On Translating the Language of Uneducated Speakers: The
No-Win Situation
Text on translation from “On Translating Bunin,” in the
book, Ivan Bunin, Night of Denial:
Stories and Novellas. Translated, with extensive notes and a critical
afterword, by R. Bowie. Northwestern University Press, 2006, p. 710. Quotation
from “The Saviour in Desecration” is on p. 158.
Another problem for the literary translator—and the most
maddening of all—is what to do about substandard speech. Translators intrepid
enough to attempt works with dialogue featuring the underclass usually make
their Russian peasants, workers, or merchants speak something relatively close
to standard literary English. If you are British, you have those speakers
speaking standard British English; if you are American you have them speaking
standard American English. But either way, you have made for a big jarring
effect: peasants, workers, and merchants don’t talk like that.
You can try for the underclass effects by using nonstandard
syntax or other such tricks. That way you can doctor up the text at least a
little bit. Why can’t you have them just speak underclass English? Because in
so doing you must choose what kind of
substandard, illiterate speech—the way the non-educated speak in, say, the
American South, or Brooklyn, or Yorkshire, or in rural New Zealand. As soon as
you make this choice, you run into the weirdly incongruous situation of having
a Russian peasant woman speaking, for example, as if she grew up in the hills
of West Virginia.
So, what to do? There really is no solution, but you have to
make the effort to get some folksiness into the text. If you don’t, you are
left with what Kornei Chukovsky calls gladkopis’
(Lauren Leighton has translated this as “blandscript”), a leveling out of
earthy speech that ends up smoothing the earthiness out of it. The peasant
woman says what would be in the American South something like, “It ain’t
nobody’s bidness but mine,” and the translator writes, “That is no one’s
business but mine.” This is something like building a Walmart Supercenter on
what was once pristine forestland. To avoid the extremes above you try for a
compromise. Maybe, “That’s not nobody’s business, only mine.”
My translation of Ivan Bunin’s “The Saviour in Desecration”
starts out like this:
No, I mean to tell you, sir, not all folks gives glory unto
the Lord, but the Lord, he will make known his ways. Now, when, and on what
account, well, that’s something only He knows. Here in our parts just look how
many there is of the famous icons and cathedrals, holy relics galore! And let
me tell you what once we had to happen here.
The daughter of one of our local
merchants, she fell sick with a deathly illness, and God Above, Heavenly
Mother, the things that man done trying to save his child! He sent away for
doctors from Moscow, he ordered up the most costly of prayer services, and he
took her off to make supplication at the relics in Moscow, then to the Trinity
Monastery. He rooted out every last sacred cross or icon for miles around—but
nothing helped.
Meanwhile, the girl herself, she’s on and on repeating the same
thing: “I’ll get well, I’ll be cured, no doubt about it, only not on account of
all them things, but by the grace of the Saviour in Desecration.”
“Now, that’s wonderful,” her father says to her, and her
mama too. “We believe you and we put our trust in you, only what is this
Saviour in Desecration and where is he to be found?”
“Well, it’s something,” she says, “that I seen in a dream;
it was the Good Lord granted unto me that vision.”
d
And so on. Does this translation get too much educated speech in
here, or too much substandard? You walk the tightrope that most translators
walk in this situation, trying for the flavor of the prostorechie (illiterate speech), while trying not to mark the
speaker as native of, say, Georgia. The one in America, not the Georgia in the
Caucasus Mountains. I would guess that most literary translators would judge my
text here as too close to the Georgia in America, near which I grew up. But
then, as I said above, the problem is really insoluble. Either way you work it,
you can’t really win.
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