like a potato than a traditional bear and is beloved by the older generations,” writes Galina Zakhoder, the wife of Boris Zakhoder, the writer and translator who gave the bear his Russian identity. In Boris Zakhoder’s own words, he “re-told [pereskazal]” A.A. Milne’s story in Russian rather than simply translating it. Zakhoder’s “Vinni Pukh and so on and so on and so on [Vinni Pukh i vse-vse-vse]” was first published by the publishing house Detskii Mir in 1960, and has since become a Russian classic.

What does it mean to “re-tell” the story as opposed to translating it? According to translation scholar Lawrence Venuti, a translation always “domesticates” the original, that is, reframes it in terms of the tropes and beliefs of the receiving culture. Every translator is a prism that reflects the original according to his or her own understanding. While Venuti criticizes this “domestication” as potentially colonial (domesticating the foreign), Zakhoder took a markedly different approach. His goal, as he states in his History of My Publications, was not to domesticate the original, but to tell it afresh. Per Zakhoder, “There is only one way to translate the untranslated, and that is — to write it anew.” In contrast to Venuti’s hypothetical translation-as-colonization, Zakhoder’s work makes no attempt to change the original source. The idea is, instead, to write in another language in the spirit of the original — so that it looks Russian, feels Russian, but A. A. Milne remains its author.

She gives a number of specific examples, and continues:

In addition to rendering A.A. Milne’s linguistic games into a form more legible to the Russian reader, Zakhoder made a host of subtler changes that root the narrative not only in Russian language, but in Russophone culture. The most important such change is that Zakhoder’s retelling has two audiences: children and adults. Zakhoder weakens the story’s frame — the illusion that we are overhearing a children’s story about a bear, told by a father to his little son.

Instead, in Zakhoder’s version, Vinni Pukh stands on his own, without much support from a little boy’s imagination, and possesses a much more mature and ironic view of the world than his English counterpart. The Russian reader is encouraged to relate to and befried Vinni Pukh directly, without Christopher Robin’s mediation and the boy’s somewhat condescending view of the bear as a toy with “very little brain.” Zakhoder creatively remakes this phrase as v golove opilki, meaning, “wood shavings in the head.” In the Soviet Union, toy bears were in fact usually stuffed with wood shavings. Therefore, in Zakhoder’s version, the bear is quite self-aware and pragmatic, conscious enough of his essence to comment upon it with gentle irony. The translator’s Vinni Pukh is thus familiar and canny, rather than merely silly. […]

Moreover, Zakhoder shifts the original’s idyllic description of childhood play into subtly ironic register that only adults can truly appreciate. Natalia Smolyarova, a scholar of Russian literature, describes how people queued up to get their hands on Zakhoder’s Vinni Pukh in the 1960s and 70s: “There were long lines for the book in libraries and among friends; people exchanged the book, looked for it and for a long time could not find it neither at book markets nor the black market.” […]

Finally, Zakhoder’s Vinni Pukh tends to make snarky comments that speak directly to adult reality. On his way to the beehive, Zakhoder’s Vinni Pukh visits “a certain acquaintance” — a puddle (“k odnoi znakomoi luzhe”) — and rolls around in the mud. The expression to “visit a certain acquaintance” is rather idiomatic in Russian and it is borrowed from adult language. A. A. Milne’s version simply says, “Winnie-the-Pooh went to a very muddy place that he knew of.”

There’s a similar situation with respect to Aleksandr Volkov’s Russian reworkings of L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, but they don’t sound nearly as interesting (see this 2019 post).

Comments

  1. I’m not sure whether the reader is supposed to know that Star Wars is, in fact, an adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s 1958 samurai classic, The Hidden Fortress. (The film Star Wars stole from)

    The original Winnie the Pooh is very much a look into young Christopher Milne’s imagination. And it’s very British, and of its era and class. (If Christopher Robin’s dad had been a Geordie coal miner, it would have been a much different book.)

    No wonder that the Russian translator took an entirely different approach.

    AHD doesn’t give “imaginary” as a noun, except as a mathematical term. I would like to use “imaginarium” here, even though that’s not in the dictionary either. But I suppose “imaginary” is fine as a short-hand for “set of imaginary things”.

  2. I’m not sure whether the reader is supposed to know that Star Wars is, in fact, an adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s 1958 samurai classic, The Hidden Fortress.

    I wondered about that too.

  3. AHD doesn’t give “imaginary” as a noun, except as a mathematical term.

    Neither does the OED, surprisingly (since the entry was updated in September 2009), but it is frequently so used in philosophical/critical circles.

  4. A similar thing, perhaps, happened in the UK with the BBC’s The Magic Roundabout, a much-loved “English-language children’s television programme that ran from 1965 to 1977. It used the footage of the French stop motion animation show Le Manège enchanté, but with completely different scripts and characters.” (Well, visually the same characters, but with different personalities and names).

    The English version was written and entirely voiced by Eric Thompson, father of Oscar-winning Emma (who would have been six when his version first hit screens). He made up his own story ideas and dialogue based on seeing the footage, but not the French text, for 441 episodes. According to Wikipedia, “The BBC originally rejected translating the series because it was ‘charming… but difficult to dub into English'”.

    It also appealed to adults as well as children – “It proved a great success and attained cult status, and when in October 1966 it was moved from the slot just before the evening news to an earlier children’s viewing time, adult viewers complained to the BBC”.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Magic_Roundabout

  5. David Eddyshaw says

    Time for bed!

    (Stupid mollusc.)

  6. The English version felt too paternalistic and too permeated by class to enjoy, but the Russian one definitely felt like an other-country story, a story which unfolds in England. Not on Russian turf.
    In addition to the cartoons, there were audio LPs closely based on the cartoons. I don’t remember cartoons, probably because the family never had a TV set, but I remember the soundtrack super well.

  7. When I read it as a kid, all the subtext was lost on me. I got the jokes and the bouquet of distinct personalities, and that was good enough. Same with The Wind in the Willows (which in addition has a plot).

  8. I’m not sure whether the reader is supposed to know that Star Wars is, in fact, an adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s 1958 samurai classic, The Hidden Fortress.

    “Adaptation” seems wildly overstated. “Influenced by” yes, but Star Wars was basically a pastiche of all sorts of Lucas’ childhood enthusiasms – samurais, Buck Rodgers, WWII action movies, Errol Flynn, etc. That is probably why older film critics at the time tended to be fairly negative toward the film – they only saw the imitating and didn’t recognize that Lucas had created something new out of all those parts.

  9. I don’t think it’s fair to say—although many commentators do—that Star Wars is an “adaptation” of The Hidden Fortress. It is certainly not an adaptation in the same way that The Seven Samurai, Yojimbo,* or Rashomon** ha\ve been adapted in Western media. The characters of Princess Leia, R2-D2, and C-3PO are fairly closely based on equivalents in The Hidden Fortress, but the other main characters, and the vast majority of the plot are unrelated to anything in Kurosawa’s film.

    George Lucas churned through many ideas as he developed what eventually became Star Wars, and from each of the earlier drafts he retained some elements that made it into the final*** product. Before Lucas hit on the idea of telling the story as a modernized epic, based on his reading of Joseph Campbell’s writings on the role of myth, his previous storyline idea has been much closer to The Hidden Fortress, with the droids as the principal protagonists, rather than just the viewpoint characters.

    * My current spell checker dictionary balks at “Yojimbo,” but it is apparently fine with “Rashomon.”

    ** Actually, while Rashomon has been adapted as a plot structure many, many times, the real important elements of the original’s story seemed to get left out. For example, just a couple weeks ago, while I was waiting for some work to be done on my car, there was a Rashomon-themed rerun of Star Trek: The Next Generation on in the waiting room. It was clearly consciously modeled on Rashomon, since it included specific elements (such as the dead man “testifying”). And yet, the various characters just blame each other for what happened and portray themselves as completely blameless. In Rashomon, the three principal characters all gives self-serving versions of what happened, but no one tries to exonerate themselves completely, and each of them claims to be the killer. In Rashomon remakes, including the Star Trek one, there is essentially always a final version of the story at the end, which reveals what really happened—whereas the woodcutter’s story in Rashomon includes at least one more lie of its own, and we never do find out who actually killed the samurai.

    *** By “final,” I mean the 1977 film, of course.

  10. John Emerson says
  11. If anyone’s interested, there are/ were a couple of episodes of the Russian TV versions of the Vinni Pukh stories on YouTube…

  12. I’d like to read a translation back to English. But… “pukh” is пух “fuzz, fluff, down”, right? That’s very neat, and makes me wonder how much else Zakhoder did that won’t translate back short of Michael Kandel.

  13. Before Lucas hit on the idea of telling the story as a modernized epic, based on his reading of Joseph Campbell’s writings on the role of myth

    This curmudgeonly writer insists that Lucas had no such grandiose plans when he was first working on Star Wars, but rather that he was mining ideas from earlier written SF, often the pulps, as well as borrowing from the cinematographic plots and tropes noted.

    Only later did Lucas read Campbell and retcon his own creation process. Monomyth, schmonomyth!

  14. The English version was written and entirely voiced by Eric Thompson, father of Oscar-winning Emma (who would have been six when his version first hit screens). He made up his own story ideas and dialogue based on seeing the footage, but not the French text, for 441 episodes.

    English equivalent of

    http://languagehat.com/the-goblin-version/

  15. “pukh” is пух “fuzz, fluff, down”

    Winnie the Poof/Pouf/Floof?

  16. The Russian translation does have elements of the frame story. When reading it as a child I noticed that those are very different and a bit crazy. Imagine, you are reading a biography of a historical character, say… Grace Hopper, but there is an interlude describing computers (or IT gods) conversing with each other and you suspect that Grace is a character of stories that they tell in evenings by the fire. This way crazy:)

    Crazy is good, but there was a dark element to it too. First, Winnie apeared as an inert (“coming downstairs now, bump, bump, bump, on the back of his head,”) toy. This is just plain evil and dehumanizing (debearizing).

    Second, I was disappointed with that Christopher Robin does not appear in the Winnie the Pooh stories as one of the characters (despite being mentioned). Dehumanizing too.

  17. “domesticates” – I like this word. (I am not sure what “potentially colonial” has to do with this.:))

  18. For a British audience at least, “Winnie the Poof” would have rather different connotations…

  19. The animator’s name is Fyodor Khitruk, not Khitriuk as in the article (Хитрук, not Хитрюк). Zakhoder’s retelling is wonderful but the classical Soviet Vinni-Pukh comes from the three animated films created by Khitruk’s team in cooperation with Zakhoder. Khitruk also recruited major actors for the voiceover: Evgeny Leonov as Vinni, Iya Savvina as Piglet, and Erast Garin as Eeyore. (In the 1920s and early 1930s, Garin had been Meyerhold’s favorite male actor, to give an idea of the talent involved.) Moisey Vainberg (aka Mieczysław Weinberg) supplied the music. Mighty forces for three short films in a deliberately “naive,” “childish” style.

  20. Just shows you that quality always tells, no matter the context. Don’t condescend to kids (or anyone else)!

  21. It is almost unimaginable to a Russian speaker that “another” Vinni Pukh exists.

    In my case this is certainly true for Disney‘s version.

  22. January First-of-May says

    that Christopher Robin does not appear in the Winnie the Pooh stories as one of the characters

    In the written stories (that I know of), he absolutely does. It’s the cartoons that skip him.
    But there might have been a different edition of the written stories that followed the cartoons; as far as I know this is not uncommon.

    Zompist on the lack of Christopher Robin (rather more positively).

  23. I mean the stories.Yes, he does. First I remembered that, second, I checked a few stories and he is there. I remember that I was dissatisfied with something related to his character when I was reading it, but it seems I misremembered what it was exactly:(

  24. For a British audience at least, “Winnie the Poof” would have rather different connotations…

    Not to children.

    And for children, “Pooh” is already homophonous with a word for “turd”.

    WikiP says that “Pooh” was “a swan they had encountered while on holiday.”(?) Well, maybe. But it would hardly surprise me if the brown and lumpy bear toy was actually given the additional name because the kid thought that it resembled poo, and thought that poo is funny. And then later no-one wanted to admit it.

  25. @Owlmirror: The bit about Christopher Robin having previously named a swan “Pooh” is right there in the first sentence of the introduction to the first book.

    If you happen to have read another book about Christopher Robin, you may remember that he once had a swan (or the swan had Christopher Robin, I don’t know which) and that he used to call this swan Pooh.

    The other book in question is, of course, the poetry collection When We Were Very Young, in which A. A. Milne mentions the swan, also in the first paragraph of the introductory remarks.

    JUST BEFORE WE BEGIN

    At one time (but I have changed my mind now) I thought I was going to write a little Note at the top of each of these poems, in the manner of Mr William Wordsworth, who liked to tell his readers where he was staying, and which of his friends he was walking with, and what he was thinking about, when the idea of writing his poem came to him. You will find some lines about a swan here, if you get as far as that, and I should have explained to you in the Note that Christopher Robin, who feeds this swan in the mornings, has given him the name of ‘Pooh’. This is a very fine name for a swan, because, if you call him and he doesn’t come (which is a thing swans are good at), then you can pretend that you were just saying ‘Pooh!’ to show how little you wanted him. Well, I should have told you that there are six cows who come down to Pooh’s lake every afternoon to drink, and of course they say ‘Moo’ as they come. So I thought to myself one fine day, walking with my friend Christopher Robin, ‘Moo rhymes with Pooh! Surely there is a bit of poetry to be got out of that?’ Well, then, I began to think about the swan on his lake; and at first I thought how lucky it was that his name was Pooh; and then I didn’t think about that any more… and the poem came quite differently from what I intended… and all I can say for it now is that, if it hadn’t been for Christopher Robin, I shouldn’t have written it; which, indeed, is all I can say for any of the others. So this is why these verses go about together, because they are all friends of Christopher Robin; and if I left out one because it was not quite like the one before, then I should have to leave out the one before because it was not quite like the next, which would be disappointing for them.

  26. Dmitry Pruss says

    In Russian, the bear is named after a swan too, and has no relation so feather or down. It’s a dual use name as it should be, which can loud like a gunshot or quite like a whisper.

    No poop connotations either. But of course in another cartoon, princess Anastasia’s dog is named Pooka which is a Little Farter in Russian.

  27. /That’s very neat, and makes me wonder how much else Zakhoder did that won’t translate back short of Michael Kandel./
    As an example, in my old comment that Hat so kindly reminded us of, I mentioned Pooh Sticks rendered by Zakhoder as пустяки – trifles, i.e. the game of doesn’t-matters. Whenever I take friends or family to where there is a bridge, we always play Poohstyaki-PoohSticks.
    Another brilliant example is his lumping of Hefalumps and Woozles into one terrifying creature called Slonopotam – Слонопотам, which is a blend of elephant – slon and hippopotamus – гиппопотам.

    Wonderful Pooh-songs in the animated version sung by Evgeny Leonov, but remastered in a slightly higher speed.

    By the way, I think the director’s decision to skip Christopher Robin in the animated version was a masterstroke. It gave the character of Winnie a whole new dimension.

  28. Thanks, Hat, it’s a very good analysis!

  29. I just noticed that that PDF of When We Were Very Young that I linked to does not include the whole book, and, in particular, it cuts off before the poetry about Pooh the swan.

    It is too bad that Christopher Milne was so unhappy about how his father’s writing affected his life. He wrote about it himself (in two books), but he also suppressed (or repressed) a lot of the memories of that time. For a long time, he was bitter about the way he was taunted with his father’s sentimental poems (“Hush! Hush! Whisper who dares!// Christopher Robin is saying his prayers.”) ​as an older child at Stowe School.* This article provides a brief summary of his situation.** So there were probably more stories that Christopher Robin could have told that she never did.

    * The Wikipedia article on Stowe School includes this wonderful encapsulation of the British aristocratic education system: “It is considered one of the most prestigious schools in the world with its own golf course, 1000 acres of land, top-end Science and Music facilities with a stunning stately palace.”

    ** Toward the end of his life, Christopher Milne forbade Disney from making any more feature films about Winne the Pooh. American television shows were fine (and indeed netted the younger Milne plenty of money), but not theatrical films. This was a compromise, but it seems like it would have made an interesting legal case had it come to litigation. Disney owned the media rights to A. A. Milne’s stories, but Christopher Robin was not, after all, a fictional character; his father’s stories mix real and imaginary elements of the boy’s tale. So Disney agreed not to make any more films until Christopher Milne’s death in 1996.

  30. David Marjanović says

    “Hush! Hush! Whisper who dares!// Christopher Robin is saying his prayers.”

    Ewwwwww.

  31. January First-of-May says

    Pooh Sticks rendered by Zakhoder as пустяки – trifles, i.e. the game of doesn’t-matters

    That’s supposed to be an (in-story) alternate name that caught on; the (again, in-story) original was пушишки ~ “Pooh-cones” (because they were throwing [fir] cones initially, apparently, they only switched to sticks later).

    I used to have (and might still have, somewhere at home, but sadly forgot the name of) a fairly large book that covered this and several other translation choices by Zakhoder, and indeed many other cases of English wordplay translated into Russian; IIRC it was supposed to be intended for teaching English to Russian children, but most of the book consisted of elaborate discussions of extended fragments from various well-known translations of (children-oriented) English texts into Russian.

  32. I wanted to use слонопотам a few days ago here, I did not because most people are not familiar with it:)
    This is the word from VP vocabulary that I borrowed into my idiolect. THe problem with is that I do not know when to use it;(

  33. Athel Cornish-Bowden says

    Christopher Robin was not, after all, a fictional character;

    No indeed. I bought a book from him once. He had a bookshop in Dartmouth.

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