Tolstoy and more general problems of translation

[Alexandra Smith]

Dear Judson,

Thank you very much for raising several interesting questions related  
to translating practice in general. Your discussion of Tolstoy's  
passage  reinforces the point about the role of subjectivity in  
reading and interpreting. It also highlights the fact that we should  
bear in mind different perspectives. As Lidiya Ginzburg points out in  
her works, we shouldn't equate the author and his/her character. It  
seems to me that Tolstoy's juxtaposition of ruler and bedsheet might  
be also viewed as a beautiful poetic image that suggests that many  
inner thoughts, emotions etc. resist any articulation and resemble a  
blank sheet of paper. In sum, I see his line (the whole triplet:  
linejka, prostynia, kapriznichan'e) as something that contains a  
poetic dimension, too. This image that has to do more with the author  
than with his character -- Nikolen'ka.
(Although we know that Nikolen'ka had some poetic ability: he wrote a  
beautiful poem dedicated to his grandma and had a feeling that poetry  
should express sincere emotions. In this instance Nikolen'ka acts as a  
mouthpiece of Tolstoy, I think.)
Several points that you and other participants of the discussion  
raised resonate well with the thoughtful survey of Chekhov's play  
offered in Anatoly Smelyansky's TV programme on Chekhov.  It's  
available here: http://video.yandex.ru/users/galactic-su-79/view/54/
Smelyansky talks about various pragmatic choices related to staging  
Chekhov's plays and translating his plays into English. It suggests  
that any translating of Chekhov's plays (be it another language or  
stage production) is an act of transposing to some extent.
Of course Tolstoy's trilogy doesn't present the same challenges as  
Chekhov's plays do but there are some analogies between the two  
authors when it comes to the interpretation of the so called "artistic  
truth". (In one of his essays, Likhachev points out, for example, that  
in "Anna Karenina" Tolstoy doesn't describe the colour of Mariinsky's  
theatre's furniture correctly because of his obsessive desire to focus  
his reader's attention on the juxtaposition between Anna Karenina and  
the red colour associated with her.)
I think that your sensitivity to the contextual setting of the whole  
trilogy is admirable. I do like your strategy to take account of the  
use of this or that object in various contexts within the framework of  
the same book. It seems to me that Tolstoy usually creates an artistic  
universe in which everything gets interconnected somehow. I think that  
you are absolutely right to wait until the end of your translating  
project and see what could work best in the passage that features  
"linejka".

With best wishes,
Alexandra








-------------------------------------------
Alexandra Smith (PhD, University of London)
Reader in Russian Studies
Department of European Languages and Cultures
School of  Languages, Literatures and Cultures
The University of Edinburgh
David Hume Tower
George Square
Edinburgh EH8 9JX
UK

tel. +44-(0)131-6511381
fax: +44- (0)131 -651 -1482
e-mail: Alexandra.Smith at ed.ac.uk



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