Robert Porter
When Academia Rossica approached me to serve on the jury for their translation prize, I was excited and intrigued. What would the field be like, how many entries would there be, were there still publishers around in the West willing to produce translations of serious Russian works? The classics apart, was there more to Russian literature for English-speaking people than penguins and historical detectives? My caricature of the average Western reader's view of Russian literature today can perhaps be excused in part by my own education.
When I was struggling with the Russian language and gaining my initial access to Russian literature and culture, there were a few gifted and prolific translators who, in collaboration with select publishing houses, did much to bring to the attention of the wider world the likes of Pasternak, Bulgakov, Solzhenitsyn, Siniavskii, Paustovskii, Osip and Nadezhda Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Evtushenko and Voznesenskii. If the Soviet establishment had had its way, many of these names would have been presented to the outside world, if at all, only in a highly selective fashion. As it was, Max Hayward (the best example) produced accurate, accessible and readable translations, frequently with invaluable Prefaces and annotations. Harvill (the best example) produced attractive and (nearly always, even for students!) affordable volumes. The 1960s were indeed the ‘swinging sixties’ for Russian literature, as the Soviet leadership swung from freeze to thaw and back again. ‘Dissident’ writers received token publication at home, if at all, and were often billed glibly as ‘freedom fighters’ in the West. Vladimir Voinovich put it more accurately, and with characteristic humour, when, after he was expelled from the Writers' Union and banned, said: ‘I didn't fight for freedom, I enjoyed it.’
As I have noted on previous occasions, with the collapse of communism, Russian literature came to resemble a well-stocked, but not particularly well managed supermarket: here you could find a few old staples (often past their ‘sell by’ date); some new lines, often in flashy packaging, whose nutritional value was nil; a lot of foreign comestibles, strange and suspect. And all this was to be washed down with a heady cocktail of chernukha and pornukha. Where were the new Solzhenitsyns and Bulgakovs? was the cry. Being a judge for a literary prize might help me find out.
When I received the email invitation from Rossica, I accepted without knowing who my fellow jurists would be. It was a relief to learn that they were old and much liked and respected colleagues. After all, literary prizes are notoriously controversial and divisive – with these two old buddies, there would be as much chance of dissent as at a Brezhnevite meeting of the Politburo... How wrong can you be?
We were all vaguely aware that the standard of translation for the most part would be very high. Gone were the days when ‘Az vozdam’ in the epigraph to Anna Karenina could be rendered as ‘I play the ace’. Russia is more accessible, its authors and scholars more available for consultation, than ever before. We judges didn't really fall out over eliminating the few texts in which we detected a good number of factual errors or where the phrasing and linguistic register seemed awkward or inappropriate. A fair number of entries were sound translations of works which we felt were not of great literary worth. As the number of potential winners narrowed our differences widened. Was it even possible to translate poetry at all? I recalled hearing, I think, Andrew Motion saying on the radio that a poem didn't mean anything, it just was. At what point should a translator be given credit for – or blackballed for – recreating and echoing an aesthetic experience rather than merely achieving lexical precision, or even at the expense of lexical precision? Was it a greater accomplishment to produce a new (better?) translation of a classic already translated half a dozen times before than to tackle a demanding and at times bewildering contemporary text? Initially, we came up with more questions and requests than answers: Couldn't Academia Rossica offer several prizes, one for the classics, one for poetry, and one for modern fiction?
For me, the friction between us was more than counter-acted by the pleasure of reading and/or re-reading many of the books. I was forced to return to Humiliated and Insulted after about a thirty-five year absence. Not Dostoevsky's best in my view, but in it there were all the bare bones of Crime and Punishment. For several years I had found it difficult to cope with Sorokin's prose, but Ice, for me, exhibited a new degree of subtlety and sophistication: there was a haunting shift from the violence, criminality and prostitution in the lengthy Part 1 to the four pages of the concluding Part, with its image of childhood, innocence and vulnerability; and then there were the multi-layered metaphors of the special ice and the elite 23,000-strong brother- and sisterhood that it could re-animate. A completely new voice for me was Maria Galina. Iramifications to my mind had all the cheeky comedy of Ilf and Petrov with just a touch of Gogolian barminess. Together with Pelevin's were-creatures, these modern-day novels illustrate that the Russian fantastic is alive and well and is nourishing itself on Russian reality. Then there is Ageev’s minor masterpieces ‘A Romance with Cocaine’, set in pre-revolutionary Russia, its rebelliousness and depiction of degeneracy appears unsettling contemporary. Babchenko’s shocking and graphic account of his experiences in the recent Chechen war is a valuable contribution to the war theme in Russian literature.
Elena Shvarts writes:
My soul is the roundest glass retort
Filled with the salt of all matter.
Angel or devil: whatever it brings forth
It was born to experience marvel.
These words could serve as a précis of the best of the literature that the judges have been considering, arguing and agonising over, these last long months. Perhaps the ultimate winner of this year's Academia Rossica prize and the many, many undeserving losers might heed or take comfort from the words of another Russian poet, Boris Pasternak: ‘Byt' znamenitym nekrasivo’.
Perhaps the judges should fear or take comfort from the epigraph to Anna Karenina.