Grossman VSE TECHET: translating some impersonal expressions

[Robert Chandler]

Dear Nina, Laura and all,

> why don't you replace "wail" with "howl" -- it's a more animal-associated
> verb, and it might highlight the contrast between "the mind" and this
> primordial horror in the face of one's own death.
You may be right.  But we did originally have 'howl'.  Then I thought that a
howl was to loud a noise for dying people to keep up for a long time...

> Another feature of the
> original's language, it seems to me, is that it's a touch more impersonal, the
> verbs locating the agency outside the speaker... How about this:
> 'A howl came from the village -- it had seen its own death.'
I like this very much.  Thank you.

 >'The whole village
> howled -- not from understanding it in their minds, not from feeling it in
> their souls, but as leaves torn in the wind or straw creaking.'
Like my own version, this lacks the startling succinctness of the Russian.

Perhaps this, using part of Laura Kline's suggestion: 'the whole village was
howling/wailing, without consciousness, without emotion.'

Vsego dobrogo,

Robert

> 
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Robert Chandler <kcf19 at DIAL.PIPEX.COM>
> To: SEELANGS at BAMA.UA.EDU
> Sent: Friday, June 13, 2008 12:25:45 AM
> Subject: [SEELANGS] Grossman VSE TECHET: translating some impersonal
> expressions
> 
> 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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