Andrey Platonov: new edition of HAPPY MOSCOW (NYRB Classics)

[Robert Chandler]

Dear Marian,

Many, many thanks for all your generous words.  It is very kind of you to say such things. I'm grateful, and moved.

But with regard to your saying "The voice is his": I hope I won't seem churlish, or obstinate, or excessively modest, or just plain silly if I repeat something I wrote about myself a while ago for the Cardinal Points website:

"He spent a year in the Soviet Union in the early 1970s, as a student at the University of Voronezh – where he first read the work of Andrey Platonov, who was born in Voronezh, and Osip Mandelstam, who was exiled there. Literary translation is usually seen as a rather solitary occupation, but Robert Chandler believes that there is a great deal more in his favourite writers – Alexander Pushkin, Andrey Platonov and Vasily Grossman – than he can possibly understand on his own. For this reason he prefers to collaborate, and the circle of people he collaborates with is constantly widening. His closest collaborators are his wife Elizabeth – who knows no Russian but who has an uncommonly sure sense of intonation and rhythm – and the Platonov and Dostoevsky scholar, Olga Meerson, a professor at Georgetown University."

Meeting Natalia Vasilyevna Kornienko and other Russian Platonov scholars at a Platonov conference in Bern was also crucial.  Until I started going to Platonov conferences and seminars in Petersburg and Moscow I really did feel I was working in the dark.  It felt important, and exciting, but working in the dark is not the best way to get things done!

All the best,

Robert



> It has been many years since Robert Chandler began his Platonov quest.  I've been around long enough to have seen the beginnings.  
> 
> When he began, Platonov was not even on the English-reading world's radar.  And for those of us who could read him in the original, it was not at all clear how what Platonov was doing  might be conveyed in English.  There was nothing straightforward about understanding--let alone creating--this voice.
> 
> Now, thanks to Robert Chandler--because no matter how many others have contributed to this work, the voice is his--we have a substantial body of work by Platonov available in English, and this work has a coherent and powerful aesthetic vision.  I am sure others will translate Platonov again in the future; there can only be excellent, not definitive, translations of such complex and influential works.  But this has been an exemplary process and outcome and will be the standard for all others that come.
> 
> Michael Emmerich, the fine Japanese translator, once said that he didn't understand all this talk about what was lost in translation: previously, the work didn't exist in English and now it did. A 100% gain.  This was partly in jest, of course, but I think of it when I consider what  Robert Chandler has accomplished.  
> 
> I am filled with admiration and gratitude.
> 
> Robert Chandler's Platonov is a feat to inspire.
> 
> Regards to all,
> Marian Schwartz
> 
> On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 8:27 AM, Robert Chandler <kcf19 at dial.pipex.com> wrote:
> Dear all,
> 
> NYRB Classics have just brought out a new edition of HAPPY MOSCOW.  This will include a slightly revised version of the translation previously published in the UK by Harvill, together with a number of other short works closely related to HAPPY MOSCOW:
> 1. the short stories: 'A Sparrow's Journey', 'Moscow Violin'
> 2. the film script, Father-Mother
> 3. the essay 'On the First Socialist Tragedy'
> 
> The essay is one of the classic ecological texts of the last century.  The film script is witty and unlike anything else I know.  And "A Sparrow's Journey" is one of Platonov's most perfect stories.
> 
> Many SEELANGERS contributed to these translations, some in small ways, some in very big ways.  My thanks to all of you!
> 
> And please do all you can to support NYRB in their efforts to bring Platonov the recognition he deserves!!!
> 
> All the best,
> 
> Robert
> 
> Robert Chandler, 42 Milson Road, London, W14 OLD
> 
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Robert Chandler, 42 Milson Road, London, W14 OLD

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