Translating 2017: An Interview with Marian Schwartz

I was thrilled when translator Marian Schwartz agreed to an e-mail interview: beyond wanting to learn more about her translation of Olga Slavnikova’s 2017, for which she received a National Endowment for the Arts grant, I wanted to find out what she’s working on now.

In a recent interview with The Boston Globe Marian said, “I think a translation is considered ‘good’ when the reader likes it, even if it’s tough going.” Marian’s translation of 2017 feels faithful to a very difficult original: I thought I was reliving favorite scenes when I read her versions. Which is to say I think the translation both reads well and manages to preserve the complexity and peculiarities of Slavnikova’s writing... fitting Marian’s definition of “good.” This could not have been easy!

Marian mentions below that she translated a manuscript that is slightly shorter than the Russian novel I read this winter. I think Slavnikova’s rearrangements make the opening chapters of this second version of the novel flow better than the Russian book I read. It should help readers avoid some of the difficulties I had getting into the rhythm of 2017 (previous post).

(Disclosure: I received an uncorrected proof of 2017 from Overlook Press. I should also add that I have quirky ways of reading translations of books I’ve already read in Russian. Though I didn’t read the translated 2017 cover-to-cover, I spent several hours reading the opening chapters and numerous assorted other passages, occasionally comparing original and translation.)

I haven’t changed anything in Marian’s answers, and I only added links. I want to add one thing here, though: I love her idea about the future of foreign literature. For more information about Marian’s background, awards, and work, please visit her Web site, including this page, with links to full reviews of her translation of 2017.

Here you go:

1. How did you come to translate 2017? Did you find the book or did the book find you?

Several years ago, Natasha Perova of Glas asked me to translate something for Nine of Russia's Foremost Women Writers. One of the choices she offered was an excerpt from an earlier version of this novel, an excerpt that included Slavnikova's spectacular set piece on transparency, which may be my favorite nugget in the whole book. Slavnikova's ability to write these set pieces about abstract ideas that are nonetheless integral to the novel reminds me of Berberova. After I got the NEA to complete the translation, another excerpt ran in Subtropics. But then Slavnikova did a somewhat shortened version for Gallimard, and that's the manuscript I translated for this edition.

2. I noticed in your acknowledgements that you thanked a friend and colleague for help with geological terminology. Was that one of the most difficult aspects of translating 2017?

I am very fortunate to have a colleague, R. Michael Conner, who specializes in translating Russian geology, so on the one hand I knew the scientific language was going to be a problem, but on the other I knew I had an authoritative source. Mike had helped me in a similar way when I translated Lost in the Taiga, which takes place in Siberia and describes the terrain at great length. So no, that wasn't difficult in the way the general density of Slavnikova's style is. As you know, Russian creates dense language in an entirely different way from English. Russian relies more on inflection; English on position. These kinds of passages become even harder when movement is involved, since Russian conceptualizes motion in what is, for English speakers, a totally alien fashion. It's at these moments that I have to step back, take a deep breath, and reimagine how English constructs a sentence out of these same components, while preserving the tone. Of course.

3. 2017 has a lot to offer, including a love story, wilderness adventure, and philosophical themes. Are there any themes or plot lines in the book that you think should be especially interesting or universal for people who read the book in translation?

The novel's attraction, I think, is not that it's universal but just the opposite, that it gives non-Russians very direct access to the kind of exotic Russian culture and psyche that has fascinated Western culture for over a hundred years. We read The Brothers Karamazov for the philosophy, but we're also intrigued by the characters' daily existence and general worldview. Some of that is going on here, too. In Spartan living conditions, educated men plot secretive prospecting expeditions and a whiz-kid computer programmer shuts himself in to figure out how to unlock secrets guarded by futuristic safeguards of his own making. Women turn to stone, for goodness' sake! Yes, there are several plot threads, but what really holds the reader, I think, is the emotion. There are sections that make my heart pound every time I read them.

4. What are you working on now?

Right now I'm translating an art book for Yale University Press on the Suprematist painter Kazimir Malevich. This is a period near and dear to my heart, and the book works with newly accessible archival materials that shed surprisingly new light on what I'd always considered a well-studied period. Little did I know.

5. What favorite writers or pieces of Russian fiction would you like to recommend to readers?

Akashic Books is putting out Moscow Noir in June, and for it I translated several stories, all but one by authors I'd never heard of let alone read, and three of them impressed me very much, Andrei Khusnutdinov, Sergei Kuznetsov, and Aleksandr Anuchkin. All the stories are a little more violent than I usually go for, but if you can accept that convention, then you're going to enjoy this collection.

The two more "literary" writers who I think should find publishers here are Mikhail Shishkin and especially Leonid Yuzefovich, who in addition to Cranes and Pygmies, which you reviewed, has a terrific historical detective trilogy (later made into a TV mini-series). Yuzefovich is a historian with special interests in Mongolia and medieval diplomacy (!), and he manages to bring all that into play. The Inspector Putilin series is set in St. Petersburg and loosely based on an actual detective who lived there in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

6. What question do you wish I had asked? And please answer it!

What does the future hold for foreign literature?

My crystal ball tells me that we are finally going to figure out how to publish and deliver great international literature electronically. I believe there are at least 5000 potential readers for almost any first-rate foreign novel, which would make publishing those books viable. Exactly what kind of portal or portals have to be devised is beyond my expertise, but we're seeing success of this sort already in science fiction, for example. International literature is one more kind of niche market, one of many that suddenly have a future. My hope is that this will lead to a much broader range of literature being published, not just the highest art (which clearly must be published), the most stylistically and intellectually challenging, but also books that are more conventional narratively and will have a wider audience. I'm not often this optimistic, but in this case I am. It's crazy, I know.

2017 on Amazon

Going Round and Round: Bykov’s ЖД

Great idea. Messy execution. That pretty much sums up my thoughts on Dmitrii Bykov’s novel ЖД (ZhD) (chapters here), which Alma Books recently released in an English version as Living Souls (PDF excerpt here).

The great idea: ZhD presents an alternative view of Russian history and politics, in which northerners (Varangians) and southerners (Khazars) live in ongoing conflict. History moves in endless cycles, as do people who literally walk and ride around in circles. The book takes place in a post-petroleum near future, and many of Bykov’s characters are in the military and/or romantic couples. I’m giving only the barest summary here because the Glas site provides so much information (warning: including many spoilers) here.

ZhD gave me an odd case of déjà vu. Like Bykov’s Списанные (The List), which I read last summer (post here), ZhD left me thinking Bykov couldn’t decide if he wanted to write essays or a novel. Both books contain many, many pages of heavy-deep-and-real conversations that could conceivably occur in life but, for my taste, felt too repetitive or contrived for fiction. I’m glad Bykov broaches difficult topics but his methods and his humor, which can get a little shticky (in these senses, not these), just don’t seem to grab me.

I frequently lost interest during the political discussions and background: even when they started out topical and intriguing, there was often too much of a good thing. Worse, they detracted from the book’s stronger layers. I most enjoyed sections when Bykov let his characters out into the world, where they could experience rather than just talk. Some scenes were fantastical, like a ghost telegraphist mentioning eternal war. I also thought an officer’s lousy Moscow home leave showed bureaucracy and spiritual poverty quite nicely. I particularly liked Bykov’s characters called Vas’ki, people who wander Russia and lack memory but have their own peculiar wisdom. They reminded me of holy fools.

Bykov includes all sorts of literal and metaphorical circles in ZhD. The title characters of ZhD want to reject what Bykov calls the замкнутый круг (vicious circle) of history, preferring to get off the track and create something new – children, a future – rather than wander the world and, ultimately, history, in circles, like the living dead.

From a historical perspective, the circles in ZhD are part of a literary progression. First: Dante’s Divine Comedy, a poem, featured circles of Hell. Second: Nikolai Gogol called his Dead Souls a poem and wanted to create a Russian Divine Comedy. Third: Bykov evokes Gogol by calling ZhD a poem and saying the title letters could stand for живые души, “living souls.” And Bykov includes lots of hellish-sounding circles.

Though ZhD felt overloaded at 685 pages, I’m sure readers who enjoy novels of ideas with characters chewing the political and historical fat will love it. Even some readers who don’t like all the chat may come away feeling more positive than I did: a Russian friend who told me she liked ZhD admitted, upon pointed questioning, that she’d skimmed.

Readers of the English translation, Living Souls, may feel less urge to skim. The English version of the book is roughly 50 pages shorter than the Russian original that my friend and I read. The Living Souls translator, Cathy Porter, told me in e-mail correspondence that, in collaboration with Bykov, she didn’t chop but chose to prune things like repetition and untranslatable Russian word play, to keep the narrative moving without losing the book’s humor and poetry. Porter said Bykov, who encouraged a free translation, thoroughly appreciates her tightening of the text.

Reading level for non-native readers: 3/5, average difficulty. I found it most difficult to plow through the repetition.

Bykov's Living Souls on Amazon

Russian Literature at the London Book Fair

I’m very excited to be heading to London soon for the London Book Fair and a morning-to-night program of Russian literature events organized by Academia Rossica! Academia Rossica calls this year’s program focus “fantasy and magical realism,” an aptly broad description that fits the diverse writers and critics who will speak and/or read: Dmitry Bykov, Lev Danilkin, Maria Galina, Sergei Lukyanenko, Olga Slavnikova, and Vladimir Sharov.

The schedule also includes seminar discussions on the Russian publishing market and literary translation. Russian programs at the book fair itself are listed here (click on the phrases at the top of the sidebar for full details), and there is a list of evening readings here. I’m especially looking forward to the “Voices from the Future – The Debut Prize for New Russian Writers” session on the 20^th: I translated a few short pieces for Squaring the Circle, an anthology published by Glas that collects work by winners of the Debut Prize.

This week I’ll post two pieces related to writers who will be at the book fair: thoughts on Bykov’s ЖД (recently released in translation as Living Souls) plus an interview with Marian Schwartz, who translated Slavnikova’s 2017.

Let me know if you’ll be at the book fair and would like to meet up… or if you have a question for one of the writers. I’ll see what I can do to get answers!

The Revolution Will Be Novelized: Prilepin’s San’kya

If you’d like a intimate view of politically motivated violence, vandalism, and mayhem, you’ll probably love Zakhar Prilepin’s Санькя (San’kya). San’kya tells the story of Sasha Tishin, a young man bent on finding an active role in an opposition party. His grandparents, who live in a remote village, call him San’kya, and his last name is derived from тише (quieter), though he also has an aggressive side.

Other than the Molotov cocktails and intention to kill a Latvian judge, Sasha feels pretty typical: he respects his grandparents, takes offense at his mother’s low nursing salary, and sometimes drinks vodka. He thinks about finding work. The problem with Sasha as a literary character – even if he’s an antihero of our time – is that his head often overflows with пустота (emptiness). Prilepin writes that we are all empty, with wind rattling through our atoms, but it’s not too much of an exaggeration to say Sasha and his party comrades feel devoid of principles or ideas beyond resentment and a desire to burn something.

Though Sasha’s emptiness may be socially or politically important, Sasha feels too undeveloped as a character to fill a novel. It’s also frustrating that San’kya includes secondary characters, like brothers known as Negative and Positive, who feel distinct but abbreviated and typecast in ways that make it easy for Prilepin to elicit reader recognition and reactions. The brothers, for example, grow houseplants, and a girl from the party named Verochka (from Vera, or Faith) is quite small, making her feel fragile. The contrast between rural and urban life didn’t feel fresh to me, either.

The shortcuts might work fine in a short story but in San’kya they contributed to my feeling that the book was watered down, as if Prilepin extended novella material into a full-length novel of 367 pages. I’ve enjoyed and admired Prilepin’s short stories much, much more: though simple, their condensed emotions have a far greater impact than the sometimes plodding pace of San’kya. Sure, political conflict can plod along endlessly, as the book’s last line reinforces, but in San’kya it doesn’t make for shapely fiction.

Despite thinking San’kya isn’t Prilepin’s best work, I don’t think it was a waste of time. It fits squarely in the post-Soviet “(anti)hero of our time” mosaic, and has been compared to Maksim Gorkii’s Мать (Mother), landing it within a long continuum of Russian political writing. Though I couldn’t finish Mother and (obviously) don’t think San’kya is a great piece of fiction, I have to admit both books have places.

Two other things: First, Prilepin is, himself, a member of the opposition National Bolshevik party. I’m not interested in whether art imitates life or vice versa, but some readers may be interested in how Prilepin portrays political activity that can easily be called extremist. Second, San’kya was a finalist for both the Booker and National Bestseller awards, losing to, respectively, Olga Slavnikova’s 2017 and Dmitrii Bykov’s Boris Pasternak. San’kya won the Yasnaya Polyana award.

Level for non-native readers of Russian: 2/5, not too difficult, thanks to short sentences and common vocabulary. Translation Watch: Available in Chinese, Polish, and French.

Photo by Cheryl Empey, via sxc.hu

Representations of Reality: A Time of Women and The Yeltyshevs

How do you prefer your fictional reality? I’ve been thinking about writers’ methods for creating fictional realities after reading two 2009 Booker Prize finalists: Elena Chizhova’s Время женщин (A Time of Women), about women in a communal apartment in the early ‘60s raising a girl who doesn’t speak, and Roman Senchin’s Елтышевы (The Yeltyshevs), about a failing family that moves from city to village in the 21^st century.

Chizhova, who won the Booker for A Time of Women, uses chunks of first-person narration that jump from character to character, capturing verbal tics and grammar mistakes. Her characters’ dialogue, inner thoughts, and descriptions sometimes feel like a mush up of skaz technique and the “verbatim” method of using actual utterances in literary and cinematic texts. Chizhova was quoted in a New York Times article as saying she eavesdropped on her mother and great-grandmother as a child, making me wonder if their speech patterns inspired her use of the vernacular in A Time of Women.

Chizhova’s situations and characters – three old women with old-fashioned names, a young female factory worker dying of cancer, and the young woman’s co-workers – feel authentic, gritty, and very specific, though the novel’s language and structure is also so choppy and jumpy that it was difficult to engage with the book. At least I’m not alone: Anna Narinskaia’s review in Kommersant (here) mentions the relief of passages in which the young woman’s daughter tells of her life in more direct language. The reviewer also mentions the frequency of diminutive forms in the book. Yes, they become grating.

What frustrated me more about A Time of Women was that I felt I’d already covered so many of its themes with other writers: voices, the apartment question, the young woman’s hassles at work over her personal life and choices, the parallel of a rotten system and cancer, illegitimate children, memories of World War Two… I don’t mean to sound immune to the power of those important and very sad themes that examine totalitarianism and the Soviet past but they had an unfortunate recycled feel, despite the way Chizhova expresses them. It’s just not my book.

To be fair, I should add that I read A Time of Women from a printout I made from the literary journal Zvezda’s Web site; I don’t particularly like reading printouts. A Russian-language book (print run: 4,000) is evidently on the way but I have seen no mentions of an English-language translation.

Which brings me to Senchin. And television, the ultimate medium for pseudo-reality. (Disclosure: I don’t have a TV.) Both Chizhova and Senchin use televisions in their books: Chizhova’s young mother manages to buy one, and it becomes a view into other lives that look happy to the characters. In Senchin, TV reflects the Yeltyshevs’ degradation. Living in the village, the family’s humanness and their television, a connection to the rest of the world, die. The family sinks into alcoholism and violence, and the TV reception fades. When they lived in town, Mr. Yeltyshev was a cop, his wife was a librarian. He fails to keep the peace, and she doesn’t seem to read much. One son can’t hold down a job, the other is in jail. Ouch.

The reader knows from the start that Senchin’s characters are doomed: Mr. Yeltyshev loses his job at the drunk tank after a critical lapse of judgment, lending the book the feel of a dark, dark parable. Senchin’s matter-of-fact narrative voice drew me in from the first sentence, and his characters, locations, and situations are so vivid that I felt like I was on location with the narrator. Senchin doesn’t include extra details, and his mentions of changes of season reinforce the atmosphere and inevitability of the Yeltyshevs’ worsening situation. Yeltyshev himself, formerly part of the rotten system, becomes rottener. I felt queasy but I couldn’t stop reading. The Russian friend who bought the book for me in Moscow read it before handing it off: she couldn’t put it down, either.

Some critics grumbled when Senchin didn’t win the Booker – I also think it or Leonid Yuzefovich’s Cranes and Dwarfs (previous post) would have been a better choice than A Time for Women – but The Yeltyshevs has been criticized by some readers who think it’s too depressing. Yes, it’s chernukha, that dark naturalism I mentioned a few posts ago. Yes, it’s horribly depressing, particularly because the Yeltyshevs are always waiting for someone, something, anything miraculous to save them from themselves and their poor decisions. The Yeltyshevs is one of the saddest, darkest, and most achingly real books I’ve read in a long time. But for my taste, it’s also one of the best because it provides such a terrifying and detailed psychological portrait of intertwined economic, social, professional, and moral failures that could, with a few changes, easily take place in another family or another country. There’s lots more I’d love to write about both these books, but I’ll stop by saying that the universality of The Yeltyshevs is, for me, an important part of what realistic fiction should be.

Level for non-native readers of Russian: A Time of Women: 4/5, rather difficult, for its vernacular plus a twitchy narrative that can be difficult to follow. The Yeltyshevs: 2/5, moderately easy thanks to simple vocabulary and a smooth writing style that builds suspense despite an obvious outcome.