DENNIS LOY JOHNSON: Reading in Translation

This Week’s Column:

BOY, AM I BEREMENNA, or, HUH?

by Dennis Loy Johnson

25 February 2001 — Even for self–publishing, it started as a small–scale effort.

"Read 'Anna Karenina,'" William Faulkner once said when asked if he had any advice for young writers. What about after that, he was asked. "Read it again," he said.

Well, no time like the present: The book that not just Faulkner but numerous other literary heavyweights consider the greatest novel of them all has just been issued in a new translation, by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Viking, $40), that's getting a lot of attention. The last time this Russian–American duo translated one of the great books of Russian literature, Dostoevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov," critics went nuts. As one put it in the Los Angeles Times, "Readers with no Russian can rest assured that they are in the best of hands."

But can we? If you, like me, are "without Russian," how can you tell if a translation is good or not?

Answer: You can't. However, you can figure out which translation is best for you if you use my Lady With A Pet Dog In The Attic test.

This test is based on my extensive collection of work by my other favorite Russian writer, Anton Chekhov, including numerous different translations of his famous story, "The Lady With a Pet Dog" — or, "The Lady With the Pet Dog," "The Lady With the Toy Dog," "The Lady With the Lapdog," or just "The Lady With the Dog." My favorite is the one in Boris Badanov English: "Lady With Lapdog."

Another of my Chekhov favorites undergoes even more radically different interpretation from collection to collection — appearing, variously, as "The House With an Attic," "The House With the Mezzanine," and "The House With the Mansard." And yes, I'm going to make you look up "mansard," but I'll tell you this: it's a lot different from a mezzanine, and not at all the same as an attic.

So the first thing the Lady With A Pet Dog In The Attic test shows is that, as Vladimir Nabokov said, "the expression 'a literal translation' is more or less nonsense."

And he should know — Nabokov not only wrote in both English and Russian, he was also a translator, and a relentless complainer about other people's bad translations.

For example, he complained of an instance where "innocent words in an English novel such as 'first night' and 'public house' have become in a Russian translation 'nuptial night' and 'a brothel.'"

And he complained about a translation of "Anna Karenina" where Anna tells her boyfriend, "I am beremenna" — the Russian word leaving English readers to wonder, Nabokov notes, "what strange and awful Oriental disease that was; all because the translator thought that 'I am pregnant' might shock some pure soul."

Which brings me to another test I forgot to mention — the Make Sure They Translated All The Words test. If they haven't, it could be because they don't know all the words — often, a bad sign in an interpreter.

Or, as Nabokov's example shows, it could represent the hardest thing of all for monolinguists to evaluate — whether a translator has the contemporary culture of the reader in mind more than the contemporary culture of the writer. The tacky and titillating cover of the new "Anna" might make you worry about that — yes, they put an exploitative picture of a woman on the cover of a proto–feminist masterpiece.

But we can't blame the translators for that. Actually, as we learn in their intro — another helpful tool when choosing between translations — Pevear and Volokhonsky have worked hard to preserve Tolstoy's unique voice, to show how, as Nabokov described it, Tolstoy "rejected false elegancies," even if it makes for some inelegant prose.

But beyond that, it could still come down to the Lady With A Pet Dog In The Attic test — that is, determining what sounds best to you.

Go on, stand in the bookstore and compare different translations of "Anna Karenina" (or, as the last new translation put it, "Anna Karenin"). Compare how they interpret the most famous first sentence in literature: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way," says the newest version.

"All happy families are alike but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion," says another.

Does one inspire your poetic trust more than another? Ultimately, that's the thing you need to enjoy any translated book, and it's the thing that will enable you to learn why Faulkner could suggest something so outrageous as to read an 838–page novel twice.

Last Week’s Column: WHY On a book tour for a poetry anthology, people keep asking our intrepid columnist: Why poetry, why now?

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