Anthony Briggs
Izbavi Bog i nas ot etakikh sudei
A few weeks ago something strange happened. Someone sent me, through the post, ten million printed words – I’ll repeat that, in case you weren’t concentrating: ten million words – nearly half of them in a difficult foreign language. I was told to get reading them. It was like starting out with Gogol: in early March a most extraordinary occurrence took place in Wiltshire; no - Mayakovsky: an extraordinary adventure that happened to Tony Briggs one springtime in the country; no – Blok: You are millions. We live in triple ignorance. (That last bit involves changing t’my, i t’my, i t’my to t’ma, i t’ma, i t’ma, but don’t worry if you can’t keep up; things will get clearer).
Intimidated into procrastination, I delayed the inevitable by weighing the dozens of books these millions of visitors had arrived in. Seven stone, twelve pounds - about the weight of a professional boxer, but only a junior flyweight. In American speech that means 110 pounds. If we must yield to the measurements imposed on us by Napoleon despite his defeats against both of our countries: fifty kilograms, give or take.
There is no circle in Dante’s Inferno to accommodate this kind of punishment for a life conducted in sin; those of us who have tormented others with words will probably have to move in somewhere on Levels Two to Five alongside other incontinents: the gluttons, misers and spendthrifts, the wrathful and sullen. (Plenty of friends there, then, and no shortage of translators).
There were fifty-eight books in English, plus the fifty-eight originals. Where to begin? Might as well have a glance through … Glancing through took a number of hours and quite some coffee, but one small triumph kept the spirits up. A slender volume claimed to have been ‘freely adapted’ from the Russian’ – out it went. There is no objection in principle to free adaptations, but we were not judging that particular skill. Not a bad morning’s work - one down, only fifty-seven to go.
Then came another discovery. Some translators had entered a number of texts all published in 2007-08, lots of them, and long texts too. (What do these people do in real life? Do they ever eat or sleep?) Here was an obvious new modus operandi. Since no one was going to have more than one text on the short list, it seemed reasonable to decide which of the multiple offerings from one person would best represent his/her ability and achievement. Careful thought went into this, and it did result in further eliminations.
We cannot go into the whole process of consideration, elimination and promotion; the determining of probables, possibles, near-misses, near-certainties, agonizing discussions with the other judges face-to-face, over the phone and in cyberspace. This part of the story, like the secrets of boardroom and bedroom, is the private property of the consenting participants. Objectivity was the aim of all the judges, but it is difficult to achieve. For instance, a believer in Nabokov-style bukvalizm will find it hard to admire the translator who aims for natural-sounding English as a first priority, and vice versa. All you can do is strive to suppress your own instinctive bias and help fellow-judges to do the same. A generous collective spirit is essential, and we three managed to achieve this from the outset. We have proposed, attacked and defended with some vigour, no individual has been either dominant or unco-operative, and each of us has conceded without rancour when the right moment came to do so. Feelings have been strong, and we all had to face disappointment when our particular view sometimes did not prevail. Difficult decisions have often been decided on the inexorable logic of a 2:1 split, and we devised our own methods of dealing with any three-way differences. We have all willingly agreed to accept collective responsibility for our judgements, whatever we may have thought and said before our decisions were accepted.
The huge volume of work that had to be done suggests one good thing: Russian literature is being taken very seriously nowadays. There is no shortage of old and new texts, eager translators or willing publishers. Equally surprising and welcome is our conclusion that the overall standard of translation is remarkably high. It hasn’t always been like this. In the beginning was the word, and the word wasn’t always accurate. Aylmer Maude pointed out that an early translation of War and Peace located a cathedral on the battlefield of Borodino, and translated ‘gave him a direct look straight in the face’ as ‘gave him a direct and heavy blow between the eyes’ - this of a young officer towards his superior in time of war. And at that time, even if the translation was accurate it wasn’t always well-expressed. One version of Turgenev’s Dvorianskoe Gnezdo came out laboriously as A Nest of Hereditary Legislators, and included the following dialogue: ‘Of what thinkest thou?’ suddenly asked she of Marie Dmitrievna. ‘Why sighest thou, mother mine?’ ‘So,’ murmured the other, ‘What wonderful clouds!’ ‘Thou art sorry for them, or what is it?’ Later on, the same lady says, ‘There he stalks – thy pleasant man: what a long – in a word, a stork.’
It is easy to see that a good reason for taking up translation might once have been to correct serious mistakes of meaning and style. But not in recent times. It is now undertaken for love of literature, love of the art of translation, and small amounts of money. The results are very impressive, making the job of adjudication more difficult than ever before.
The sheer complexity of translation is something that most people underestimate. Infinite possibilities radiate outwards from even the simplest of texts. I have often enjoyed presenting an audience with a little sentence from Tolstoy that consists of nine words, including one proper noun and two conjunctions, so that only six of them really count; nevertheless these few phrases yield a range of acceptable possibilities in English that runs to at least two thousand different versions. One thing is certain. We are a very long way indeed from handing the task of translation to a computer. So, it is good to know that we have such a rich supply of talented Russian-English translators. The collective intellectual attainment of 2007-8 attested by the 58 books brought to our attention (and there were some others that were never submitted) is an outstanding achievement in an age that is supposed to have been dumbed-down. Long may this cultural resurgence continue.
Being one of the judges in this competition has been an enjoyable and rewarding experience, but we are under no illusions. Our decision will find favour perhaps with one camp, but many more will be inclined to repeat the title of this piece, which was translated by Bernard Pares in 1942 as ‘And God deliver us from critics quite as blind.’ How accurate is that as a translation? Discuss.