Languor Management

To the envy of the world

A peasant, feeling betrayed by his wife, permanently abandons the world. From Sovlit.com: A translation of Leonid Leonov's short story The Tramp.

 

Provided with everything needed for conquering life, Chadaev lacked only the gift of laughter; but even this bitter injustice of nature brought an advantage to him: he was feared. The war spared his tall, reddish body, which looked like a pine tree against the sunset; he returned intact, having received not so much as a black-eye. But then suddenly, petty misfortunes, like mice, began to plague him. He fought with them for a whole year, getting crazy from the battle, but still hordes of them attacked to gnaw at his celebrated good fortune. On days of respite, he bitterly looked into himself but could find no cause for his ruin. Only now, traveling to this latest punishment of fate, did he recall one adventure at the front...and although a muzhik is not ashamed of any sin that is covered in a soldier's greatcoat, this recollection burned and gnawed away at Chadaev's very essence, and there was no way to root it out.

 

 

 

Parting Poetry of Pindostan's Political Pygmies

Viktor Pelevin's latest book, P5--a collection of short stories--was announced by the publisher as a novel, because short story collections don't sell. But it sounds like the publisher is going to need more tricks than that to sell this one. From the Moscow Times:

The critical consensus after the book's appearance was unfavorable to Pelevin. Some said he was moving toward Sergei Minayev (the author of several very badly written bestsellers). Some said Pelevin had become undistinguishable from his numerous imitators. Galina Yuzefovich wrote in Vedomosti that the creative spirit that had inspired the author throughout the 1990s has obviously left him.

People often tell me that I am a pessimist

Today, October 7, is the second anniversary of the murder in Moscow of Anna Politkovskaya (1958-2006).

[Hat tip to A Step at a Time.]

Interesting fellows

The Russian version of Esquire magazine has published a conversation between Mikhail Khodorkovsky and the writer Grigory Chkhartishvili, better known as Boris Akunin. Khodorkovsky's lawyer, Robert Amsterdam, will be posting a portion of it everyday this week in his very necessary blog.

Correspondence: CONVERSATION OF WRITER GRIGORY CHKHARTISHVILI
(B.AKUNIN) WITH MIKHAIL KHODORKOVSKY

When the editorial board proposed to me to get an interview from any person who would be interesting to me, I said right away: “Most interesting of all for me would be to talk with Mikhail Khodorkovsky”. The fate of the former richest person of Russia gives me no peace. And not at all because he is the richest. Every time somebody tries to stand up for Khodorkovsky an his comrades, without fail you always hear the reproach: come on, we have many people in our country who are being held behind bars unfairly. They don’t write about them in the newspapers, they don’t have a team of high-class lawyers looking out for them. Why is it, gentlemen, that you’re making such a fuss over this specific oligarch?

I will explain why I’m making such a fuss. It was specifically on the YUKOS case that we lost the independence of the judiciary – an institution without which a democratic society can not exist. That means this is precisely the point to which we have to return. If we restore justice and legality in the case of Khodorkovsky, this will also help all the rest of the victims of our foundering Themis.

For understandable reasons, the dialogue took place in epistolary form. It is given here without any abridgements. -- Grigory Chkhartishvili...

Well said!

In this month's The Believer magazine, Adam Thirlwell expresses quite well something that I have yearned yet failed to express for some time, namely that Style can be translated across languages even if formal elements like meter and rhyme must be jettisoned in the transfer from one language to the next. The Believer doesn't provide the full text of Thirlwell's essay, so here's an excerpt (reproduced without permission) on Vladimir Nabokov's experience and troubles translating that famous novel-in-verse Pushkin's Eugene Onegin:

In Nabokov's forward to his translation he asked a simple question: "Can Pushkin's poem, or any other poem with a definite rhyme scheme, be really translated?" And then he rephrased it: "Can a rhymed poem like Eugene Onegin be truly translated with the retention of its rhymes?" The answer, of course, is no. To reproduce the rhymes and yet translate the poem entire is mathematically impossibe." And yet: "In losing its rhyme the poem loses its blooom, which neither marginal description nor the alchemy of a scholium can replace." The only solution, thought Nabokov, which was not really a solution, was to give up on the style and explicate the content. this, argued Nabokov, was a literal translation; and only this method was acceptable. It was hardly a translation at all: rather  than fulfilling the traditional function of replacing the original, it was now only useful as a crib, a prompt to the orginal, instead.

Every theory of translation is a theory of style. Each implies the other. Translation has to deal, minutely, with the relationships between form and content. The reason, I think, that Nabokov was having such trouble with Eugene Onegin was that it pointed to a central problem. His idea of style was problematic. He believed in the novel--the novel in prose--as a poetic entity. He thought it should value the form (the phonetics, the technical tricks) of a sentence as much as or more than it should value that sentence's content. He believed the European avant-garde idea--most famously expressed in Flaubert's letter to Louise Colet--that a novel had a value only insofar as its sentences were organized with as much care as possible. But Nabokov's idea of how sentences might be organized placed too much emphasis on the sentences' internal structure. And so he refused to admit that Eugene Onegin could be translated. He did not allow that a novel--even the most poetic novel of all, one written in poetry--has a style that goes beyond the sentences' internal structures: It  is there in the arrangement of paragraphs, of chapters, of voices and materials. It is there in the arrangements of the plot. Nabokov's model of style was too much based on the advertised constricted tricks of the lyric poem.

All theories of translation depend on a genre--on whether a text is poetry, or prose, or an instruction manual. Maybe I can make this even more limited. All theories of translation will only be entirely true for a particular work....

Yes!