VAL VINOCUR TRANSLATION OF ISAAC BABEL, "Иисусов грех" ("The Sin of Jesus")

There's a new book of Babel stories in English, Isaac Babel: The Essential Fictions, edited and translated by Val Vinocur (Northwestern Univ. Press, 2018).

Many have tried, but I am yet to find a translator who captures in English the flair and eccentricity of Babel's unique style.

One of my favorite stories is ИИСУСОВ ГРЕХ "The Sin of Jesus," with its humor and overtones of blasphemy. It features a chambermaid in a cheap hotel, who appeals to Jesus for help in negotiating her sordid life. He sends her an angel, Alfred, to help her out, but she rolls over him in her sleep and accidentally smothers him. 

As Vinocur has it: "And so she smothered the angel of God in her drunken slumber and delight, smothered him like a week-old babe, went and crushed him, and he died for good, and his wings, wrapped up in the sheet, wept pale tears." Not bad translating.

When Arina goes back to tell Jesus the news, she is greeted with the wrath of the Lord: "I don't want to deal with you anymore," the Lord Jesus exclaimed. "You've smothered my angel, you brute."

The word 'brute' won't do here, and Jesus speaks in a more colloquial Russian than Vinocur captures in his English version. This presents problems.

Arina's life then goes from bad to worse. At the end of the story she confronts the Lord with her pregnant misery:

Vinocur: "Before she was about to give birth, for three months had rolled by in the meantime, Arina went out into the backyard, behind the janitor's rooms, raised her awful enormous belly to the silken sky, and in a stupor uttered:

'See, Lord, here's a belly for you. They play my drum with their peashooters. And what and why I don't know. But I don't want any more.'

And Jesus answered Arina, and, washed with his tears, the Savior fell to his knees.

'Forgive me, Arinushka, forgive your sinful God for all that I have done to you.'

'I got no forgiveness for you, Jesus Christ,' replied Arina, 'none at all.'"


Taken all in all, Vinocur does a commendable job at translating this story, given the burdens under which he labors. Translating fiction written in the illiterate language of the underclass is the hardest task any literary translator has to face. For more on this problem, see my posting on this blog, about translating a story by Ivan Bunin:

https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=8905746674606267673#editor/target=post;postID=6244984639158633756;onPublishedMenu=allposts;onClosedMenu=allposts;postNum=9;src=postname

See also, on this blog, my translation of "The Sin of Jesus" into Georgia and Georgian:

https://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=8905746674606267673#editor/target=post;postID=958049745031146618;onPublishedMenu=template;onClosedMenu=template;postNum=0;src=postname