Falen's Evegenii Onegin / khandra

Sat May 7 05:34:08 UTC 2005

We still, alas, cannot forestall it -
This dreadful ailment's heavy toll;
The spleen is what the English call it,
We call it simply Russian soul.

I¹d always thought this was quite witty.  As if the gloominess of the
Russian soul was something so obvious that it didn¹t need to be spelt out!

Would anyone who read this first in English, then in Russian, really feel he
had been misled as regards the meaning of the quatrain as a whole?

R.

> Of course it's true that in translating one is always balancing a variety of
> factors, but that's no excuse for gaffes of this magnitude.  BTW, now that I
> remind myself of the stanza in question, Pushkin's narrator has already used
> "angliiskii splin" by this point and is now searching for a Russian
> equivalent.  Nabokov has, predictably, the utterly opaque "Russian
> 'chondria'."  (Honestly, if you're going to translate, translate already!)
> To call it "simply Russian ennui" ends up, in context, being silly.  Maybe
> "Russian gloom."  But this is an instance in which Falen has allowed the
> always tenuous balance of literary factors to go out of whack, sacrificing
> far too much syntactically to the other desiderata.  My guess is that he
> would be glad to have it back.  All translators experience this at one point
> or another.  But to defend such a slip on the grounds that translation is
> hard is an insult to translators.  Better to change the line far more
> radically than Falen has in this instance than to propagate such a crude
> misanthropologism.
> 
> My third and fourth cents,
> David
> (Powelstock)
> 
>> -----Original Message-----
>> From: Slavic & East European Languages and Literature list
>> [mailto:SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU] On Behalf Of Deborah Hoffman
>> Sent: Friday, May 06, 2005 6:50 PM
>> To: SEELANGS at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU
>> Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Falen's Evegenii Onegin / khandra
>> 
>> I would also agree that this is not necessarily an error.
>> Frequently translators must choose from betwee several not
>> entirely acceptable options, especially when translating into
>> English with its plethora of synonyms, each of which calls to
>> mind its own set of associations and collocates well or
>> poorly with other words in a very opaque way.
>> 
>> For example, using "soul" for khandra may work perfectly well
>> given the particular context - which I have not seen.  In
>> another context, say a work by Olesha perhaps it could be
>> "spite," in a work about Leonid Utesov perhaps "blues," in a
>> work describing a flighty or temperamental character perhaps "pique"
>> would work, in doing Sherlock Holmes even "spleen,"
>> which otherwise sounds archaic and odd, and makes one think
>> of Greeks.  
>> 
>> Beyond that, in reproducing verse, Falen has to take things
>> like rhyme, assonance, consonance, not to mention meter into
>> consideration, all of which could have made "soul" more
>> desirable than other alternatives.  Nabokov (I really should
>> look this up and see for myself what he did) would likely
>> have footnoted whatever choice he made, which interferes with
>> the flow of the text and any hope of reproducing the
>> original's effect on the original reader.  To cite a cliche,
>> things inevitably get lost in translation and sometimes all
>> you can do is decide which things they are.
>> --Deborah
>> 
>> 
>> ---------------------------------------------------
>> Date:    Fri, 6 May 2005 06:28:32 +0100
>> From:    Robert Chandler <kcf19 at DIAL.PIPEX.COM>
>> Subject: Re: Translations of Pushkin, Tolstoy?
>> 
>> Dear Laura,
>> 
>> I agree entirely with your general praise of Falen.  I just
>> want to add that the line you quote is not an 'unfortunate
>> translation choice' in the least.
>> It conveys Pushkin's meaning and tone very well.  I
>> appreciate that a language teacher may find it irritating if
>> students end up thinking that 'khandra' = 'soul' - but
>> translators are NOT language teachers!
>> 
>> Best Wishes,
>> 
>> Robert Chandler
>> 
>>> I just used Falen for the first time in a survey
>> course and found
>> that
>>> it was surprisingly accurate, given how well it
>> conveys the tone of
>> the
>>> original to non-Russian speakers.  One word of
>> warning: 1:38 contains
>>> the unfortunate translation choice of rendering
>> "koroche: russkaia
>>> khandra" as "We call it simply /Russian soul/."
>> Students read all
>> kinds
>>> of deep meanings into this, something which I plan
>> to forestall with
>>> advance warning next time around.
>>> 
>>> Laura Goering
>>> Carleton College
>>> 
>>> pjs wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Anyone have any strong feelings about the Johnston
>> vs. the Falen
>>>> translation of E.O. for a survey course in
>> 19th-century Russian
>>>> literature?  My sense (after a cursory inspection)
>> is that the
>> Johnston
>>>> hews more closely to the original while the Falen
>> "reads better." 
>> Other
>>>> suggestions?
>>>> 
>>>> How about _Death of Ivan Illich_?  Any suggestions
>> there? Anyone
>> seen the
>>>> Pasternak-Slater translation?
>>>> 
>>>> Peter Scotto
>>>> Mount Holyoke College
>> 
>> Deborah Hoffman
>> Graduate Assistant
>> Kent State University
>> Department of Modern and Classical Language Studies
>> 
>> http://www.personal.kent.edu/~dhoffma3/index.htm
>> 
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