Two New Translations of The Little Golden Calf

[Anne Fisher]

Dear SEELANGers,


I think Ilf and Petrov would’ve loved this! They were very particular about
their translations, by the way, and threatened to withdraw permission for
the French translation of *Zolotoi telenok* if it didn’t use the version of
the text they wanted.



Will Ryan raises a very interesting question.



If we consider the authors’ intent, the effect they clearly wanted their
title to have on readers, then it is evident that they wanted readers to
recognize both 1) the Biblical image, and 2) the “lowering” of it. The
manuscript of *Zolotoi telenok* shows this: on the cover of the file
containing the manuscript, they wrote



Burenushka

Zlatyi telets

Telyata

Telushka-polushka



It seems from this list that they toyed with both extremes, from a faux-OCS
rendering (“zlaty telets” - which is faux if, according to Will and Daniel,
the phrase as used really should be either the “telets litii” of the OC
Elizabethan Bible or Dostoevsky’s “zolotoi telets”) to the overly jokey
“telushka-polushka,” and eventually settled on a rendering that captured the
resonance they wanted.



All translators of the novel have to decide what to do with this semantic
shift between “telenok” and “telets.” For example, as far as I know from my
limited knowledge of Polish and German, there is only one version of the
word “calf,” just like in English. But in their versions of the title (*Złoty
cielec*, *Das Goldene Kalb*) they repeat the Biblical phrase exactly, with
no indication of the semantic shift.



The previous two English translations of *Zolotoi telenok* are evenly split:
Charles Malamuth’s of 1932 is *The Little Golden Calf*, while John
Richardson’s of 1961 is *The Golden Calf*. The French Ilf and Petrov scholar
Alain Prechac (apologies for the lack of diacritics!) wrote in 2000, “Le
titre appelle un commentaire: le Veau d'or biblique, ou celui du zodiaque
(en francais: le taureau), se dit en russe "telec". Mais Ilf et Petrov lui
ont préfère le simple "telenok", qui le dedramatise et le rend plus proche
de nous: c'est le «Little Golden Calf" de la version anglo-américaine.”
Strangely, although he seems to approve of the Malamuth rendering, he adds
nothing in his own translation of *Zolotoi telenok *- *Le Veau d’or *- that
would echo the “dedramatizing” effect of which he approves.



Can anyone else offer analyses of the title’s translation into other
languages?



Regards to the list,



Annie


-- 
Anne O. Fisher, Ph.D.
Russian Interpreter and Translator
anne.o.fisher at gmail.com
440-986-0175

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