More Reading

I had a bit of a lull in late November and got some reading done. I'd been looking forward to stepping back from the actual work of translation and reading about why it's so important (not that I need convincing, mind).

Even though I've been a translator for 12 years now, something about Why Translation Matters made me feel like I was on the outside looking in. Much of the discussion is on academic issues - Should students be allowed to read translated literature at university? Why do literary critics give translators the cold shoulder? - that don't really get my blood pumping.

On the other hand, I did enjoy Grossman's plucky attempt to define good literary translation and her discussion of all the ways linguistic insularity hurts us as a culture. One particular sentence stuck with me:

"In short, there seems to be overwhelming evidence to the effect that if you wish to earn your living as a writer, your works must be translated into English regardless of your native language."

That's a huge obstacle for most, if not all, young authors and authors from small countries. Since I am so often approached by authors looking to have their manuscripts translated into English, let me share the advice I give them:

1. If you're still looking for an agent, don't get your whole book translated right away. Most agents only want to see a summary plus a chapter or two. You can get the rest of the book translated after you have a lead.

2. Get your translator to help you write a good pitch letter to go along with the synopsis you send out to prospective agents.

3. Only proposition agents who say they handle international fiction.

4. Think about submitting translated short stories to magazines that publish fiction before trying to shop a big novel.

5. If you're unfamiliar with the U.S. publishing industry, invest in a book like Writer's Market to find out what publishers might want to see your work.

Reading, Reading and More Reading

My resolution for 2010 is to read more, and I don't mean reading more work to translate.

First off is Dina Kaminskaya's Записки советского адвоката (Published in the U.S. as Final Judgment: My Life as a Soviet Defense Attorney, You can get it at abebooks for a couple of bucks). I saw a good review several months ago on openspace.ru and immediately bookmarked it. Her description of growing up under Stalin is riveting, and I really enjoy the details on the day-to-day workings of Soviet courts. I've found that I learn history best by reading memoirs, and Kaminskaya's provides the kind of minutiae that I find fascinating.

Next up: a collection of essays and letters written by Ivan Grozny. I lost this book during a move many years ago and have always missed it. Grozny's proposal of marriage to Elizabeth I of England is priceless.

For the spring: Ilf and Petrov's memoir of their U.S. travels. Hotel Iris by Yoko Ogawa. Any suggestions?

Sakhalin Island and Buccaneer Physicians

In re-reading Chekhov's "Sakhalin Island" late last night I ran across the following interesting passage:

"Иду в избу. Там в горнице сидит старик в красной рубахе, тяжело дышит и кашляет. Я даю ему доверов порошок - полегчало, но он в медицину не верит и говорит, что ему стало легче оттого, что он "отсиделся".

Сижу и думаю: остаться ночевать? Но ведь всю ночь будет кашлять этот дед, пожалуй, есть клопы, да и кто поручится, что завтра вода не разольется еще шире? Нет, уж лучше ехать!"

My translation:

"I went into the house. There was an old man in a red shirt sitting in the good room. He was breathing heavily and coughing. I gave him some доверов порошок (doverov poroshok, "dover powder"). It helped, but he didn't believe in medicine so he said that "sitting it out" was what had helped him.

"I sat there and considered whether or not I should spend the night. I knew the old man would be coughing all night, and I suspected there would be bed bugs. And who could say that the water wouldn't spread further tomorrow? No, I decided to keep going!"

As soon as I read доверов порошок I immediately thought that there must be a Mr. Dover somewhere. And there was:

Dover's Powder, a combination of opium and ipecac, was invented by Thomas Dover in 1732. His biography in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography draws Dover as a colorful figure living in a colorful era. The man got his name in print for reasons ranging from his involvement in "privateering" (read "piracy") and the slave trade to his energetic promotion of his own remedies and his encouragement of patient self-diagnosis. The New York times ran an article about Dover on June 1, 1902 as a retrospective about an obscure figure who invented a remedy that was still very much in use at that time.

Chekhov took his trip to Sakhalin in 1890, and I found incomplete information in a Google Books preview of a 1933 dissertation that Dover's Powder was known in Russia as early as 1812.

The attraction of Dover's Powder at the time of its creation was that the inclusion of a small amount of ipecac (which causes vomiting) would supposedly prevent patients from overdosing.

It would be interesting to know if Chekhov, physician-writer-activist, knew anything about Thomas Dover, physician-pirate-activist.

Hooliganism, Part II

I think I've mentioned before that I love finding answers. I can't quite put my finger on why the word хулиганство has stuck with me for several months now, but it's had my imagination all fired up. How did the word get borrowed into Russian?

Reading offers some answers: Joan Neuberger's Hooliganism: Crime, Culture and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900-1914 gave me a name - Isaac Shklovskii, a journalist who wrote a column on life in England for the paper Russkoe bogatstvo. He wrote about the word hooligan in a colum in 1898, which happens to be the year the OED records as the first use of the word in print in English.

You can find some of Shklovskii's articles online by searching for his penname (Dioneo), but I couldn't tell from the ones I read what kind of sense of humor the man had. I mean, hooligan would have appealed to his Russian ear in a purely phonetic sense, wouldn't it?

Architecture Glossary

Плужников В.И. "Термины Российского Архитектурного Наследия" Москва, "Исскуство" 1995

Pluzhnikov V.I. "Vocabulary of Russia's Architectural Heritage" Moscow, Isskustvo, 1995

I bought this book ages ago - well, ten years ago actually, but it feels like ages. I've only used it a few times to look things up for a translation, but it's fascinating reading and has illustrations for some of the entries. Here's a taste:

ОБЫДЕННАЯ ЦЕРКОВЬ - A church built in one day in gratitude for a military victory or in order to prevent or put an end to some calamity.

ЗАБОРОЛ - A wooden platform above the walls of a fortress from where one could throw logs at the enemy or pour boiling water or hot pitch on him.

ЕЗ (ЭЗ) - Piles or net stretched across the entire bed of a river to stop fish from moving upstream.

At the back of the glossary is a detailed chapter on how to decode the old Russian system of writing dates with letters instead of numbers, which you can sometimes see on very old buildings or works of art.

Summer Reading and Murder

I move a lot, and that means that my huge collection of books is stored in a number of places on two continents. Where is Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf? Good question.


But the flip side of that coin is that sometimes I find things I wasn't even looking for.


For example:

This is the kind of book you can pick up and start reading in the middle, which is what I did as soon as I found it in a box of miscellaneous household goods. On p. 125, Crystal explains that in Anglo-Saxon society, the word murder meant any killing that was "particularly wicked or hateful." It also had to be done in secret to count as murder.

Now if only I could find Beowulf...