Translating Living Russian Poets: Experiences of Collaboration
Josephine von Zitzewitz introduces three poet-translator pairs, and their thoughts, experiences and challenges. With contributions from Katherine E. Young and Dmitrii Manin.
As literary translators into English we occupy a unique position. Many poets – and of course other writers, too – are very keen to be translated into English, because a work that is available in English is accessible to a near-global readership. Moreover, the ubiquity of English as a lingua franca also has a direct bearing on the poet-translator relationship: many of the internet-savvy contemporary Russian poets have an excellent command of English, which means they are able to read and assess the work of their translators. This can be fraught with difficulty, as knowledge of a language does not necessarily imply familiarity with the formal conventions employed by those writing in that language – all the more important in the case of poetry, a highly condensed, and indeed formalised, mode of expression. A common bone of contention is the reluctance of English-language poetry to rhyme, owing to contemporary practice as much as to the language’s lack of the syntactical flexibility and grammatical rhymes that make Russian so very supple. Russian poets continue to place great emphasis on rhyme as a corner stone of poetics, and I have been questioned more than once on my decision to translate without attempting to reproduce a clear rhyming pattern.
Poets’ command of English also provides a chance for truly collaborative efforts that transform the process of translation itself. The new Pushkin House translation residency honours this trend of collaborations, which are increasingly common. They range from the poet-and-translator pair working out sticky points together, to versions in English that are effectively co-authored. Collaborative translations challenge established conceptual frameworks, raising questions about authorial voice and the hierarchy between the source text and the translation. This is certainly a fascinating field for academic study. It also makes for good stories. Here, several translators share their experience.
The Translator as Co-Author: Katherine E. Young and Xenia Emelyanova
Katherine E. Young is a poet and an accomplished translator of contemporary Russian poetry. She is used to working with poets who have confident English and observes that while some are content to check her work for general accuracy and leave it at that, others want to discuss every word and debate the fine points of English grammar, an experience that chimes with my own. Here, she describes her collaboration with Xenia Emelyanova, a promising young poet living in Moscow. Emelyanova has excellent spoken and written English, and she is working as an English teacher for young children. The result of the collaboration is an English poem that has no underlying Russian original.
Katherine Young: “Perhaps the most interesting collaborative experience I’ve had is with Xenia Emelyanova. Her poem ‘Your hair will smell of river water’ (“Волосы запахнут речной водой”) arrived in my inbox in a Russian version, accompanied by the author’s self-translation of the poem into English. Nevertheless, this particular translation needed enough small tweaks that I thought it better to start fresh, using her self-translation as a guide. In that self-translation, Emelyanova had rewritten the English-language ending of the poem to differ considerably from the ending that appears in the Russian-language version; she made additional changes to the English version in response to my drafts and queries. In the end, the changes were so significant that we decided to label the English version “After the Russian original, translated by the author and Katherine E. Young.” Strictly speaking, then, the poem doesn’t have an authoritative Russian-language original: it was literally created in both Russian and English.”
‘Your hair will smell of river water’ was published online for the US National Translation Month as part of a bilingual selection of Emelyanova’s poems. It is the only poem in the selection not accompanied by a Russian original.
Authorial Intention and Translation: Josephine von Zitzewitz and Irina Mashinski
How we as translators interpret the ambiguities of a given poem can result in an English text that sounds and feels quite different from the original, and often we are forced to resolve the ambiguity for the poem to make sense in English. The role of authorial intention for interpreting a text has preoccupied academics for decades. Most often, this issue is discussed in relation to reading and reception, focussing on whether readers need to know the context in which a piece was written in order to read it “correctly”. For translators of living authors, this question assumes a different kind of significance. Should we ask the poet? Are we obliged to do so?
Irina Mashinski is a prolific poet, editor and translator who was born in Moscow and now lives in New Jersey. As editor-in-chief of the bilingual journal Cardinal Points/Storony sveta and instigator of the now-discontinued Compass Translation Award in Russian poetry, she is familiar with the intricacies of translation. I had not even thought of asking her assistance when I translated her poem “To the Memory of the ‘Illusion’ Cinema”, but she ended up clarifying references to the Moscow of her youth to help me imagine an urban landscape I had never seen. But the surprise element was Mashinski’s admission that the poem is autobiographical. And this means that the person dragging themselves “like a foot soldier” in the final stanza is a woman, not a man, and so my use of male pronouns was incorrect. Or was it? After all, the reason I could not imagine a female was not just social (the vast majority of soldiers, even today, are men) but also linguistic: Russian is a heavily gendered language, and the word “riadovoi” (“infantryman” or “foot soldier”) is grammatically masculine and thus triggers the use of masculine pronouns and verb forms. But this does not mean the person denoted is necessarily male.
How from Taganka [...] she dragged herself
like a foot soldier towards her goal
while bare bulbs shone on quietly
above the fortress “Illusion".
Как от Таганки [...] тащился он,
как рядовой к цели,
и тихо лампочки горели
над крепостью "Иллюзион".
English is different in this respect; pronouns are indicative of the real gender of whoever they refer to. In following Mashinski’s narrative and making the poem’s protagonist female, I ended up clearly signposting the connection between the poet herself and the figure walking the streets of Moscow. The result is an English poem that is more obvious than its Russian original (or counterpart?) but the alternative would have precluded the author’s intended reading outright, removing an entire layer of suggested meaning, namely that of personal recollection.
“To the Memory of the ‘Illusion’ Cinema” is published in the bilingual anthology 100 poems about Moscow. A bilingual anthology, ed. Maxim Amelin (Moscow: OGI, 2017)
Bilingual translators: Dmitrii Manin and Yulia Friedman
Russia continues to be a country that exports its intellectuals. A sizeable diaspora of Russophone poets and writers live in Anglophone countries. Some continue to write in Russian, some embrace literary life in its bilingual from, some write in English, and yet others have become vital bridges between the languages by translating from their original mother tongue into the language of their chosen home country (e.g. Boris Dralyuk, Eugene Ostashevsky et al). A number of high-quality publications and websites testify to the literary ferment created by the encounter of languages and cultures (the abovementioned Cardinal Points, the literary blog Punctured Lines, the journal Interpoeziia). Translator Dmitrii Manin was born in Moscow and has lived in the USA since the early 1990s. He not only translates from English into Russian, but also the other way round. Here, he and poet Yulia Friedman discuss the practicalities of their collaboration and address many of the issues those translating poetry grapple with every day.
Dmitrii Manin: When I translate your poems and try to carry them over into English as faithfully as I possibly can, do you feel I'm being too closely bound to the original?
Yulia Friedman: I often get flashbacks of our discussions when I read works of other translators (of other pieces authored by some other guys and gals). They do a good job but they also alter a lot. You'd never lose a rhyme and you do keep your track of the rhythmical pattern. Compared to other living translators, you may be uniquely close to the original (although I wouldn't say "too closely tied to it").
Which brings out my question, in turn. We both know of the, almost proverbial, restriction: one should not rhyme or translate poetry into a language that is not one’s mother tongue. Any sensible rule is bound to have exceptions, and Isaak Asimov is often named as one such exception. Although he lived in the USA from the age of three and his speech sounded like that of a native speaker, he is said to have never lost his inner distance from the structural mysteries of the grammar and semantics of the adopted language. Presumably, this is exactly what made it possible for him to become a master of puns and wordplay, and a prodigious inventor of new verbs to use in his limericks. Unlike him, you have adopted English as your own language much later in your career. My question is, do you feel that same distance and, if yes, does it seem to provide you with additional tools or empowering perspectives?
Dmitrii Manin: English is very much a foreign language for me, and I don't think the distance helps me in any meaningful way. My only claim to being able to translate into it is that I've translated thousands of lines of English poetry into Russian and realized at some point that I eventually developed an ear for it. So I try saying something in English and then listen to it from various angles trying to figure out whether it sounds right. Correct and beautiful English doesn't pour from me all on its own. In the beginning I hoped that if I translated poetry that does strange things with language anyway that would mask my accent. But it doesn't work that way: even language distortion can sound natural or unnatural.
But I want to return to the issues of precision and faithfulness in translation. Rhyme and meter are easy as they are surface features, but what about those things that the translator (and the reader) can only guess at? Does it feel differently when you look at a translation ofa poem where you have direct access to its inner workings, subtext, prototext etc? And does it also give you an insight into how people might read it? A couple of times you've said that my translation deviated from the original, but you liked it even better that way. I still can't decide if that's a compliment, a consolation, or a deeper truth of some kind.
Yulia Friedman: Firstly, I would never single out rhyme or meter as "surface features". The fun of poetry is that the axes of "rhyme", "meter", "phonetics" and "semantics" become literally mixed, in a very simple and real sense, like time and space do when you drop down a black hole. If any of those is a surface feature then they all are. A rhyme can sound weird and you keep it that way in your translation, complex and weird and still exact. That is not what people usually care to attempt, and often I'd say they'd better try. Secondly, no, I don't think it feels much different reading a translation of a poem that I wrote. Frankly, I don't know of any special way to treat a translation. I simply read it as I read a poem.
[…] Anyway, somehow I get a feeling that your own notion of "faithfulness to the original" undergoes a sort of evolution. There are times when you sound almost like Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (might be a trick of my imagination again). Could you define said faithfulness as you see it?
Dmitrii Manin: First of all, I totally agree that all facets of a poem are inextricably intertwined. You likened it to the way spacetime in relativity can’t be unambiguously separated into space and time; one could also liken it to quantum entanglement. Still, rhyme is directly visible, while some meanings have to be inferred with uncertainty, and that makes a difference for a translator. How do you make sure the translation carries the same semantic charge as the original, if you can’t be sure you know what it is, in the first place? Note that I’m talking about “semantic charge” and not about “meaning”, because I treat a poem not as a container for meanings (neatly packaged by the poet), but as a machine for generating meanings (in the reader). I perceive it as “voice”: the translation should speak in the same voice as the original, then it is faithful. But I have trouble explicating what exactly this “voice” thing is, precisely because it’s not very useful to deconstruct it into elements like images and rhymes, as you pointed out. You can load the translation with all the same images and rhymes, and it might still sound wrong.
I do have some tricks of the trade on a very practical level, but they are pretty obvious. For example, never translate a poem sequentially line by line. Instead, identify lines that are especially important, striking or difficult to translate, and get them right, then fit everything else around this scaffolding with more of a leeway. In a sonnet, these reference points usually are the first and eighth lines and the pointe.
I recently realized that I don’t want to bring either the work closer to the reader or the reader closer to the work (the infamous domestication/foreignization dilemma). I want them to stay where they are, and simply remove the opaque screen between them, the language barrier. With this approach, I sort of relinquish any control I might otherwise have over how the poem will be perceived in the “target language”.
Translating a living poet is a special experience. And establishing a working relationship with a living author has never been easier. The internet not only makes geography irrelevant, but has also become the most important publication venue for new poetry in Russian, not least through poets’ personal social media feeds. If you’re a translator with a working relationship with a Russian-language poet, Pushkin House’s Russian Poetry in Translation Residency is now open for applications until 7th October!
About the author
Josephine von Zitzewitz is an academic at UiT The Arctic University of Norway and translator specialising in later Soviet and contemporary Russian poetry. She is a trustee of Rights in Russia, a member of the committee of the Pushkin Club, and a member of the steering committee and jury of the Pushkin House Translation Residency. She is author of the forthcoming monograph The Culture of Samizdat (Bloomsbury, 2020).