Platonov and 'Ya chuvstvuyu"

Wed May 23 04:53:31 UTC 2007

Thanks very much, Genevra!

And yes, I agree, more or less, about Josh.  It isn't perfect for Platonov,
but it might be for many other writers.

R.

> 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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