On Literary Translation ISAAC BABEL

ON LITERARY TRANSLATION (ISAAC BABEL)

If you want a job that demands excruciating, intense travails, and for which your reward will be mostly nil—both financially and in terms of appreciation—try literary translation. I spent roughly twenty-five years, on and off, translating the Russian writer Ivan Bunin, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1933. My second book of Bunin stories and novellas—718 pages long and complete with extensive notes on the translated stories and a lengthy critical afterword—was published in 2006: Ivan Bunin, Night of Denial: Stories and Novellas, Northwestern University Press. The book was received with thunderous, gut-wrenching silence, not even reviewed anywhere in the professional journals devoted to Slavic languages and literature.

But even when literary translations are reviewed, seldom do the reviewers do anything approaching a thorough job at analyzing the text. The usual thing is to discuss the writer and his works for most of the review, then spend a few paragraphs at the end caviling with the translation. I was reminded of this when reading—in The New York Review of Books, Feb. 8, 2018—Gary Saul Morson’s review of new translations of the great Isaac Babel. The translators are Val Vinocur (Babel, The Essential Fictions, Northwestern Univ. Press) and Boris Dralyuk (Babel, Red Cavalry and Odessa Stories, London: Pushkin Press).

Prof. Morson rightly emphasizes the strangeness of Babel’s style and opines that the task of a good translator is to preserve the strangeness. He goes on to say that both Dralyuk and Vinocur “provide a readable text that captures much of what makes Babel’s stories great, but they often explain—that is, explain away—Babel’s oddities.” Morson takes one line from the story “Pan Apolek” and disputes its translation by both D. and V. He, I think rightly, demands that the word “crumpled” be used for the description of a “hastily crumpled city,” whereas the two translators have explained away the odd imagery by using “swiftly crushed town” and “hastily crushed city.”

“Babel’s strange lexicon [writes Morson], and the peculiar image of a town resembling a crumpled letter disappear. And the translators omit the double use of the word ‘in’ (‘In Novograd-Volynsk, in the hastily crumpled city’), so the sentence’s rhythm changes.”

Up to this point I am okay with Morson’s charges, but he goes too far when he insists on those two “ins.” In fact, the greatest genius of a literary translator on earth cannot retain the rhythms of Russian prose in an English translation, nor should he be expected to. English-language prose has its own rhythms, and the good translator finds those rhythms in the target language.

Probably the most famous line Babel ever wrote is the following (in Morson’s rendering), from his story “Guy de Maupassant”: “No iron can enter the heart as icily as a period placed in time.” The original Russian: “Nikakoe zhelezo ne mozhet voiti v chelovecheskoe serdtse tak ledenyashche, kak tochka, postavlennaya vovremya.” Morson laments that “It is especially sad when translators get the timing of this sentence wrong. They drag it out, which is like giving a joke a wordy punch line. In Morison’s version [Walter Morison is an earlier translator of Babel], “No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place,” while Vinocur has: “Nothing of iron can breach the human heart with the chill of a period placed just in time.”

Morson continues. “’Stab’ and ‘breach’ are interpretations; ‘with force’ does not mean icily; the right place is not the right time; and the word ‘just’ is only implied. For both translators, Babel’s fourteen words needlessly expand to eighteen. The period arrives, like a bungled witticism, a bit late.”

Hold it, hold on, hold it; here the nitpicking runs amuck. We are, of course, back here as well to the age old argument, which no one will ever resolve: how far is the literary translator, in aid of producing literature in his own language, allowed to get away from the original text? Morson here is close to demanding literal translation, and literal translation means literature is lost. Let’s look in some detail at the points he makes.

The idea of the timing of the sentence, how the translators get the timing all wrong and drag out their sentences. They don’t. In fact, the two criticized sentences are both good in English. They flow well, they read well, their timing is fine, they do not drag. David McDuff, a British translator not mentioned in Morson’s review, has the following: “No iron can enter the human heart as chillingly as a full stop placed at the right time.” That “chillingly,” while accurate, does throw a monkey wrench into the rhythm of the sentence.

Does it matter that Babel has fourteen words, while the translators V and M have eighteen? Not a jot. Counting the exact number of words and holding translators to that standard is absurd. And given that Russian words on average are two to three times longer than English words, the sentences of V and M come out here sounding shorter and more pithy than Babel’s original. Note that in Walter Morison’s sentence sixteen words out of the eighteen have only one syllable. Now, that’s terse, economical Anglo-Saxon writing. By the way, how many one-syllable words does Babel have in his sentence? Four.

Odd that Prof. Morson leaves out Babel’s “human” (“the human heart”). Does it matter? Not really. The context tells us quite clearly that the heart of a monkey or crocodile is not under discussion. I might concede that the ‘stab’ and ‘breach’ have to go. Then again, I might not. Take a look at the four sentences, in the four translations given here. McDuff’s “chillingly” knocks his sentence out of the competition for best rendering. In English Prof. Morson’s sentence, however, is weaker than either of the other two. Okay, so he made sure the iron “enters the heart,” as Babel had it. He kept the iciness in there (I like Vinocur’s use of the word ‘chill’). He insists on “a period placed in time,” but that phrase is somewhat ambiguous: “in time” as in “just in time,” or “in time” as “in the realm of time, the thing that passes”?

In a word, Walter Morison’s sentence gets the furthest away from the original Russian, but  Morison’s sentence still does the best job of expressing, in very good, terse English, the essence of Babel’s thought: No iron can stab the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place. It could be slightly improved, perhaps, if we put Vinocur and Morison together: No iron can stab the human heart with the chill of a period placed just in time. If Isaac Babel were alive to read that English sentence, I think he would smile. Down with the literal in literary translation!