In your letter to the List you write (I quote): "The existing Russian translations of the novel ("Ada") are awful, having nothing to do with the original, and my own version remains unpublished."

In my PhD thesis (2004) I compare, among other things, four translations of "Ada" into Russian, yours included. My method allows to express the distance between the original and its translation in one figure, Translation Quotient (TQ), which is the percentage of the original kept in translation (roughly speaking). The results are the following (Table 34 p. 203):

(1) Oksana Kirichenko, A.N. Girivenko, A.V. Dranov. Khronika Odnoy Semyi. Kiev: Atika / Kishinev: Koni-Veles, 1995; TQ=80%

(2) Sergei Ilyin. Ada ili Radosti Strasti. Sankt-Peterburg: Symposium, 1999; TQ= 80%

(3) Oksana Kirichenko. Ada ili Erotiada. Semeynaya Khronika. Moscka: Act / Kharkov: Folio, 2000; TQ=77%

(4) Aleksey Skliarenko. Ada ili Strast’: Semeynaya Khronika. (unpublished). TQ=81%

As you can see, your results do not seem to differ greatly from the "awful, having nothing to do with the original" translations of the other authors. Let me also give you one more citation from my thesis (the same page):

"The results scored by A. Skliarenko surpass those of other tranlators by 1 percent point only, but he used the least amount of exessive tokens, 8. Probably for this reason D. Nabokov’s impression was that “the structure of his sentences and paragraphs is sometimes awkward.”"

As a practical translator and a translation scholar, I know how easily can any translation be denounced. Such a tactic is not the best way of elbowing your way up, I presume.

Good luck to you in finding a translator for your essay. And let's hope that the resulting translation will not be "awful and having nothing to do with the original". Sometimes it happens.

Best regards,

Ljuba Tarvi

Helsinki-Tallinn

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