Dostoyevsky's " Бе сы"plus Anna Karenina plus amour-propre

[Valentino, Russell]

What you've zeroed in on, Alexei, falls into the general category of the rhetoric of re-translation, in which the translator attempts to justify the new version. One of the most common ways this has been done, reaching all the way back to Jerome, is by claiming that the previous versions got something wrong. Pevear's "tradition of mistranslation" characterization of previous translations clearly takes up this line. And yes, in general, they and their publishers (and some reviewers) have used a sort of "return to the source" rhetoric (it's not the only one available) as part of their marketing effort, e.g., the sentence in the source was awkward and repetitive, so the "authentic" English version should be awkward and repetitive in the same way. There are plenty of problems with this way of thinking, and maybe we can discuss them if people are interested.



The rationale he provides in the remainder of the paragraph indicates the profound role of interpretation that accompanies what some have characterized as the "mere creation of Anglophone versions." He attempts to articulate a very small part of the interpretive dimension that usually remains invisible anywhere but in the translated words themselves. If he had merely left the choice "wicked" without comment, I think many readers would have said great, look, another possible rendering, and an enrichment of the stock of English versions. Wicked is a possibility after, as is evil, and bad and plenty of others. Why not simply "I'm malevolent" as that opening salvo? Chelovek isn't always man after all, and maybe our male-centered versions have missed something fundamental (in the rhetoric of re-translation sense) about the book that is about people, not just men. We'd have to come up with a different acronym for him, in that case. Try reading "I'm malevolent" a few times aloud. Poetry.



The rhetoric of re-translation is not something that translators engage in all by themselves. Publishers may be the driving force. Luckily, these works tend to be in the public domain, so anyone can do a version. We can all do our own, in fact. There can be folk versions (like the illegal Harry Potter ones), and annotated ones, and experimental ones. This is about the best thing that can happen to canonical works in translation, it seems to me, since the valences and nuances and interpretive assumptions behind any one version can be enriched by others. Copyright restricts this for more contemporary works, which is probably good for authors and publishers (and a handful of translators) but it's too bad for literature.



I suspect he's right about the tendency to substitute the psychological for the moral, at least in interpreting this particular work in English. It puts the UGM into the existential angst category, where he's been at home in English at least since Walter Kaufmann. If the novella is about evil, and good, as opposed to the idiosyncrasies of a certain psychologically unusual paradoxicalist, that changes the conversation a lot. Absolutely agreed about the fig.



Russell





Russell Scott Valentino
Professor and Chair
Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature
http://ccl.clas.uiowa.edu<http://ccl.clas.uiowa.edu/>
Editor, The Iowa Review
http://www.iowareview.org<http://www.iowareview.org/>
University of Iowa
tel. 319-335-2827









-----Original Message-----
From: SEELANGS: Slavic & East European Languages and Literatures list [mailto:SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu] On Behalf Of Alexei Kutuzov
Sent: Tuesday, December 14, 2010 11:58 AM
To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Dostoyevsky's "Бе сы" plus Anna Karenina plus amour-propre



[...] Peavear's intro:



"There is, however, one tradition of mistranslation attached to Notes From

Underground that raises something more than a question of "mere tone."  The

second sentence of the book, Ya zloy chelovek, has most often been rendered as

"I am a spiteful man."  Zloy is indeed at the root of the Russian word

"spiteful" (zlobnyi), but it is a much broader and deeper word, meaning

"wicked," "bad," "evil."  The wicked witch in Russian folktales is zlaya ved'ma

(zlaya being the feminine of zloi).  The opposite of zloy is dobryi, "good," as

in "good fairy" (dobraya feja).  This opposition is of great importance for

Notes From Underground; indeed it frames the book, from "I am a wicked man" at

the start to the outburst close to the end:  "They won't let me... I can't be...

good!"  We can talk forever about the inevitable loss of nuances in translating

from Russian into English (or from any language into any other), but the

translation of zloy as "spiteful" instead of "wicked" is not inevitable, nor is

it a matter of nuance.  It speaks for the habit of substituting the

psychological for the moral, of interpreting a spiritual condition as a kind of

behavior, which has so bedeviled our century, not least in its efforts to

understand Dostoevsky.  Besides, "wicked" has the lucky gift of picking up the

internal rhyme in the first two sentences of the original."



There is much balderdash here, but I will point to the most obvious offenses,

namely:  the assumption of rhyme (no, "wicked" and "sick" do not rhyme, and

if the Russian "Я человек больной... Я злой человек" naturally contains some

sort of "poetic gift" it is not the one Pevear would like to bequeath to us);

the discussion of fairies and witches has virtually nothing to do with

Dostoevsky's Notes, but the bigger point here is that Pevear makes the

assumption that one word means exactly another in a different language.  This is

the mark of bad faith and fraudulence, for as any good translator knows, There

is no one-to-one correspondence across languages.  To assume that zloi means

wicked (which it doesn't) is to drastically limit and distort the range of

meanings at stake in Dostoevsky's text (let's agree:  the valence of zloi here

cannot even be delimited to "spiteful," let alone "wicked," which changes the

meaning of the entire text; but even if we decide to be generous and allow

"wicked," it is this kind of banal, "dangerous literalism" for which husband and

wife have been praised and on which their enterprise rests); and finally, if

anyone buys the criticism of the substitution of the "psychological for the

moral" which informs Pevear's choice, I'll leave that to his or her discretion.

If anyone is in need of an insanely comical read, take a look at page one of the

text where Pevear renders "я ни шиша не смыслю в моей болезни" as "I don't know

a fig about my sickness."  If anyone agrees that this is an acceptable English

idiom, and not a calque, I will eat my lecture notes.  Poetic gifts indeed.



AK