Platonov: kak na tesnom dvore

[Timothy Sergay (SEELANGS)]

Re Olga's letter:  Robert is VERY careful with investigating standard
idioms before he explores their metaphoric, marked meaning. But Platonov's
idioms are ALL a
> bit distorted, or amenable to be resurrected as metaphors--some by
slight
> distortions and some, by the larger context. This idiom, I agree, is not
much altered from its standard.

(Olga, are you sure you sent your letter to the whole list? In my email
client the only "to" address I find in its header is my own, not
SEELANGS.)

Dear Olga, Robert, Karen and all,

I completely agree about the crucial point Olga makes: the freedom of the
translator to compensate where opportunities present themselves in the
target language for tropological dynamics of the original that in other
places must be dampened or sacrificed in translation. And I would be the
last person in the business to suggest that Robert does anything less than
due diligence. But in this local instance I would suggest that there just
is not a natural opportunity in English to "resurrect" the "dead metaphor"
of the term "zhivnost'" by rendering it as "stock of life"; the problem
this entails is the same one Robert identified in the strategy of
rendering that same "zhivnost" as "one's life" -- the "metaphoric"
translation renders unvisible and unavailable to readers of the English
text the "literal" stratum, the meaning "one's livestock." But when I read
about "one's STOCK OF life" as opposed to "one's life" the notion of
"livestock" (farm animals) still does not occur to me: the words "stock
of" don't close the gap between the notion "life" and the notion "farm
animals," not for me anyway. Reading "one's stock of life," all that
occurs to me is the idea of a quantum of life (i.e., a stock, a laid-up
quantify, of time) allotted to one. Reading about "the release of one's
stock of life into collective imprisonment" I would never guess that at
some "literal level" we are speaking of farm animals being relinquished to
the ownership of a collective farm. This amplification of the "metaphoric"
stratum obscures the "literal" stratum, in my view, beyond recognition:
it's now invisible. I would guess that something sinister on a
social-existential plane is going on having to do only with one's
individual lifespan and/or freedom. One is fated to be imprisoned by
society. Eating or consuming one's stock of life (poest' svoiu zhivnost')
also seems hard for me to interpret at a "literal" level as connected with
slaughtering one's small livestock; it sounds more like living too fast
and hard, burning one's candle at both ends, dying young and leaving a
beautiful corpse, that kind of thing.

It is hard for me as a nonnative speaker of Russian to identify what
exactly Platonov has done to "resurrect" the metaphoric potential of
"zhivnost'" (which seems to me just a term, not even an idiom) in this
initially, at least, uncomplicated phrase about consuming one's livestock
rather than see it collectivized --  other than set that word in a network
of cognate lexicon deployed throughout the text. "Poest' svoiu zhivnost',"
"pustit' ee pod nozh" -- is the first really all that unusual for this
stylistic register?

The idea of life is no less evident, no less suggested via its lexical
root, in the word "livestock" in English than it is in the word
"zhivnost'" in Russian; if we try to exaggerate the presence of that theme
by altering "livestock" into "stock of life," I think we introduce great
interpretive difficulty in a place that does not suggest such difficulty
in the original. Khudozhniku polnaia i sviashchennaia svoboda, konechno,
but I would favor "livestock" as a natural, unobtrusive equivalent for
whatever root-based lexical strategy one finds in Platonov's "zhivnost'."

Thank you, Olga, for your very interesting remarks; my apologies for the
wordy response. Best wishes to all,
Tim

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