Platonov: kak na tesnom dvore

[Timothy Sergay]

Dear Karen, Robert and SEELANGers,

About treating Platonov's collocation "svoia zhivnost'" as "one's stock of
life" or "one's life":

I think it's worth reviewing what "svoia zhivnost'" means in common
Russian. The dictionary entries and tokens of usage that I find on the
runet suggest that it means one's pet animals, whatever they may be; in
farming contexts, it means "domashniaia ptitsa i eshche melkii skot"
(poultry and small cattle, poultry and sheeps and goats). To "poest' svoiu
zhivnost'" is evidently an action that livestock farmers have to consider
taking in certain distressed circumstances. I think I've found a token of
parallel usage by googling "svoiu zhivnost'":
Сельские
частники
уже было
задумали
пустить под
нож всю свою
живность. ("Sel'skie
chastniki uzhe bylo zadumali pustit' pod nozh vsiu svoiu zhivnost'").
"Otpustit' svoiu zhivnost' v kolkhoznoe zakliuchenie" seems to me to refer
to surrendering one's private stock of poultry and small cattle to the
kolkhoz, to "collective-farm captivity," a bitter outcome to be sure, as
is reflected in the semantics of zakliuchenie (plen, etc.).

In handling "difficult," "metaphorical" writers, I think the rule of thumb
for translators should be roughly this: when stumped by a certain
collocation, one should first investigate the semantics and usage of that
collocation in common Russian, especially of the same period, needless to
say, and only afterwards should one explore parallel tokens of the same or
cognate lexicon in the given literary text (and the oeuvre of its author)
for the possibility that the usage amounts to a trope enmeshed in a system
of related tropes. In other words, just as happens in ordinary reading,
the conclusion that a given usage is a trope is always deferred (if only
for a split second) until non-tropological interpretations are first
assayed and eliminated. Is it really a local trope, or could it be
professional jargon? The idea that Platonov "writes in metaphor," or that
in Babel's texts the strangest and most unexpected things can happen --
this kind of idea can lead translators into semantic errors inspired by
efforts to match the effects of what they have prematurely taken to be a
local trope.

Scholars of Platonov may disagree with both my understanding of
"zhivnost'" and my rough ideas of procedure in translation. I don't know
Platonov well at all, but after reading the local context of this
particular passage, these are the considerations that occur to me.

Best wishes,
Tim Sergay

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