If you were to ask me what I enjoyed most at the
Translators’ Coven, which I attended at St. Antony’s College in Oxford,
England, last month, I’d probably say something like “everything” or “all of
it.” Those two days of formal and informal discussion about translation,
Russian, and English—mostly Russian-English translation, but with one panel
about English-Russian work—were even more fun and informative than I’d
expected. Though it’s always difficult to explain what’s so fun and informative
(I’ve already tried and failed quite a few times), the lively official coven
report, compiled by Boris Dralyuk
and available online here
in PDF form, should give you a sense of why I had such a great time and why
I hope so very much there will be another coven next year. I’ll use this post
to amplify and complement certain points in Boris’s detailed report…
So many translators…
I think it’s safe to say that everybody was surprised the coven drew so many
people: in his opening remarks, Oliver Ready said he and Robert
Chandler had expected a much smaller gathering so had to reserve a larger
room when it turned out that over 120 people (!) wanted to come. I’m tremendously
grateful to Oliver and Robert for organizing the coven, and to sponsors CEELBAS,
the Prokhorov
Foundation, and the Russkiy
Mir Foundation for funding the coven and supporting my travel, care, and
feeding. It was a wonderful treat to have a chance to meet, speak with, and
listen to so many colleagues from what feels more and more like a true community:
the coven added to my impression that Russian-to-English literary translation is
experiencing something of a boom, to borrow a word from conversations with one
of you. It was especially encouraging to hear how busy everybody is translating
and, yes, publishing. I’m already taking entries for the 2014 new translation list.
A chance meeting… Speaking
of the value of community, Boris’s report notes that the coven provided a
chance for Peter
France and Anatoly
Liberman to learn, by virtue of speaking on the same panel, that they’ve both
been translating Baratynsky
(a.k.a. Boratynsky)… but without knowing of each other’s work. I mentioned
Peter’s work on Mandelshtam in a previous
post about poetry translation events in London the week after the coven; Peter
also translates Batiushkov
and Annenskii,
who was one of my big favorites in grad school. Anatoly spoke of handling
various technical problems of poetry translation, such as differing quantities
of syllables in Russian and English. Anatoly, by the way, writes the “Oxford
Etymologist” columns for the Oxford University Press blog: you can learn about
words like “pumpernickel” and “flute” here.
Retranslations…
Though I’ve never retranslated anything beyond isolated lines of classics that pop
up in contemporary work, I loved the panel on retranslations. Rosamund Bartlett
spoke about her work on Anna Karenina,
offering very practical bits on topics like Tolstoy’s use of repetition, which
she sometimes preserves and sometimes does not, depending on shades of meaning,
the value of switching word order in exceptionally long sentences, and the vexing
question of feminine surnames. I also appreciated Oliver’s account of spending
about five years translating Crime and Punishment,
which he wrote out by hand; Oliver, too, mentioned repetition, saying he kept
a glossary so he could preserve repetition, as appropriate.
Collaborative
translation… Discussion of collaboration was a highlight, too: Anne Fisher
spoke about translating poems by Maxim Amelin with her
husband, poet Derek Mong: she showed us
drafts, beginning with a crib and ending with polished lines, and acknowledged
disagreements. After Anne spoke, panel chair Robert Chandler added that he and
his wife, with whom he collaborates, sometimes try “something silly” when they’re
stuck. I like that approach, too: I often repeat lines over and over to myself,
out loud (and, hmm, usually staring blankly at the wall), trying out new words.
It often works for me. Robert is, of course, an active collaborator: I’ve been
enjoying working on a Platonov story with him and am just getting started on a
play. It’s been especially instructive seeing how Robert draws on opinions and
advice from experts on Platonov and railroad technology from the early
twentieth century. But back to the coven itself! Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski, both
of whom are co-editing Anthology of
Russian Poetry from Pushkin to Brodsky with Robert, spoke of their work
together, using the example of Arseny Tarkovsky’s “Field
Hospital” and some of Irina’s poems. It was fun hearing how they work on poetry that Irina did not write: Irina gives Boris a
summary of elements in the poem she sees as crucial. I liked Irina’s metaphor
of “the bristles of each line” in a poem that the translator should feel.
“Productive” and
“rowdy”… Boris’s summary uses those adjectives to describe Chris Tauchen’s
presentation about his work on Nikolai Kononov’s short story “Аметисты” (“Amethysts”). Chris asked attendees
to look at a problematic passage and offer translation ideas. As Boris notes in
the report, “there is little translators like to do more than translate.” He’s
right: it was fun talking over ideas with the people sitting nearby… this
involved, of course, repeating lines over and over, out loud, trying out new
words. I drew on that theme in my own talk about translating dialogue for
plays, too, highlighting the importance of intonation.
English-Russian
translation… The panel on translating Julian Barnes and Peter Ackroyd from
English to Russian was a nice change of pace on the second afternoon: Anna
Aslanyan’s observations on looking to Nikolai Karamzin’s Letters
of a Russian Traveler for help when she was working on Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor, which is partially set in the eighteenth century and
uses spellings like “fabrick” and “agonie,” was reassuring after my work on
excerpts from Evgenii Vodolazkin’s Laurus,
which contains bits of archaic Russian. Alexandra Borisenko and Victor
Sonkin’s presentation
on retranslating Flaubert’s Parrot
was filled with humor, some of which drew on passages from Soviet translations
where meaning was overshadowed by what Boris neatly summarizes as “the
prudishness of the Soviet approach.”
The non-coven cows…
Finally, I can’t help but mention how much I loved walking around Port Meadow in
Oxford with Anne Marie Jackson and dozens of cows the day before the coven. It
was just the thing to shake off one plane flight and two bus rides.
Other posts about the coven:
Alan Shaw on Prosoidia, here.
Erik McDonald on XIX век, here.
Disclaimers: The usual. And, again, my profuse thanks to coven’s sponsors and organizers!
Up Next: Back, finally, to writing about books! Alexander Ilichevsky’s The Orphics, Iurii Buida’s Thief, Spy, and Murderer, and then, at some point in the future, Maxim Kantor’s huge (608 large pages) Red Light/World, which I started last Sunday and am finding very intriguing so far… it reads like a combination of a dishy contemporary novel, a historical novel, and a sociopolitical rant. We’ll see how that goes.
Photo Credit: Sarah Charlesworth, Creative Commons, via Wikipedia
