How And Other Stories (translated by Michael Ishenko and Liv Bliss) Came To Be

When asked to tell the readers of the SLD blog something about one of my favorite translation projects ever, I (Liv) realized that there wasn’t much I could say that hadn’t already been said in the book itself. Michael Ishenko, fellow ATA member, author, illustrator, book designer, and translation partner extraordinaire, agreed. So here, reproduced and lightly modified with his kind permission, is the book’s afterword, “About This Translation.” As idyllically unlikely as what follows may sound, I promise you that every word is true.

Any ATA member interested in receiving their very own AOS (no charge) need only send their mailing address to me at bliss.mst@gmail.com. Don’t be shy: I’ve got lots of copies.

Liv:

Author Michael Ishenko and I had been professional colleagues for quite some time when he began sending me chapters of his fictionalized autobiography И другие рассказы, just to read. For me, it was pretty much love at first sight. The honesty, the insight, the scope… The self-deprecating humor, the visual immediacy, the whimsy… The characters, the settings, the plot twists…

And I began nagging, insisting that what I was already calling And Other Stories couldn’t possibly go untranslated. He demurred, justifiably pointing out the pitfalls. There’s too much untranslatable subtext, he told me, having witnessed younger Beta readers of the Russian-language original scratching their heads over its Soviet-era realia and its cultural nuances. Endnotes abounded.

Michael:

I included a total of seventy-one (71!) endnotes in the Russian-language original. As I wrote, I kept sending finished stories to my then-twenty-one-year-old great-niece “for queries.” My answers to her questions actually made up the bulk of my cultural and historical notes. I hate notes in a book of fiction, but it was the best I could do to make things clear for the younger reader.

Liv Bliss blended all those notes into the English narrative gently, tactfully, and seamlessly. As a result, the reader will be pleased to find not a single endnote in this book.

Liv:

I normally try to rock as few boats as possible. Not this time. Unbeknownst to Michael, I started working on an episode from the book, planning to send him my translation and then hide under my desk for a week or two. And only days before I was ready to do that — his translation, of the same episode, arrived in my inbox. Clearly, this thing was meant to be.

Michael:

And when I compared those two translations, the choice of translator became obvious to me. If I had to write this book in English, I would be happy to accept this translation as my English original. But I couldn’t write it myself, so Liv did it for me.

Liv:

Having to adjust our intensive work on And Other Stories to the rest of our professional and private lives presented some challenges. Progress was at times slow, but it was always steady. Early in the process, Michael began compiling cheat-sheets, often with illustrations, to cover elements of the next chapter in line for translation that he thought I might have difficulty with. This was invaluable to me. And any mistakes I still insisted on making that happened to escape his sharp eyes were usually caught by Nathalie Stewart, a long-time colleague and friend of Michael’s who gave each chapter a close reading and found things that had eluded us both.

Fellow translator Lydia Razran Stone once wrote that “Translating poetry is a series of compromises punctuated by miracles,” and can’t most creative translation be considered a kind of poetry? Miracles did happen in this project, for sure. But the fun, for me, came from the back-and-forth with Michael, the trading of ideas and inspirations, the dogged hunt for solutions that came closest to satisfying us both.

I have worked with, for, around, and even against many authors in my translation career, and I can tell you that not one of those experiences has been remotely comparable to this. I have learned so much, on so many levels, from Michael. He has made me a better translator than he found me.

Michael:

Speaking of compromises, I have to end with a few words about the way place-names have been transliterated in this book. Among the various Ukrainian place-names transliterated in line with the contemporary conventions, one — the name of my birthplace, Odessa — is spelled the old way. “Here I stand,” I basically told Liv. “I can do no other.”

And once again, we were on the same page.