Grossman VSE TECHET: translating some impersonal expressions

[Robert Chandler]

Dear all,

Most of my recent questions have been about matters of fact.  This question
is not.  The meaning of the passage is entirely clear.  I am asking for help
with reproducing a particular, very un-English quality of the language.

It is late Spring 1933, the height of the Terror Famine.  The narrator was,
at the time, a Party activist, in a Ukrainian village:
   Завыло  село, увидело  свою  смерть. Всей деревней выли - не разумом, не
душой,  а как  листья  от  ветра шумят или солома скрипит. И тогда меня зло
брало - почему они так жалобно воют, уж не люди стали, а кричат так жалобно.
Надо  каменной  быть, чтобы  слушать  этот вой и свой пайковый хлеб кушать.
 
And here is a very poor draft:
The village began to wail; it had seen its own death.  It was the whole
village wailing – and their wails came neither from the mind nor from the
heart.  It was a noise like leaves in the wind, or creaking straw. It made
me angry.  Why did they have to wail so pitifully? They had ceased to be
people – so why were they screaming so pitifully?  You’d have to be made of
stone to carry on eating your ration of bread to the sound of that wailing.

This may be a bit better:  It was the wail of a whole village, not a wail
that came from heart or mind.

One problem with both versions is that we don’t really expect a wail to come
from the mind anyway.

Vsego dobrogo,

R.

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