Subject
Re: Nabokov on Gogol: A Query (fwd)
Date
Body
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Rodney Welch asks:
>
> How translatable is Nikolai Gogol?
>
> Is "The Overcoat" so bound up in language that certain of
>its merits will always be denied English readers? The
>translations I've read are quite often at odds.
----------------------------------------
>From Jeff Edmunds <jhe@psulias.psu.edu>:
I have a keen personal interest in Mr. WelchÂ’s questions since my
professional life is eerily akin to Akaky Akakievich's (though his tools
are paper and quill whereas mine are keyboard and cathode ray tube: Akaky
is mercilessly, and endlessly, harrassed by his colleagues; I am regularly
tormented and teased by mine. His is always the drudge work, thrust
summarily at him without so much as a “Here’s an interesting task for
you;” mine is the same--the office litany is “let’s make Edmunds do it.”
A.A. wanders absentmindedly through the streets of St. Petersburg,
tripping over cracks in the sidewalk and getting splashed by passing
droshkys; I wander the serpentine paths of this sprawling campus, my
outmoded jackets and tapered trousers softly mocked by baggy-legged co-eds
and malevolent fraternity brothers sporting goatees and shaven heads.)
To respond to Mr. WelchÂ’s questions let me quote D.S. Mirsky, whose
opinions on Russian literature VN generally esteemed:
>From Jeff Edmunds <jhe@psulias.psu.edu>:
“[Gogol’s] imaginative work [in contradistinction to what Mirsky calls his
‘miscellaneous and moralistic writings’] is a very different business. It
is one of the most marvelous, unexpected--in the strictest sense,
original--worlds ever created by an artist of words. If mere creative force
is to be the standard of valuation, Gogol is the greatest of Russian
writers. In this respect he need hardly fear comparison with Shakspere, and
can boldly stand by the side of Rabelais. Neither Pushkin nor Tolstoy
possessed anything like that volcano of imaginative creativeness. [...]
“The main and most persistent characteristic of Gogol’s style is its
verbal expressiveness. He wrote with a view not so much to the acoustic
effect on the ears of the listener as to the sensual effect on the vocal
apparatus of the reciter. This makes his prose intense and saturated. It is
composed of two elements, romanticaly contrasted and romantically
extreme--high-pitched, poetic rhetoric, and grotesque farce. Gogol never
wrote simply--he is always either elaborately rhythmical or quite as
elaborately mimetic. It is not only in his dialogue that the intonations of
spoken speech are reproduced. His prose is never empty. This makes it
hopelessly untranslatable--more untranslatable than any other Russian prose.”
I haven’t reread “The Overcoat” (or The Carrick, if you accept VN’s
preferred rendering) in English in many years, so I cannot voice an opinion
on the quality of extant English versions. I can say, though, that in
addition to the features noted by Mirsky, there are also in Gogol, and
specifically in “The Overcoat,” a plethora of peculiarly Russian objects
and institutions liable to be unfamiliar to the non-Russian reader. Gogol
was of course writing for Russians (more specifically for the St.
Peterbourgeois) and things like the brutally icy sting of that cityÂ’s wind
or the stupendously hierarchical civil service system of 19th-century
Russia would have been taken for granted by him as familiar to his readers.
Looking only at the first (very long) paragraph of the story, I note
several passages liable to be tricky for translators. To mention but two:
“tsvetom litsa chto nazyvaetsia *gemorroidal’nym*” Despite the whimsicality
of GogolÂ’s prose, I doubt any skilled translator would want to use
‘haemorrhoidal’ as an adjective to describe a ‘face’ (litsa). But in the
Russian, ‘gemorroidal’nym’ is echoed a few pages later in the phrase
“priazhku v petlitsu da nazhil *gemorroi* v poiasnitsu” (and the ‘litsu’ of
‘petlitsu’ nicely echoes the earlier ‘litsa,’--though the latter
[buttonhole] is semantically unrelated to the former [face]--and is in turn
again echoed by the final ‘poiasnitsu’ [waist].)
“Familiia chinovnika byla Bashmachkin.” As Gogol goes on to (needlessly for
Russian readers) explain, Bashmachkin comes from the common Russian word
“bashmak” (shoe). This would be, I think, impossible to convey in English
without padding the text, changing poor AkakyÂ’s family name to Shoemaker,
or resorting to an explanatory footnote. The heroÂ’s forename presents
similar difficulties: the very rare, and vaguely comical name “Akaky”
connotes something like ‘long-suffering’ or ‘slow to take offense’ in
Greek, a fact certainly known to some of GogolÂ’s Russian readers. To
English ears, ‘Akaky’ probably sounds no more exotic or silly than the much
more common “Arkady” or “Evgeny.”
There is much in the story, matters of language aside, that I find
beguiling. ItÂ’s important to keep in mind that Gogol was writing in the
early nineteenth century. He was almost exactly a contemporary of Poe
(1809-1852 versus PoeÂ’s 1809-1849). Absolutely no one was writing like
Gogol then, nor has anyone since. He is unique, as much a subject for
cryptozoologists as literary scholars.
-----------------------------------------
EDITORIAL NOTE. See end of texts.
Jeff Edmunds exegesis on Gogol's Akaky Akakievich puts me in mind of a
phrase from, I think, from an early Leonov novel with the phrase "geroi s
gemorroiiami" (hero with hemmorhoids) which works well in English since
the words are cognates in both languages. In Japanese, one would guess,
this sort of stylistic transfer wouldn't work.
Less frivolously, one might look at Nabokov's own book _Nikolai Gogol_ for
comment on Gogol's style.
--------------------------------------------
Rodney Welch asks:
>
> How translatable is Nikolai Gogol?
>
> Is "The Overcoat" so bound up in language that certain of
>its merits will always be denied English readers? The
>translations I've read are quite often at odds.
----------------------------------------
>From Jeff Edmunds <jhe@psulias.psu.edu>:
I have a keen personal interest in Mr. WelchÂ’s questions since my
professional life is eerily akin to Akaky Akakievich's (though his tools
are paper and quill whereas mine are keyboard and cathode ray tube: Akaky
is mercilessly, and endlessly, harrassed by his colleagues; I am regularly
tormented and teased by mine. His is always the drudge work, thrust
summarily at him without so much as a “Here’s an interesting task for
you;” mine is the same--the office litany is “let’s make Edmunds do it.”
A.A. wanders absentmindedly through the streets of St. Petersburg,
tripping over cracks in the sidewalk and getting splashed by passing
droshkys; I wander the serpentine paths of this sprawling campus, my
outmoded jackets and tapered trousers softly mocked by baggy-legged co-eds
and malevolent fraternity brothers sporting goatees and shaven heads.)
To respond to Mr. WelchÂ’s questions let me quote D.S. Mirsky, whose
opinions on Russian literature VN generally esteemed:
>From Jeff Edmunds <jhe@psulias.psu.edu>:
“[Gogol’s] imaginative work [in contradistinction to what Mirsky calls his
‘miscellaneous and moralistic writings’] is a very different business. It
is one of the most marvelous, unexpected--in the strictest sense,
original--worlds ever created by an artist of words. If mere creative force
is to be the standard of valuation, Gogol is the greatest of Russian
writers. In this respect he need hardly fear comparison with Shakspere, and
can boldly stand by the side of Rabelais. Neither Pushkin nor Tolstoy
possessed anything like that volcano of imaginative creativeness. [...]
“The main and most persistent characteristic of Gogol’s style is its
verbal expressiveness. He wrote with a view not so much to the acoustic
effect on the ears of the listener as to the sensual effect on the vocal
apparatus of the reciter. This makes his prose intense and saturated. It is
composed of two elements, romanticaly contrasted and romantically
extreme--high-pitched, poetic rhetoric, and grotesque farce. Gogol never
wrote simply--he is always either elaborately rhythmical or quite as
elaborately mimetic. It is not only in his dialogue that the intonations of
spoken speech are reproduced. His prose is never empty. This makes it
hopelessly untranslatable--more untranslatable than any other Russian prose.”
I haven’t reread “The Overcoat” (or The Carrick, if you accept VN’s
preferred rendering) in English in many years, so I cannot voice an opinion
on the quality of extant English versions. I can say, though, that in
addition to the features noted by Mirsky, there are also in Gogol, and
specifically in “The Overcoat,” a plethora of peculiarly Russian objects
and institutions liable to be unfamiliar to the non-Russian reader. Gogol
was of course writing for Russians (more specifically for the St.
Peterbourgeois) and things like the brutally icy sting of that cityÂ’s wind
or the stupendously hierarchical civil service system of 19th-century
Russia would have been taken for granted by him as familiar to his readers.
Looking only at the first (very long) paragraph of the story, I note
several passages liable to be tricky for translators. To mention but two:
“tsvetom litsa chto nazyvaetsia *gemorroidal’nym*” Despite the whimsicality
of GogolÂ’s prose, I doubt any skilled translator would want to use
‘haemorrhoidal’ as an adjective to describe a ‘face’ (litsa). But in the
Russian, ‘gemorroidal’nym’ is echoed a few pages later in the phrase
“priazhku v petlitsu da nazhil *gemorroi* v poiasnitsu” (and the ‘litsu’ of
‘petlitsu’ nicely echoes the earlier ‘litsa,’--though the latter
[buttonhole] is semantically unrelated to the former [face]--and is in turn
again echoed by the final ‘poiasnitsu’ [waist].)
“Familiia chinovnika byla Bashmachkin.” As Gogol goes on to (needlessly for
Russian readers) explain, Bashmachkin comes from the common Russian word
“bashmak” (shoe). This would be, I think, impossible to convey in English
without padding the text, changing poor AkakyÂ’s family name to Shoemaker,
or resorting to an explanatory footnote. The heroÂ’s forename presents
similar difficulties: the very rare, and vaguely comical name “Akaky”
connotes something like ‘long-suffering’ or ‘slow to take offense’ in
Greek, a fact certainly known to some of GogolÂ’s Russian readers. To
English ears, ‘Akaky’ probably sounds no more exotic or silly than the much
more common “Arkady” or “Evgeny.”
There is much in the story, matters of language aside, that I find
beguiling. ItÂ’s important to keep in mind that Gogol was writing in the
early nineteenth century. He was almost exactly a contemporary of Poe
(1809-1852 versus PoeÂ’s 1809-1849). Absolutely no one was writing like
Gogol then, nor has anyone since. He is unique, as much a subject for
cryptozoologists as literary scholars.
-----------------------------------------
EDITORIAL NOTE. See end of texts.
Jeff Edmunds exegesis on Gogol's Akaky Akakievich puts me in mind of a
phrase from, I think, from an early Leonov novel with the phrase "geroi s
gemorroiiami" (hero with hemmorhoids) which works well in English since
the words are cognates in both languages. In Japanese, one would guess,
this sort of stylistic transfer wouldn't work.
Less frivolously, one might look at Nabokov's own book _Nikolai Gogol_ for
comment on Gogol's style.