Platonov and 'Ya chuvstvuyu"

[Olga Meerson]

Dear Josh and all,

No, this is not the difference between British and American idioms--I know because I am an outsider to both :) The difference is between the effect of what Platonov does with idioms and what happens when people use them automatically, without what Shklovsky called the resurrection of the word. You see, in Platonov's world, no matter how accepted the IDIOM of bleeding something as living and breathing it may be, the actual bleeding creeps in. If he uses it, he always means it, not just what the idiom would mean. (The technique he uses for this literalization of idioms is slightly distorting them; they sound as if a foreigner attempted to talk in idioms instead of plainly. Something shifts about the syntactic government or word compatibility--and here you go: the idiomatic meaning turns into a thin veil over the literal. If you are interested in some corroboration of my conclusions in my life-long project on Platonov, check out Alexei Tsvetkov's Dissertation at U. Michigan on 
the topic, written and defended back in the '70s: it is mostly linguistic). 
What Robert meant then is that you can't translate Platonov specifically idiom-by-idiom, because his own, Platonovian, idioms always imply what they say literally and not merely idiomatically. Robert has worked on that problem for decades, so naturally, he was shocked by the literal meaning of the idiom, the meaning which he always takes into consideration (that is why I admire his work and try to contribute as much as he would take). Paying attention to the literal meaning of idioms is what Platonov does to his reader, in the original and in an ideal translation, to which Robert comes so close that the difference between his work and the ideal is often negligible. After all, Robert has managed to create a language WITHIN the English language that does to people what Platonov does to them in Russian. 
All this explains why he (R.) considered your translation fit for many other writers but not for Platonov: many excellent writers can be translated idiom-by-idiom. If you try to do that with Platonov, you might as well dance and prance on a mine-field. 
Recently, a student of mine attempted to read Pl. in Russian. Her spoken Russian is very good but she still does take idioms in Russian at face-value: if people say so and it reminds me of something idiomatic then this must be the relevant idiom in their language. You know what she told me? That Platonov sounded cheesy to her! She was so careless about that mine-field! The more you know Russian, the weirder Platonov sounds, not the other way around. I admire Robert for his constant awareness of that, native-speaker's perspective on Russia's greatest 20th c. writer.
Cheers to Josh and all,
o.m.


----- Original Message -----
From: Josh Wilson <jwilson at SRAS.ORG>
Date: Tuesday, May 22, 2007 11:12 pm
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Platonov and 'Ya chuvstvuyu"

> >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. 
> 
> Interesting, when I suggested it, I did not consider it at all 
> shocking.Simply a play on words. Actually, I still don't see it as 
> shocking -
> certainly much more mild than the little boy's statement to his 
> dead father.
> 
> 
> Maybe this is a difference between "American" and... that other 
> language?  
> 
> Best, 
> 
> JW 
> 
> P.S. Isn't it also interesting that I phrased it "rail ties" and Mr.
> Chandler turned it into "railway ties" (which I don't think flows 
> near as
> well...) Language is fascinating... 
> 
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