Other worlds, p.28
Other Worlds, page 28
Much of Witch is based on Teffi’s recollections of her childhood summers in Volhynia.10 A few close textual parallels show us that Teffi also drew on one of the most authoritative sources then available, a book by Sergey Maximov about Russian house and nature spirits, first published in 1903.11 Teffi writes vividly, wittily, and with deep psychological understanding; her stories are also ethnographically sound.
—R. C.
A NOTE ON RUSSIAN NAMES
A Russian has three names: a Christian name, a patronymic (derived from the Christian name of the father), and a family name. Thus, Agafya Petrovna is the daughter of a man whose first name is Piotr, and Grigory Nikolaevich is the son of a man called Nikolay. The first name and patronymic, used together, are the normal polite way of addressing or referring to a person; the family name is used less often. Close friends or relatives usually address each other by one of the many diminutive, or affectionate, forms of their first names. Lena, for example, is a diminutive of Yelena, Grisha of Grigory, and Varya of Varvara. Volodya and Volodka are both diminutives of Vladimir, Klasha and Klaudinka are both diminutives of Klaudia, and Masha and Manya are both diminutives of Marya. Less obviously, Tolya is a diminutive of Anatoly, Kolya of Nikolay, Tyoma of Artyom, and Venyushka of Avenir. Ganya and Ganka are both diminutives of Agafya. There are many double diminutives; Varenka is a double diminutive of Varvara, Vanechka of Ivan, and Manechka and Marusenka are both double diminutives of Marya.
Married or older peasants are often addressed and referred to by their patronymic alone, or by a slightly abbreviated form of it. Thus, the cook mentioned in the first pages of “The Dog” is referred to simply as Fedotych.
Many traditional Russian and Ukrainian names are derived from Greek. Yavdokha, for example, comes from the Greek Eudokia (eudokeo meaning “to be well pleased”). Ustiusha is a diminutive of Ustinya, a Russian equivalent of the Latin Justina (justin meaning “fair”).
Most of the stories from Witch are set in the province of Volhynia, then part of the Russian Empire and now a part of Ukraine. At the time, Polish, Yiddish, and Ukrainian were all widely spoken there and several of Teffi’s characters bear Polish names. Teffi, naturally, transliterates those into the Cyrillic alphabet, but we have reverted to the original Polish spellings. Jadzia (pronounced Yadya) is a diminutive of Jadwiga, which is derived from the Old German Hedwig (a compound word meaning “battle fight”). Kornelia is a variant of Caroline, and Eleonora of Helen.
Lastly, a Russian nyanya differs in many ways from an English nanny. We have therefore chosen to transliterate the word rather than translate it. A nyanya was typically employed first as a wet nurse and then as a more general household servant, often becoming an integral part of the family. It was common for a nyanya to be more deeply and intimately involved in a child’s life than his or her mother. Pushkin’s nyanya was deeply important to him, and nyanyas play a prominent role in many classic works of Russian literature.
—R. C.
THIS TRANSLATION
Teffi is difficult to translate. I have said a little in the foreword about her Pushkinian grace and deft use of repetition. She also makes the most of two freedoms—the freedom to omit words and an extreme freedom of word order—that are available only in a highly inflected language like Russian or Latin. And the precision of her psychological understanding, visual descriptions, and references to details of nineteenth-century Russian life leaves a translator with no room to maneuver.
Her use of dialect and substandard speech presents a particular difficulty. Many of the stories are set in Volhynia, in what is now western Ukraine, and the peasants and less educated characters speak a language heavily influenced by both Ukrainian and Polish. There is no logically satisfactory way of translating such speech. On the one hand, much of the texture of these stories is lost if all the characters—educated and uneducated alike—are made to speak the same standard English; on the other hand, translating their speech into a particular English or American dialect risks disorientating a reader, making him or her feel they have suddenly been transported to, say, Somerset, Yorkshire, or Appalachia. In the end, the latter risk seemed worth taking—if only because I had the good fortune to know two translators, Pavel Gudoshnikov and Sian Valvis, both of whom have an unusual gift for reproducing Yorkshire dialect. With their input, our versions of several of these stories—especially of some from The Lifeless Beast, where Teffi deviates most boldly from standard Russian—have gained greatly in poetry, humor, and vividness. I should also explain that I asked Valvis to introduce a hint of Scots into the dialogue of “Solovki,” which is set in the Far North of European Russia.
All these translations are the fruit of collective vision and revision. All those credited as translators of individual stories have also read the entire book and made helpful suggestions with regard to many of the other translations. And I have used most of the stories as texts for translation workshops at Pushkin House, in London. Participants have often come up with good, lively turns of phrase that my wife, Elizabeth, and I have eagerly incorporated in our final versions. Native speakers of Russian have also drawn my attention to many passages in the original that I had initially misunderstood. Teffi’s apparent simplicity often veils unexpected subtleties; I almost always underestimate her work on first reading.
If we read Teffi in Russian, we feel that we are listening to a living, speaking voice—not just reading words intelligently arranged on a page. The greatest difficulty for a translator lies in reproducing this immediacy, this illusion of spontaneity. The simplest words, paradoxically, are often the hardest to translate. Two short sentences about Baba Yaga, for example, proved surprisingly difficult. Though not especially original, the Russian is pithy: “Sku–u–u-uchno (B-o-r-i-n-g). Skoree (sooner) by (if only) zima (winter).” We published an earlier version of our translation of this article in the anthology Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov.1 There we translated these two sentences as “She feels b-o-r-e-d. If only winter would come soon!” This is accurate, but I can’t hear the intonations of Baba Yaga’s voice. It was only recently that we changed it to “Would winter never come?” This has the ring of speech—and the right plaintive tone.
One of the joys of running a translation workshop is that almost every participant makes at least a few valuable contributions. Even someone relatively unschooled or inexperienced will sometimes suggest a brilliant solution I would never have thought of myself. In a description of a group of people walking across a grass-covered bog, Teffi writes that “beneath the velvety green carpet they could sense sticky, viscous, quagmiry death.” In the original, the last four words (lipkaya, tyaguchaya, tryasinaya smert') are expressive, even onomatopoeic. We struggled over them for some time. The word “viscous” was clearly unsatisfactory. It is a dull, rather scientific word, and too similar in meaning to “sticky.” It was a secondary-school student, Sophie Benbelaid, then only seventeen and less than half the age of anyone else present, who came up with “treacly.” We all immediately recognized that this was perfect—above all, perhaps, for being so unexpected an adjective to use of death. And we quickly agreed on a final version: “Hidden under the velvety green carpet lay sticky, treacly, quagmiry death.”
There are many features of Teffi’s style that I first consciously noted only while working on this book, as I tried to understand what made a particular sentence seem dull and pedestrian in our draft even though it was lively and graceful in the original. Teffi’s pacing, her handling of transitions, is fluent and delicate; our first drafts, in contrast, often sounded either ponderous or jerky and disconnected. And Teffi’s syntax is unusually flexible. The first sentence of “Water Spirit” is performative; the syntax enacts the narrator’s growing anxiety as she travels alone through remote countryside. The first third of the sentence reads as if lifted from a dull guidebook. The syntax then becomes less controlled, and the tone more desperate. By the end of the sentence, the syntax has fallen apart; the last three words—gloosh', dal', oozhas—sound like wild exclamations rather than descriptive statements.
In English, Teffi’s single long sentence seemed to work best as a series of short sentences. Our final version runs as follows: “The town was just thirty versts from the railway station, and it was forest, bogs, and more forest all the way. Rickety wooden bridges dancing across wild streams. Backwoods. The back of beyond. Dreary, dreadful, godforsaken.”
It is those last three words—gloosh', dal', oozhas—that were hardest to translate. The repeated long vowels—oo, aa, oo—are crucial; they do much to convey the narrator’s sense of fear and horror. And two of these words have no English equivalent. The noun gloosh' is cognate with glookhoy, a common adjective meaning “deaf,” “muffled,” or “muted.” Nicolas Pasternak Slater writes, “Gloosh' is untranslatable. It carries the feeling of a dull sound that is almost silence, at the same time as the remoteness of the back of beyond.”2 Dal' means something like “distance,” but it is more colloquial and expressive. Oozhas, at least, is relatively translatable—except that “horror,” while conveying the dictionary meaning, lacks the long oo that is so important in the original.
Our version evolved only gradually. Since a literal translation is not even possible, we tried to compensate for the inevitable losses by means of alliteration, assonance, and repetition. “Backwoods” evoked “back of beyond.” “Dreary” and “dreadful” seemed a natural pairing; for some time our last sentence read simply, “Dreary and dreadful.” Eventually, however, I realized that this sounded too neat, that it lacked the necessary emotional intensity. The addition of “godforsaken” allowed the sentence to echo on in the mind. I was pleased when my friend and colleague Maria Bloshteyn wrote, in response to this last change, “It now sounds almost like a hex or a spell. Teffi would have loved that.”
It has been said that the first letter of the Hebrew Bible is untranslatable. Nevertheless, the Bible as a whole evidently can be translated. Something similar is probably true of any great work of literature, however universally it has been recognized; there will always be at least an occasional sentence where the author has made such creative use of the most specific resources of a particular language that any attempt to reproduce this sentence in another language is bound to fail. Since Teffi’s linguistic creativity—the poetry of her prose—has yet to be properly acknowledged, I shall end by quoting a virtuoso passage from “Shapeshifter”: I dolgaya, dolgaya, tianulas' doroga. Sierdtse bolielo ot bieloy toski besprediel'nykh snegov. Literally, this means, “And long, long, stretched the road. Heart ached from white anguish of boundless snows.”
Like the sentence quoted earlier, this sentence is performative. The repetitions of the word dolgaya and of the syllable iel enact the sheer vastness of these white spaces. The final occurrence of iel is especially effective, since bespredyel'nykh (“boundless”) would stand out anyway because of its length. As for “white anguish,” this is as unusual in Russian as in English; it gains added resonance, however, from its similarity to “white fever” (bielaya goriachka)—a standard term for delirium tremens.
Our final version of this sentence is acceptable, but no more than that: “The white anguish of the boundless snows, the monotonous jingle of our bell, the motionless, evil figure beside me—all this made my heart ache.” This conveys the meaning of the original and some of its feeling, but it is not—like the Russian—something that anyone is likely to remember by heart. Nevertheless, as often happens, English then offers us at least partial compensation for these losses. Our next two sentences read, “The driver swayed silently in his seat, as if dead. Ahead loomed the dead of night.” The curt final sentence works extremely well in English. In the original, “dead” serves merely as an ordinary adjective, agreeing with “night.” English allows us to use the more idiomatic “dead of night.” The bleak context reinvigorates the idiom, and the repeated “dead” takes on still more weight from the rhyme with “ahead.”
•
One of the many reasons I so often choose stories by Teffi for translation workshops is that she has an unusually wide appeal. Regardless of age or literary taste, most readers warm to her. Erica Wagner concluded a London Times review of Memories with the sentence, “Teffi is a courageous companion for anyone’s life.” Nicholas Lezard began a Guardian review of Subtly Worded, our first collection of Teffi’s stories and articles, by saying, “Pushkin Press has done it again: made me fall in love with a writer I’d never heard of.” Other reviewers and readers have responded in a similar vein. There is no doubt that Teffi evokes in her readers an unusually strong sense of personal connection.
It is now well over fifteen years since Elizabeth and I translated two of Teffi’s stories for our first Penguin Classics anthology, Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida—and we can certainly say that she has been an engaging and rewarding companion. We admire her wit, grace, and courage more and more as the years go by. And she has a gift for bringing people together; my workshops and e-mail collaborations have been a constant joy—both at the time and in retrospect.
—R. C.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My special thanks to Mme Szydlowski for her remarkable generosity; to Christine Worobec for her help with many questions relating to both Orthodox and folk-religious beliefs, rituals, and traditions; and to Boris Dralyuk, Veronica Muskheli, and Alexander Nakhimovsky who have provided convincing answers to a great many complex questions.
Collaboration with others always reveals unexpected aspects of the original, as well as helping to free one from stylistic habits one may slip into too readily. It has been a joy to work with the following, all of whom have translated or co-translated at least one complete story: Maria Bloshteyn, Maria Evans, Pavel Gudoshnikov, Anne Marie Jackson, Sabrina Jaszi, Sara Jolly, Nicolas Pasternak Slater, Kathryn Thompson, and Sian Valvis. The contributions made by Jolly and Slater have proved especially valuable.
All the following have also made helpful suggestions: Anoushka Alexander-Rose, Leonie Barron, Sophie Benbelaid, Christine Bird, David Black, Maria Bozunova, Irena Brezowski, George Butchard, Ilona Chavasse, Richard Clarembaux, Elizabeth Cook, Douglas Doty, Anya Emmons, Tamara Glenny, Galina Griffiths, Gasan Gusejnov, Daryl Hardman, Stephen Holland, Jessy Kaner, Martha Kapos, Clare Kitson, Maria Kozlovskaya, Sophie Lockey, Elena Malysheva, Irina Mashinski, Melanie Mauthner, Naomi Mottram, Alice Nakhimovsky, Nargiz Najafli, Olga Nazarova, Yulia Kartalova O’Doherty, Natasha Perova, Anna Pilkington, William Powell, Lynda Proffitt, Susan Purcell, Donald Rayfield, Miriam Rossi, Francesca Sollohub, Jonathan Sutton, Natalia Tronenko, Elena Trubilova, Olga Utrivanova, Katia Volodina, Marie-Claire Wilson. And there are many others who have responded helpfully to questions on e-mail forums or contributed to my Pushkin House workshops and summer schools.
For the main part, we have followed the texts of these stories as printed in the seven-volume collected edition published in Moscow by Lakom (1998–2005). For “Solovki,” which is not included in the Lakom edition, we have followed the text as printed in Vecherny den' (Prague, 1924). Earlier versions of some of these translations have appeared as follows: “Kishmish” and “Solovki,” in Slav Sisters, edited by Natasha Perova (Sawtry, UK: Dedalus Books, 2019); “Yavdokha,” Chtenia: The War to End All, 8, no. 3, issue 27, edited by Boris Dralyuk (Summer 2014); “A Quiet Backwater” and “The Kind That Walk,” in Teffi, Subtly Worded (London: Pushkin Press, 2014); “The Dog” and “Baba Yaga,” in Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov, edited by Robert Chandler (New York: Penguin Classics, 2012).
RECOMMENDED READING
In English
Chandler, Robert. “Nezhivoi zver'” (a discussion of The Lifeless Beast) and “Ved'ma” (about Witch). The Literary Encyclopedia, available at litencyc.com.
———. Russian Magic Tales from Pushkin to Platonov. New York: Penguin Classics, 2012.
Haber, Edythe C. “The Roots of NEP Satire: The Case of Teffi and Zoshchenko.” In The NEP Era: Soviet Russia 1921–1928, vol. I. Idyllwild, CA: Charles Schlacks, 2007.
———. Teffi: A Life of Letters and of Laughter. London: I. B. Tauris, 2019.
———. “Teffi.” The Literary Encyclopedia, available at litencyc.com.
Hilton, Alison. Russian Folk Art. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1995.
Hubbs, Joanna. Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture. Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press, 1993.
Ivanits, Linda. Russian Folk Belief. Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1992.
Kelly, Catriona. A History of Russian Women’s Writing 1820–1992. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Kononenko, Natalie. Slavic Folklore: A Handbook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2007.
Pollock, Ethan. Without the Banya We Would Perish: A History of the Russian Bathhouse. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.
Ryan, William. The Bathhouse at Midnight: Magic in Russia. London: Sutton, 1999.
Sinyavsky, Andrey. Ivan the Fool: Russian Folk Belief. Translated from the Russian by Joanne Turnbull and Nikolay Formozov. Moscow: Glas, 2007.
