Platonov and 'Ya chuvstvuyu"

Wed May 23 04:31:43 UTC 2007

Dear Robert,
1. Thank you so much for having started such a good thread. The quality of
the comments was so good that I was sorry not to have paid more attention to
literary classes.
2. Josh's "I bleed rail ties" I thought was very inventive, and accurate;
and I think it also raised his place on the list by more than 20 points.

Genevra Gerhart

ggerhart at comcast.net

www.genevragerhart.com
www.russiancommonknowledge.com

-----Original Message-----
From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list
[mailto:SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Robert Chandler
Sent: Tuesday, May 22, 2007 12:08 AM
To: SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU
Subject: [SEELANGS] Platonov and 'Ya chuvstvuyu"

Dear all,

THANK YOU all for your suggestions, all of which, in their different ways
are helpful.  And it is gratifying to generate so much interest both in
questions about the nature of translation and in a writer I love.

I'd like to mention again that, in spite of the wonderful work being done by
textologists and editors in Moscow and Petersburg, there are still a number
of Platonov's finest works which are still hardly known.  'Sredi zhivotnykh
I rastenii' is one of them.  The full text is published only in the journal
ROSSIYA (Jan. 1998).  And I have attempted to type the text into my computer
and have sent a WORD file to several of you who have asked for it.

I'm grateful to Sasha for mentioning Olga Meerson's brilliant book.  I'd
like to add that a much-shortened English version of this is available in
ESSAYS IN POETICS (University of Keele: Autumn 2001), p. 21-38.  I doubt if
there is any single essay that says so much of importance about Platonov.

And I do passionately agree with almost everything that Lily Alexander has
said in the last couple of days, especially in passages like this:
> Platonov has the dimensions of kosnoyasychie of the holy fool, of the
> Soviet press, and of the Soviet muzhik, and of street language merging
> with literature, and many many more things. That's why I believe that it
> is difficult to read too much into Platonov's texts, because they have
> so many hidden channels and semantic niches opening into all kinds of
> possible interesting readings. I have seen students interpreting his
> texts very differently, but all of them made sense to me - I enjoyed
> seeing them trying. This is his richness. His texts are provoking in
> this sense - they are almost force us into some kind of Talmudic intense
> interpretation set of mind.

Sasha raised the question of US and British readership.  The differences
between US and British English are subtler and more numerous than is often
realized.  I would not dream of trying to write in 'American', even though
this current volume is to be published by NYRB Classics; I'd gladly write
American if I could, but I can't.  And this is what I wrote in my preface to
my Penguin Classics anthology RUSSIAN SHORT STORIES FROM PUSHKIN TO BUIDA:
"for all our lip service to cultural pluralism, both British and American
readers are often surprisingly intolerant of 'Americanisms' or
'Britishisms'. This volume contains work by both British and American
translators; I enjoy their different styles and have not attempted to reduce
them to a pallid norm. It may even be the case that some stories translate
more readily into particular varieties of English. It is hard, for example,
to imagine Vasily Shukshin's 'In the Autumn' sounding as effective in
British English as in the American version by John Givens and Laura
Michael." 

In answer to Professor Hill: Platonov went to a parish school on the
outskirts of Voronezh in the early 20th century.  I doubt if there would
have been such a thing as 'creative  writing' there.  He was publishing a
lot of poems and articles by 1920, when he was 21.  The thoughts and images
are bold, but the language is not subtle.

As for my original question - in some respects I like the suggested
translation 'I bleed railway ties', but it is only very rarely indeed, esp.
in his later work, that Platonov uses an image as shocking as that. For the
main part he uses rather ordinary words and infringes linguistic and other
norms in a way that is not only startling but also startlingly subtle.  Some
time ago, on this list, we discussed one of the most remarkable sentences
from CHEVENGUR: 'Skoro ya umru k tebe', spoken by a small boy to his dead
father in the grave.  The most ordinary of words put together in the most
extraordinary way...

Platonov's heroes often have a certain amount in common with one another and
with their author.  The pointsman certainly has something in common with the
hero of the story 'V prekrasnom i yarostnom mire', of whom the narrator
observes, ' <Он чувствовал свое превосходство перед нами, потому что понимал
машину точнее, чем мы, и он не верил, что я или кто другой может научиться
тайне его таланта: Мальцев понимал, конечно, что в усердии, в старательности
мы даже можем его превозмочь, но не представлял, чтобы мы больше его любили
паровоз и лучше его водили поезда, - лучше, он думал, было нельзя.
И Мальцеву поэтому было грустно с нами; он скучал от своего таланта, как
от одиночества, не зная, как нам высказать его, чтобы мы поняли>.  I'll
transliterate the last sentence: 'I Mal'tsevu poetomu bylo grustno s nami;
on skuchal ot svoego talanta, kak ot odinochestva, ne znaya, kak nam
vyskazat' ego, chtoby my ponyali.'

I'm still not sure how to translate 'khodite' in the sentence I originally
asked about, but I certainly want to leave the meaning of the sentence as a
whole as open as possible.  'Vy tut tol'ko sluzhite, khodite, a ya
chuvstvuyu' is something that Platonov himself could have said to his fellow
writers.  For that reason I shall stay with the words I came up with a few
days ago: 'but I work by feeling'.  These words can be read with very
different meanings and emphases.  It could simply be Fyodorov running his
hand along a rail to check its condition, something he does repeatedly; it
could be Fyodorov putting his heart and soul into his work; it could be
Platonov putting his heart and soul into his work.

I like a number of the suggested translations for the first half of the
sentence - 'put in time' is appealing - but I can't quite settle on anything
yet.

Greetings and thanks to all,

Robert

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