Slavic Languages Division (American Translators Association)
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Calling all experienced conference-goers! If you’ve previously attended an ATA Annual Conference and plan on joining your colleagues for ATA64 in Miami, this fast-paced networking/brainstorming event is for you. Meet other veteran conference-goers, trade tips for getting the most bang for your buck, and plan your Miami conference experience together.
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The Slavic Language Division’s annual meeting is this Friday, September 22, from 3:00 PM to 3:30 PM (ET).
Don’t miss out on the chance to share your common interests!
ATA Divisions hold their annual meetings to discuss new developments and ideas while offering a chance to connect with colleagues who share common languages or specialties.
How to attend:
The Zoom link can be found at https://web.atanet.org/divisions/division_annual_meeting_2023.php (requires ATA member login)
Conference registration is not required! All members are welcome!
We would like to invite you to the next quarterly gathering on Zoom this Sunday, April 30. Come chat with Slavic Languages Division colleagues about what’s going on in life and in business. The past meetups have offered members a valuable chance to catch up with each other. We hope that this one will give attendees a sense of connection and motivation going forward.
Grab something from the fridge and meet us on Zoom from 12–2 PM EST on Sunday, April 30. Come when you can, leave when you must!
To RSVP, please email SLD Assistant Administrator Steven McGrath (steven@mcgrathtranslations.com) before the meetup. We hope to see you there!
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Join your ATA colleagues for an educational and energizing look into how MT and AI are shaping our professions … and how we can leverage these advancements in our work as language professionals.
This ATA virtual conference will feature presentations from 4 industry- and thought-leading presenters who will share their experience, knowledge, and insight into the present landscape and future horizons for translation and interpreting.
The day will conclude with a Virtual Town Hall on MT, MTPE, AI, and HT. Share your experience and hear how your ATA colleagues are leveraging technological advances, innovating, and thriving!
We can’t wait to “see” you!
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Are you a professional translator or interpreter? Have you considered the importance of professional liability insurance to protect yourself and your business from potential claims?
In this 60-minute presentation, you’ll hear from an industry expert about the nature of professional liability insurance, what it does and doesn’t cover, and other important policy terms. You will also gain insight into the types of claims that can be made and how to avoid or mitigate them.
Using examples of actual situations that have arisen, you will learn about the benefits of having such insurance and what to do in a claim or potential claim situation, including what is required by the terms of the policy. You will also learn about the features and availability of the insurance program available to ATA members.
This presentation is designed for both translators and interpreters and will be presented in English.
Martin Ween, Senior Counsel at Wilson Elser, the law firm that works with the Underwriters at Lloyd’s, London, has been involved in the field of professional liability for 50 years, including extensive experience with the liability of translators and interpreters as a result of more than 20 years of responsibility for claims made under the professional liability program provided by the Underwriters at Lloyd’s to members of the American Translators Association. This has included handling and resolving claims; receiving and responding to inquiries from ATA members; and providing seminars, webinars, and materials to ATA and its members on a variety of topics related to their insurance coverage, liability, and ways to avoid and mitigate claims.
The article below is reprinted from the most recent SlavFile. The full issue is available here.
By Nora Seligman Favorov
In the introduction to Yuri Aleksandrovich Fedosiuk’s book «Что непонятно у классиков или Энциклопедия русского быта XIX века» (What is Unclear in the Classics or An Encyclopedia of 19th-Century Russian Daily Life; Moscow: Flinta, 2017), the author’s son explains the book’s origins by quoting a 1959 letter-to-the-editor his father wrote to the journal «Вопросы литературы» (Questions of Literature):
For an ever-expanding subset of contemporary readers, hundreds of expressions encountered in the writings of the Russian classics and reflecting social relationships and the everyday features of prerevolutionary Russia are becoming stumbling blocks, being either utterly baffling or misunderstood. […] As someone acquainted with only the metric system, it is unclear to me whether a nobleman possessing two hundred десятина of land is rich or poor, whether a merchant who has consumed a пол штоф of vodka is very drunk, and whether an official who gives a tip of a синенькая, a красенкая, or a семитка is being generous. Which character in a story holds a higher position when one is addressed as ваше благородие, another as ваше сиятельство, and a third as ваше превосходительство? (All translations of Fedosiuk are my own.)
Reading this gave me a warm, fuzzy “I’m not alone!” sort of feeling.
Fedosiuk ends his letter by urging philologists and historians to undertake the task of creating reference works that elucidate the terminology of prerevolutionary daily life in order to help a wide range of readers (first and foremost literature teachers, students, and schoolchildren) to “more deeply penetrate the works of the classics, reinvigorating many lines that have faded since the concepts they deal with have, in our era, been relegated to archives.”
Literary translators are not listed among those needing to “more deeply penetrate” the Russian classics, but we might be the ones with the most desperate practical need. Of course, Fedosiuk wrote his letter before the internet, where explanations of most if not all of the puzzling terms he names can be easily found. And since 1959, Fedosiuk himself has produced the valuable resource cited above (available in physical form through Amazon, kniga.com or for download through LitRes.com).
I first heard of this book from Erik McDonald, professor of Russian literature, literary translator, and blogger. At the time, we were both translating works by the prolific, popular, and currently almost-unheard-of nineteenth-century writer Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya (~1822–1889), who published under the pseudonym V. Krestovsky. He was working on her 1879 novella «Свидание» (The Meeting, 2022), and I was working on «Братец» (The Brother; the original was published in 1858 and the translation will soon be pitched to a publisher). Both these works had rather puzzling references to билеты. Erik had already discovered Fedosiuk’s book and found the explanation we needed in the chapter on Ценные бумаги (loosely, financial instruments): билет was the term commonly used for the piece of paper representing ownership of a sum of money that had been deposited with a financial institution. This fit the context in both our novellas nicely.
But the story behind the билет appearing in my novella involved another puzzle Erik and Fedosiuk helped me solve. In The Brother, before any билет is mentioned, we learn that one of the sisters had inherited 5,000 rubles from a godmother and that sum had been “положенная в N-ском приказе”—deposited in a “приказ” in the town of N (the seat of the province in which the story takes place). Toward the novella’s conclusion the sister “взяла билет приказа и понесла его брату” (retrieved the приказ билет and brought it to her brother). Приказ? I knew by then that the term приказ had long since gone out of use as a term for agencies/offices of the Russian government, with one exception: the Приказ общественного призрения.
This term brings me to another usually invaluable resource for R>E translators dealing with the prerevolutionary period: Dictionary of Russian Historical Terms from the Eleventh Century to 1917, compiled by Sergei G. Pushkarev and edited by George Vernadsky and Ralph T. Fisher, Jr. (Yale University Press, 1970). Several years ago I had trouble finding this book for any reasonable price, but I see that it is now easily and affordably available on, for example, AbeBooks. (As a side note, I was thrilled when I did finally receive a copy I ordered from Amazon and found a lovely cursive inscription inside the front cover: “Susan C. Brownsberger, 1976.” Brownsberger [1935–2021] is my idol; her brilliant translation of Iskander’s Sandro of Chegem is what first inspired me to pursue literary translation.)
Pushkarev offers the following entry for Приказ общественного призрения:
Distinct from the Muscovite приказы, these departments were established in each ГУБЕРНИЯ capital by the statutes on губерния administration of 1775. They dealt with health, welfare, and primary education. After the introduction of the ЗЕМСТВО in 1864, these functions were transferred to the земство institutions, and the приказы общественного призрения remained only in those губерния that did not have the земство organization.
Pushkarev has helped me solve many terminological riddles, but this entry wasn’t helpful at all. This приказ didn’t sound like the sort of institution in which money would be deposited. At least one historian, John P. LeDonne, translates the name of this institution as Board of Public Welfare. “Board” is more appropriate than, say, “Office,” since it apparently “consisted of six assessors from the intermediate courts representing the nobility, the townsmen, and the peasants of the treasury, but it met under the chairmanship of the governor only during the winter months” (John P. LeDonne, Absolutism and Ruling Class: The Formation of the Russian Political Order, 1700-1825, Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 254).
Again, Erik guided me to a passage about this приказ in Fedosiuk’s chapter on “Губернские власти” (provincial government).
The приказ общественного призрения, which was responsible for local vocational schools and all manner of medical and charitable institutions, came directly under the authority of governors. This приказ had the right to engage in financial operations for the purpose of augmenting its meager budget. Knowing this sheds light on Dobchinsky’s response to Khlestakov’s request for a loan of “about a thousand rubles”: “My money, I regret to inform you, is deposited with the приказ общественного призрения.”
Indeed, this приказ does come up in Gogol’s Inspector General, as Fedosiuk points out. The two translations of the play I was able to find on Google Books render this institution as “the State Savings Bank” (Thomas Seltzer) or “the state bank” (Fruma Gottschalk). This is understandable. It would distract and confuse readers of Gogol’s brilliant play if Dobchinsky had for some unknown reason deposited his money with the Board of Public Welfare. The only version of The Inspector General I have on my shelves, published in the National Textbook Company’s “Annotated Reader for Students of Russian” series in 1993, glosses all the vocabulary except for this tricky term, leaving it to the imagination of struggling students of Russian.
Some readers of SlavFile may recall a presentation I made at the 2020 ATA Annual Conference about translating historical terminology, in which I discussed the challenges I faced translating the 1863 novel City Folk and Country Folk. This novel was by Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya’s younger sister, Sofia. The Khvoshchinskaya sisters grew up in a close-knit, well-educated, and poor noble family. When Sofia and Nadezhda were children, the family was financially ruined after their father was falsely accused of misappropriating government funds. They lost their estate and he was disqualified from government service. During the eleven years that passed until he was exonerated, both daughters, but especially Nadezhda, helped their father as he struggled to support the family through copy work—reproducing calligraphic versions of government documents and topographic maps. The daughters’ detailed knowledge of the bureaucratic workings of Russia’s provincial governments in the mid-nineteenth century is reflected in their work, and this makes them both exceptionally hard to translate. Their fiction is filled with passing mentions of phenomena that would have been immediately familiar to their educated contemporaries but require hours of research by translators diligent enough to burrow down the necessary investigatory rabbit holes.
I am grateful to Erik McDonald for introducing me to Fedosiuk’s book and to Yuri Alexandrovich for writing it. One drawback for people wishing to use it as a reference is that it is not designed for quick searches. The eBook is not searchable, so when you want to look something up you have to go the TOC at the end and read through the chapters potentially related to your term. Pushkarev’s Dictionary is organized as such (with the Russian words in Latin rather than Cyrillic letters and alphabetized A-Z rather than А-Я). Its primary drawback is that it was published in 1970 and has never been updated or expanded.
There are surely many other resources and tricks for translators of prerevolutionary Russian texts. Beside the obvious approach of perusing Russian-language material that comes up in response to internet searches, I often plug the puzzling term into Yandex and/or Google in transliterated form to see if Anglophone historians have written about the given phenomenon. That is how I found the LeDonne text cited above. I’d love to hear what tricks and texts my colleagues use to research Russian historical terminology: contact me, or write an article of your own. Tales of terminological searches are yawn-inducing for ordinary mortals, but if you’ve made it to the end of this article, you’re no ordinary mortal.
Nora Seligman Favorov is a Russian-to-English translator specializing in Russian literature and history. Her translation of Sofia Khvoshchinskaya’s 1863 novel City Folk and Country Folk (Columbia, 2017) was recognized by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and Eastern European Languages as “Best Literary Translation into English” for 2018. Her translation of Stalin: New Biography of a Dictator by Oleg Khlevniuk (Yale, 2015) was selected as Pushkin House UK’s “best Russian book in translation” for 2016. She serves as translation editor for Russian Life magazine and took over as chief editor of SlavFile in 2021 after Lydia Razran Stone’s retirement. She can be reached at norafavorov@gmail.com.
Like what you read? There’s more where that came from. Check out the Summer-Fall 2022 issue here or the full SlavFile archive here.
Photo by Alex Padurariu on Unsplash
Dear SLD members,
We would like to invite you to the next quarterly gathering on Zoom this Sunday, January 29. Come chat with Slavic Languages Division colleagues about what’s going on in life and in business. The past meetups have offered members a valuable chance to catch up with each other. We hope that this one will give attendees a sense of connection and motivation going forward.
Grab something from the fridge and meet us on Zoom from 1–3 PM EST on Sunday, January 29. Latecomers are welcome. Attendance will be limited to 100 attendees, but this has not been a problem in the past.
To RSVP, please email SLD Assistant Administrator Steven McGrath (steven@mcgrathtranslations.com) before the event. We hope to see you there! There are still spots available! We hope to see you there!
The article below is reprinted from the most recent SlavFile. The full issue is available here.
By Vladimir Kovner
I suspect that I am a generation or two removed from the majority of SlavFile’s current readers. Nevertheless, I hope that they all know the name Bulat Okudzhava and are familiar with at least some of his works. In the late ʾ50s, Okudzhava began to perform his poems/songs—basically, poetry set to music accompanied by guitar—for his friends. Thus began the highly influential era of the Russian “bards,” of which Okudzhava is considered to be progenitor. I got my very first tape recordings of one of his performances in late 1959 and met him in person in 1962 at a home concert in Leningrad. Later I had the pleasure of recording his performances in Leningrad, Moscow, Detroit, and Oberlin, Ohio.
I’d like to start by saying a few words about the uniqueness of his poetry. In 2011, A.V. Sycheva (a professor at the University of Magadan and a protégé of the outstanding scholar Professor Roman Tchaikovsky) remarked in her dissertation “About Translations of Okudzhava’s Poetry into English” that the majority of the bard’s translators recreate only the basic sense of his poetry, their translations being interlinear or free, not even rhymed. In her opinion, only slightly more than 16 percent can be considered adequate. Later, explaining why even some decent renderings cannot be considered adequate, she explains: “In most cases, the completed translations of Okudzhava’s lyrics do not comply with all the criteria of that genre. Even if the original poetic texts of his songs are reflected quite successfully in the English language versions, some extremely important components of his poetry, such as its folkloristic character and musicality, are quite often completely absent in translation.” Later, we’ll come back to the discussion of that problem.
Before his first performance in the Leningrad House of Art in 1960, Okudzhava said to Alexander Volodin, a well-known playwright and poet who was tasked with introducing Bulat to the audience: “Don’t call my works songs. I am a poet. They are poems.” But later Volodin added to that story: “Long ago poets were called singers. They composed verses and melodies, and performed them with their own zither accompaniment… In our time, in our country, the first one to accomplish this was Okudzhava. Every word of his poetry is a word of a song that is supposed to soar over this vast country.”
The uniqueness of Bulat’s poetry is in his incredible musicality. We translators have to understand that more often than not his poetry is not simply verses. Even his poems that for some reason were not set to music beg to be sung. According to Vladimir Frumkin, a musicologist, one of the founders of the “bard” movement, and one of the best if not the best performer of Okudzhava’s songs, his verse-songs are unique because they have been created/composed as a cohesive whole that comprises not only lyrics and music but also the author’s own performance, his unique, somewhat restrained voice, a subtly ironic manner, a deeply individual cadence, and his guitar accompaniment. Together, these elements give us a unique genre known as “guitar poetry.” In his song «Главная песенка»/“The Paramount Song” (the version below is translated by Lydia Razran Stone and myself and was published in the journal Readings, no. 31, summer 2015). Bulat demonstrates how to create a song (music and lyrics) as a single whole:
“Okudzhava’s songs are more a phenomenon of oral than of written poetry, like folksongs” (Vladimir Frumkin). Let’s add that Okudzhava heard music emanating from everywhere (e.g., from Moscow streets, from architecture), then he constantly and naturally incorporated the most diverse musical instruments and genres into his poetry: guitars, horns, drums, flutes, clarinets, waltzes, marches, and so on. Furthermore, as he described it: “I write when I feel like it, under the influence of various moods and impulses that are sometimes not even clear to me…” And finally, he possessed a remarkable musical ear. This is why I believe it is essential for translators of Okudzhava’s songs to spend time listening to how he performs them to be sure that not only their translation adheres to the original meter and rhyme pattern (that is relatively simple), but that it is singable to the original melody, with the rhythm pattern of the translated song matching the pattern in the original.
| Наверное, самую лучшую На этой земной стороне Хожу я и песенку слушаю – Она шевельнулась во мне. Она еще очень неспетая. Она зелена как трава. Но чудится музыка светлая, И строго ложатся слова… |
The best thing that life on Earth brings to me, That causes most joy in my heart, I walk, and from nowhere it sings to me, A song that is longing to start. Not yet a true song, but developing; Unripe, like green fruit on the vine. The melody’s splendid, enveloping, And words fall precisely in line… |
Returning to A.V. Sycheva’s analysis, obviously the majority of translators were either tone-deaf or failed to consider the melodical component important and based their renderings on his written poetry.
Let’s come back, at last, to the subject of our discussion: a very unusual poem-song, «Песенка старого шарманщика». Before I describe the very interesting and complex process of translating that song into English, I’d like to say that the following translation represents my efforts to match the brilliance of Okudzhava’s original lyrics and my very useful and important periodic discussions with Nora Favorov, who critiqued some of my early versions and suggested a few interesting alternatives that I gratefully accepted.
Песенка старого шарманщика. Булат Окуджава.
Е. Евтушенко
Шарманка-шарлатанка, как сладко ты поешь!
Шарманка-шарлатанка, куда меня зовешь?
Шагаю еле-еле – вершок за пять минут.
Ну как дойти до цели, когда ботинки жмут?..
Работа есть работа, работа есть всегда,
Хватилo б только пота на все мои года.
Расплата за ошибки – ведь это тоже труд.
Хватило бы улыбки, когда под ребра бьют.
Работа – есть работа…
Composed circa 1960–62
The melody follows a waltz rhythm (one-two-three, one-two-three), a naïve charming waltz for a street-organ. (The standard rhythms for street-organ music were older forms of dances such as the waltz, two-step, polka, etc.)
“The Organ-Grinder Ditty” by Bulat Okudzhava
dedicated to Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Oh, charlatan, street organ! Your singing is so sweet.
You devious street organ! Where do you summon me?
I trudge on, legs feel heavy, five minutes – just one inch.
How can I reach my haven in boots that cramp and pinch?
What’s work? Just work I get. Jobs – plenty, good and bad.
God, help me toil in blood-n-sweat through years that lay ahead.
A payback for my blunders – that’s also labor, but…
Can I still smile, I wonder, when punched straight in the gut?
What’s work? Just work I get…
There are eight lines in this short song; each one is six poetic feet long—hexameter, consisting naturally (remember, it’s a waltz) of two iambic trimeters. Every two consecutive lines (1-2, 3-4 and so on) are rhymed at the end and in the middle of lines. All the rhymes are perfect (exact). It’s a straightforward pattern for a translator.
Let’s begin with the title of that song: Песенка старого шарманщика. Why did Okudzhava call it “песенка” rather than “песня?” Actually, he used both titles many times. Possibly through this choice Okudzhava was trying to underline the idea that «песенка» (“ditty” in English or chansonette in the French manner) brings an element of intimacy between a performer and listeners. Also, it is possible that while he often repeated that his songs were foremost poems and he was basically performing guitar poetry, he underestimated his exceptional musical gift and incredible merits and the value of his songs’ melodical aspect, meaning for him his songs really were just ditties. It is interesting that in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Ada the author refers to Okudzhava’s “Sentimental March” as a “…soldier dit[ty] of singular genius…” Based on all that, we will render the English title of this work as: “The Organ-Grinder Ditty.”
We have to repeat that this poem is very unusual: the whole poem, including its title, is written as a witty satire in the best traditions of Aesop. (Okudzhava wrote two more poem-songs of this type.)
Before singing this song for Western audiences, Vladimir Frumkin used to tell them that the old organ-grinder in this song by Bulat Okudzhava is not really an organ-grinder. Soviet listeners understood this perfectly well: the author was hinting at what the creative intelligentsia—poets, writers, composers, and artists—had to endure working under the pressures of total censorship. As Fyodor Raskolnikov wrote in an open letter to Stalin in 1938: “You have forced art into a straitjacket in which it suffocates, withers and dies.” By using an organ-grinder as camouflage, Okudzhava was trying to disguise the true meaning of the song from the censors, the literary gendarmes, Soviet cultural authorities, and, of course, the communist media. There is a curious story about this song connected with Professor Charles Gribble of Ohio State University, who in 1966 founded Slavica Publishers. In 1976, Frumkin suggested that he publish an encyclopedia of Russian bards and sang him several songs. After hearing “The Organ-Grinder Ditty,” Professor Gribble, who at the time was making frequent trips to the Soviet Union, replied: “No way. I cannot publish anti-Soviet poems. The Russians will never let me in again.” Obviously, Professor Gribble saw through the Aesopian language, and of course Okudzhava’s audience in the Soviet Union (both his fans and the authorities) were even less likely to miss the song’s true meaning.
The song was composed circa 1960–62, performed at home concerts and, like the rest of his songs, widely distributed by way of “magnitizdat” tape recordings. It was not officially published until 1983.
What pushed Bulat Okudzhava over the edge and made him compose a song in which a lilting melody and the quaint image of a street-grinder are paired with a series of much darker images: the singer is too hobbled by painful shoes to walk more than an inch in five minutes, has to pay for his blunders, and is punched in the gut: шагаю еле-еле, ботинки жмут; расплата за ошибки, под ребра бьют.
We have to recall what the situation was at the time this song was written.
It was composed around the same time as the 22nd Communist Party Congress. The brightest prospects for the country within the next twenty years were heralded from the podium, along with confident assurances that it would attain communism, that all socioeconomic differences between the city and the countryside and between toilers of the body and the mind would disappear, and so on and so forth. In short, universal rejoicing was in order.
What about Bulat at that time? According to Professor Anatoly Kulagin, Okudzhava’s name always sounded suspicious to the Soviet regime. They sensed covert, if not overt, opposition, an unwillingness to “play along” by performing ritual displays of loyalty and producing art with the required slant in exchange for the ability to publish, to be granted a government apartment, summer dacha, or sanatorium stay, etc. In spite of the fact that at that time Okudzhava was the head of the poetry division at the most prominent national literary weekly in the former Soviet Union, Literaturnaya Gazeta, authorization for release of his first recording was blocked, Kiev TV cut all of Okudzhava’s poetry from a TV program based on the contents of Literaturnaya Gazeta, and, in a May 1961 speech, the secretary of the Komsomol’s Central Committee characterized Okudzhava’s songs as fit only for a boudoir, a remark intended as a huge insult for a Soviet poet.
Here is Okudzhava’s reaction in his own words: “I started to sing my poems, not imagining what a scandal was to break out in a short time. Guitarists accused me of lack of talent…composers of lack of professionalism… singers of having no voice at all, and all of them together of impudence and banality…The officials accused me of pessimism, anti-patriotism, pacifism, and the press backed them up” (from the book ОКУДЖАВА 65 песен, by Vladimir Frumkin, English translation by Eve Shapiro). Already a member of the Union of Writers, after working at Literaturnaya Gazeta for less than four years, in early 1962 Okudzhava left the newspaper. Obviously Bulat was sick and tired of all the government’s “sweet promises”—actually endless lies, and the belittling criticism of so-called cultural workers and “brother-writers” organized “from the bureaucratic top.” Fed up, he composed and began performing “The Organ-Grinder Ditty.”
My goal in translating this poem-song was to accurately reflect the underlying Aesopian meaning while maintaining the formal metrical structure.
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The sweet (сладко) singing of the organ-grinder represents the temptations the Soviet government put before people aspiring to work in the arts. For the Russian word “звать” (to call), we chose a stronger word, “summon,” specifically implying the exercise of authority.
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The first line of this couplet alludes to the constraints placed on Okudzhava. In 1962, despite being a very popular bard, he had only been allowed to publish two tiny books of poetry—Lyrica, 63 pages, and Islands, 91 pages—and not a single record had been released. A вершок is an antiquated Russian unit of measurement just under 2 inches. Next, the image of painfully tight shoes is an obvious reference to the straitjacket of literary censorship (ботинки жмут). Цель (goal) is a polysemantic word. For a writer it could be to publish a novel, for a composer, to hear his new symphony in a concert hall, for Bulat, say, to see The Complete Poetry of Bulat Okudzhava in print. While “haven” and “goal” are not exact equivalents, given the constraints of meter, we felt this word fit with the underlying meaning: the ability to freely exercise his art was, for Okudzhava, a sort of haven, both a place of refuge and a desired goal.
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As Nikolai Bogomolov, a professor at Moscow State University has observed: “Projecting the real situation in Russia onto this song, we see an obvious clash between the dulcet tones of the street-organ and social and political reality, and the only solution that crosses the minds of many people is that there is nothing left for them but work. Работа есть работа, работа есть всегда…” (In fact, work—as in paid work—was not always available, since when a writer was expelled from the Writers Union or other analogous professional organizations, he/she was deprived of any possibility of making a living in that field, as was the case with Boris Pasternak in 1958 and with Alexander Galich in 1971.)
Regarding the phrase “Хватилo б только пота…” in 1986, when asked how young writers and poets were able to establish themselves in the field of literature, Okudzhava replied: “One’s talent has to fight its way through sweat, blood and toil. And this is fair!” I assume that Okudzhava knew the Speech of Winston Churchill at the beginning of the war in May of 1940: “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” We draw on this phrase in translating the second line of this couplet.
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Of course, as for “ошибки/blunders,” we have to acknowledge the note of irony: Okudzhava’s uncompromising stances vis-à-vis the behavior expected from Soviet writers were blunders from their point of view, but not his own, of course. Being forced to openly admit “blunders” was worse than hard physical labor for many.
The last line, “Хватило бы улыбки, когда под ребра бьют”, reflects a slight exaggeration in regard to the Khrushchev era. Although Stalin’s torture and merciless executions of the most talented people of all persuasions and professions, including writers, were over, the persecution and harassment of dissenting writers under Nikita Khrushchev (and later Brezhnev) continued.
Alas, throughout Russian history, punches in the gut, whether literal or figurative, have been a fact of life for centuries.
Vladimir Kovner is an engineer, journalist, and English<>Russian translator and editor specializing in poetry, bard songs, ballet, and idioms. He participated in the edition «Песни Русских Бардов» (The Songs of Russian Bards, Paris, 1976), a collection comprising four volumes and 40 cassette tapes, and has published two books of poetic translation from English into Russian: «Приласкайте Льва» (Pet the Lion; 2010), and a bilingual edition titled Edward Lear: The Complete Limericks with Lear’s Own Drawings (2015). He also translated (in collaboration with Nora Seligman Favorov), Sergey Baimukhametov’s Magic Dreams: Confessions of Drug Addicts. His memoirs, «Золотой век Магнитиздата» (The Golden Age of “Magnitizdat,” were published in the United States, Russia and Germany. He enjoyed a long-term collaboration with Lydia Razran Stone. They made several joint presentations at ATA Annual Conferences and together wrote the “Idiom Savants” column in SlavFile. They jointly authored an article about translating Edward Lear in the Moscow journal «Мосты» (Bridges; 2012), a bilingual edition of the journal Чтения/Readings devoted to Okudzhava (2015), and Sports Idioms: English-Russian and Russian-English Dictionaries (2017). He can be reached at 19vovakova02@gmail.com.
Like what you read? There’s more where that came from. Check out the Summer-Fall 2022 issue here or the full SlavFile archive here.
The article below is reprinted from the most recent SlavFile. The full issue is available here.
By Liv Bliss
First, the basic scoop: The Wonder Heritage Language Centre (WHLC) in Toronto, Canada has developed a volunteer program of English-language tutoring for Ukrainian native speakers who are recent arrivals in an Anglophone country or are preparing to make the move.
For the life of me, I can’t remember how I first heard about it. So if you’re reading this, and it was you who posted the announcement I read—Thank You!
There’s a brief description of the program here, which is also where you can link to the application form. There you will see that the program is called “Conversation Practice” and is intended for Ukrainian speakers with at least some knowledge of English.
Here’s how it worked for me. I applied through the site and soon afterward was invited to sign up for a short online (Zoom) orientation session. A number of dates were available, so scheduling was no problem. Volunteers also receive a short PDF densely packed with dos, don’ts, and other hints and information. Shortly after that, I was matched with a learner and had to contact her directly to set up our first meeting. The means of communication (Zoom, Google Meet, etc.) was left up to us.
My learner already had Zoom installed on her phone, so Zoom it was. My being a Zoom newbie—except as an invitee—exposed me to a bit of a learning curve. But it was wonderfully shallow, and now I can set up our meetings in my sleep (although that is not recommended).
As instructed, I first contacted my learner by email in Russian (with apologies for not speaking Ukrainian), but since then, Russian has played only a very small part in our interaction. That’s a faint echo of my training for an EFL teaching certificate, many decades ago.
There were other, more resonant, echoes: relentless repetition, back-chaining (shun – siashun – nunsiashun – pronunsiashun), prior introduction to the vocabulary to be used in teaching a particular grammatical pattern, a brisk tempo, homework as reinforcement, and visual aids. Lots and lots of visual aids. (Oddly, I still had a stash of magazine photos and my own drawings from back in the day. But now the blessed internet spares me from having to sketch a lion that comes out looking more like a mangy chihuahua.) Right now, in readiness for today’s session, there’s a lesson plan and a stack of graphics on my desk, along with a can of Pepsi, some bottled water, a can of beer, a bottle of vodka, and an airline-sized bottle of wine. Please don’t ask.
I quickly found out that my learner’s comfort level is boosted once she sees unusual words and weird grammar written down. So I come to every session with a black marker and a bunch of blank paper slips. I really should invest in a small dry-erase whiteboard one of these days.
My lessons are generally planned around blank spots that came up in the lesson before. For example, I found that my learner was having a hard time with “this/these” vs. “that/those” (which is so much easier to teach face-to-face than remotely, where wild gestures can be sadly misinterpreted), so I sent her an illustrated exercise that we explored in the next session, following it up with homework that we discussed in the session after that. She’s great with homework: always does it and usually aces it. I wouldn’t impose it on her if it was a burden, though. “Do you want some homework on this?” I routinely ask, and she always gives me a big grin and a “Yes, please!”
As you’ll have gathered by now, this has proved to be a fairly structured series of lessons, spiraling upward in complexity week by week, rather than a more laid-back conversation practice, which is fine with me but may not suit everyone. WHLC tries to match pairs based on, among all else, the tutor’s English teaching experience (if any) and knowledge of Ukrainian/Russian (ditto), but I’m quite sure that any instances in which tutor and learner proved in the end to be hopelessly mismatched would be swiftly rectified. The program is not intended to start beginners off from scratch: my learner had several years of post-Soviet high-school English that has grown rusty in spots over the decades since.
I won’t fib and tell you that the preparation for our sessions takes only “a few minutes,” as the WHLC site suggests. But that’s likely attributable to my learner’s needs and my own foibles—no seat-of-the-pants teacher, I! The follow-up to each lesson—an emailed list of new words and expressions—takes a little time too. Two or three sessions a week is generally preferable, per WHLC, but we now have to arrange our meetings around my learner’s work schedule, because a mere week or so after arriving in Canada, she had her child in school and had found a part-time job. I’m so proud of her.
WHLC asked to be notified after the first meeting had happened but otherwise stays pretty much out of the process. There’s a Google Docs spreadsheet to which tutors are encouraged to add online resources, and also a Slack workgroup for tutors, where we can ask and answer questions and generally share our experiences. That apart, this is an entirely self-motivated program, and the only metric of success is that beaming smile and that “Oh!” when a grammatical pattern suddenly makes sense. How long will it last for my learner and me? I have no idea. As long as I can be useful, I suppose.
I know that we SLD-ers can be inveterate volunteers and that it’s easy to become over-extended and all volunteered out. So if any of this is news you can use, great. If not—well, it’s been fun telling you about it.
Liv Bliss, an ATA-certified Russian to English translator, can be reached at bliss.mst@gmail.com, in case you have any comments or questions about the WHLC program—or about anything else, for that matter. This article has been seen and approved by Dr. Marina Sherkina-Lieber, founder of the Wonder Heritage Language Centre.
Like what you read? There’s more where that came from. Check out the Summer-Fall 2022 issue here or the full SlavFile archive here.
The interview below is reprinted from the most recent SlavFile. The full issue is available here. We look forward to seeing you at ATA63 in LA next week!
Interviewed by Nora Seligman Favorov
This year’s distinguished speaker was invited on the strength of a recommendation by one of our newer members, Elizabeth Tolley, who recently earned an MA in RU<>EN conference interpretation from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, where Dmitry Buzadzhi is currently teaching. We thank Elizabeth for that recommendation. Since receiving it, I’ve been familiarizing myself with the YouTube channel of which Dmitry is co-founder: «Перевод жив» (Translation Lives). I myself do not interpret, and I assumed that, for me, this channel dedicated to the art and science of interpretation into and out of Russian would be of limited personal interest. But then I started watching and couldn’t stop: I was as entertained as I was enlightened and, well, dazzled by the high-level production values, by the professionalism of the presenters (sometimes Dmitry himself, sometimes one of his collaborators), by the behind-the-scenes peeks at various international forums, and by, as these videos make clear, the level of skill, training, and conditioning (analogous to what Olympic athletes go through) it takes to be and stay a top-level interpreter. In short, I look forward to two excellent talks at ATA63 in Los Angeles: the Susana Greiss Lecture: “Translation and Interpreting as Acting” (Thursday, October 13, 2:00 pm-3:00 pm) and “Anticipation in Interpreting” (Friday, October 14, 4:45 pm-5:45 pm). Please help us spread the word, including to colleagues working in other languages.
Some biographical details: Dmitry Buzadzhi is a graduate of Moscow State Linguistic University’s School of Translation and Interpretation, with a degree in translation and interpretation (Russian, English, German). After earning his Candidate’s degree at MSLU, he taught translation in the English Translation and Interpretation department for ten years before serving as head of that department for five. As mentioned, he is currently a professor of English-Russian Interpretation, Russian as a Foreign Language, and the Interpretation Practicum, at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, California.
Dmitry is an active translator and simultaneous interpreter. As an interpreter, he has worked at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, the Eastern Economic Forum, the Fort Ross Dialogue, and other important international events. His literary translations into Russian include Babel 17 by Samuel Delany, The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. Le Guin (forthcoming as «Жернова неба» [Azbuka]), and short stories by Antonia Byatt. He has published over 50 articles on translation and interpretation, has co-authored two textbooks, and recently collaborated on a chapter on conference interpretation in Russia for the Routledge Handbook of Conference Interpreting.
He is a member of the editorial board of «Мосты» (Bridges), a leading Russian quarterly on TI, and is on the jury panel of Cosines Pi, an international contest for simultaneous and consecutive interpreters, as well as a regular presenter at such major industry conferences in Russia as Translation Forum Russia and the Global Dialogue.
As mentioned in the introduction to this interview, I find your YouTube channel, «Перевод жив» to be extremely impressive. How did the idea to start the channel come about and how is it produced? It’s obvious that a lot of work goes into each episode. What sort of team puts it all together? And who’s in charge of finding the snippets of old films that inject a nice dose of humor?
This is really the work of just two people, myself and my longtime friend and colleague Alexander Shein, who was my classmate at Moscow State Linguistic University. The idea initially came from me, although we both have been teaching translation and interpretation (TI) and thinking about it from what could, perhaps grandly, be described as theoretical and pedagogical perspectives, as well as actually practicing it since we graduated from MSLU.
On the one hand, I’ve always liked transferring my practical TI experience into teaching and some kind of theoretical generalizations, which, among other things, helps you understand your own work better. On the other, I think we were both inspired by some great educational videos (not necessarily related to TI or linguistics) you can find online these days.
Unlike articles or textbooks, videos are more versatile, give you a more direct tool to reach your audience and get their feedback, and eliminate the middleman, i.e., publishers, editors, etc. Apart from that, we both enjoy dabbling in technology, so it was a perfect excuse to get some gear and get more serious about filming and editing.
As for snippets of old films, we both are in charge of finding them depending on who is editing a given video. I personally love intertextuality and am a huge fan of Soviet cinema, so it’s hard to resist the temptation to insert a movie quote here and there.
Any plans to expand it beyond a Russian-speaking audience?
Not at the moment. We mostly cover things related to English-Russian TI and the Russian-language market, so you need to speak Russian anyway for our content to be of any value to you. We’re always open to suggestions and collaborations though.
Tell us a little about how you happened to translate Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven? Was this on your initiative or were you approached by someone else?
The new Russian translation is published by Azbuka, one of Russia’s biggest publishers. I have worked with Azbuka before, so this time one of their senior editors just sent me an email asking if I would be interested. I couldn’t refuse of course, having read and re-read Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy several times since my teenage years, every time completely enraptured by the depth of the story and the powerful characters.
The Lathe of Heaven has no spells or dragons, it’s more rationalistic and less epic, but it has an interesting correlation with The Farthest Shore, the concluding novel of the Earthsea trilogy, which was completed at about the same time, in the early 1970s. In both novels, the “villain” is someone whose quest for absolute power and abstract “good” threatens to destroy the fabric of our imperfect yet magical world, although in The Farthest Shore it’s an evil sorcerer who wants to defeat death and in The Lathe of Heaven it’s a very liberal psychiatrist who attempts to improve the world in the interests of humanity.
Whether you’re in the booth doing synchronous interpretation or at your keyboard working on a literary translation, you’re bound to run into “untranslatables”—things for which there’s no equivalent in the target language/culture. What are the different ways you handle those instances during T vs. I? Can you offer an example or two?
That’s a great question: “untranslatability” is something I could talk about forever. Actually, things that really are untranslatable are simply omitted or don’t (or shouldn’t) get submitted for T or I in the first place, so there are no clever solutions there. However, as you rightly said, there are many things for which there is no direct or conventional equivalent in the target language/culture, and these, challenging as they are, give the translator/interpreter a great chance to be creative.
The main differences in handling these things in T vs. I are, of course, time constraints and the completeness of context. When translating, your time for thinking and doing research can be considered unlimited (although in reality it is not), and you know the full context. If it’s a pun, a meaningful name, or an expression in an invented language, in a sci-fi novel, for example, you know exactly what its function is, and you can take into account not just its significance for what has been written so far but also its implications for the rest of the text. In consecutive or simultaneous interpretation, all decisions have to be made on the spot, and you should always bear in mind that you don’t know how the speaker might refer to this “untranslatable” later or how your equivalent might be used by target-language speakers who may want to follow up on the previous speaker’s remarks.
To give a short answer to your first question, I’d say that, in T, you can and should be creative and try to recreate the communicative effect of the “untranslatable” for the target-language audience as fully as possible, even if it means spending a long time on a short passage. In I, however, you have to act quickly and most likely focus on just the most important part of the message (e.g., sacrificing stylistic or cultural nuances to render factual information) and try to play it safe. To a certain degree, a bland but factually correct rendering can be said to be a bad option in literary translation but a good option in simultaneous interpretation.
I’m not sure if I have a list of the best examples in my head, so I’m just going to give a couple of the more recent ones. One of the main characters in The Lathe of Heaven is called George Orr, who at first appears meek and indecisive. When he stands up a woman for lunch, she has this angry internal monologue where she calls “that little bastard” “Mr. Either Orr.” Now, “Either Orr,” apparently, is an attempt to dismiss him as a wishy-washy guy who can’t make up his mind and commit.
The same conjunction in Russian (или… или), obviously, sounds very different, and changing his last name to something sounding more or less like или (“eely”) for the purposes of this little joke is out of the question (it would probably sound silly, Le Guin nerds would be annoyed, and you’d lose the likely allusion to George Orwell). So I thought of a different way a Russian speaker might angrily work someone’s last name into a disparaging description of someone who appears dubious. What I ended up writing was “Надо все-таки снова встретиться с этим мелким засранцем. Мистером Орром-Не-Пойми-Которым” (literally: “Mister Orr-I-Don’t-Know-Who”, but the point is, for those who don’t speak Russian, there’s a rhyme here). Which—talking of Soviet movies—actually reminds me of a scene where a woman, who doesn’t quite know what to make of a guy named Tikhon she just met, refers to him, in her head, as “Тихон – с того света спихан” (literally: “Tikhon, pushed back from the netherworld,” again with a rhyme).
Moving on to interpreting, there was a funny episode at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum where I interpreted this year. We were working at a session, the closing session of the day, titled “ПМЭФ без галстуков” [SPIEF without ties/in shirt-sleeves] I saw that the title had been translated into English as “What SPIEF Left Behind,” which kind of made sense because the idea was that they would casually wrap up the day and pick up some odd bits and pieces that may have been overlooked by other speakers. So I began my interpretation by saying something like, “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our session called ‘What SPIEF Left Behind’…” There was a pause, and I peered at the screen to see what the moderator was doing. He was ripping his tie off in a very deliberate manner. So I had to add quickly, “Or, as it’s called in Russian, SPIEF with your tie off.”
In general, how much of the work of Russia-based interpreters working between Russian and English involves interpreting for people for whom English is not a native language?
It’s true that much of the work Russian-English interpreters do in Russia involves interpreting for non-native speakers of English. You will end up interpreting for native speakers of Chinese, Vietnamese, Korean, Hindi, Italian, Swedish, Norwegian, etc., etc. Which is actually a pity for our colleagues because Russia has an excellent tradition of training translators and interpreters with a wide range of languages, and, in many of these instances, professionals with these speakers’/listeners’ native languages could be found. Unfortunately, too many people in the world rely on English these days, although that’s a good thing for TI professionals with English in their combination.
Working with non-native English speakers involves many challenges. On the one hand, you get all kinds of unbearable accents, some of which are undecipherable even to a native speaker of English. Such cases are especially painful because the interpreter may only have a vague idea of what the speaker is trying to say but, to everyone else, since “English” is being spoken on the floor, any problems with interpretation are the interpreter’s fault.
On the other hand, if these non-native speakers are your audience, you may sometimes have to use simpler language just because you realize they may not understand your fancy word choices, even if they are absolutely correct.
Final question: Your English is exceptional for someone who grew up outside of an English-speaking country. Could you say a few words about your first encounters with foreign languages?
Thank you for your very generous comment! My first encounter with foreign languages was hearing my parents (both trained as teachers of foreign languages, although they never taught) talk French to each other so that I couldn’t understand what they were discussing. It seemed to be some kind of a supernatural power, a secret code, and must have piqued my interest.
Learning German and English at school came later. My first encounters with actual speakers of English occurred during my final year of high school, when, by a stroke of luck, I had a chance to spend an entire academic year at a boarding school in England. There was greater exposure to all things foreign when I became a student at MSLU, of course, and, towards the end of my studies there, I began to get my first interpretation assignments.
I’ll add one more thing, although you didn’t really ask me that. I’m not saying that spending some of your formative years in a country where your B language is spoken isn’t helpful for your linguistic progress. It certainly is, and the fear of speaking “Russian English” is probably something I’m never going to get out of my system. However, teaching in America has allowed me to see the other side of the coin. Quite often, students who had formal language education in their home countries (this applies to both native speakers of Russian and English) have an advantage over their peers who just picked up their B language living abroad. The latter may sound more fluent and idiomatic at times, but they often lack more formal vocabulary, don’t have a structured view of the language, and may be clueless about some mistakes they still make because they never learned the rules in the first place.
Like what you read? There’s more where that came from Check out the Summer-Fall 2022 issue here or the full SlavFile archive here.
