September 2021
a note on the translation
2 September 2021, around 14.33.
Книгу занимательную вы проглотите слишком скоро, она слишком врежется в вашу память и воображение; перечесть ее уже невозможно. Книга скучная, напротив, читается с расстановкою, с отдохновением — оставляет вам способность позабыться, мечтать; опомнившись, вы опять за нее принимаетесь, перечитываете места, вами пропущенные без внимания etc. Книга скучная представляет более развлечения.
The other day as I was reading Radishchev’s Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow (ca. 1789; translated by Andrew Kahn and Irina Reyfman, 2020), a chance word pulled me from the world of the book and set me to wondering about translation. The word in question appeared in chapter 6 (‘Spasskaya Polest’), perhaps the most famous part of the book, in the midst of a curious interchange the narrator overhears in the dark at a post-station cabin. The speakers turn out to be a treasury clerk and his wife on their way to Novgorod; the clerk is complaining about government corruption and, in particular, about a governor-general who happened to like oysters and went to extraordinary lengths (and immense expense using government funds) to satisfy his cravings.2 The passage that drew my attention ran as follows:
For as long as he had little moolah of his own he refrained from his craving, eating about ten at time, and then only when he happened to be in Petersburg. (p. 28)3
The word that caught my eye, of course, was ‘moolah’. Moolah: First attested (in the OED) in the sense of money, cash, the green stuff (and not a variant spelling of mullah) in 1936 – ‘slang (originally U.S.)’.4 An odd choice for a twenty-first-century translation of an eighteenth-century text. Seems like the sort of word one would use in a translation class to show the instructor – whimsically – that one is paying attention (‘engaging with the original’) and not cribbing from a pony (as Nabokov would put it).
It is impossible for me to have a well-informed opinion about whether or not ‘moolah’ is an appropriate choice in this particular passage. One must account for the fact that it is reported speech, and the translation should (or could) convey a sense of the character’s manner, as well as the narrator’s, as well as the author’s. Other renderings would leave a different impression:
- ‘So long as he had but little money of his own…’ (trans. Leo Wiener, Harvard UP, 1958)
- ‘While he was short on funds…’
- ‘…he didn’t have much cash…’
- ‘…he didn’t have the scratch…’
- ‘…he was skint…’
Any time the topic of translation crops up, it always calls to mind W.H.D. Rouse’s comment on Elizabeth Carter’s translation of Epictetus (from the introduction to the Everyman edition): ‘Mrs. Carter’s own style is not the style of Epictetus; but it is a style, which is more than can be said of most writers at this time. At least she has represented the author’s ideas faithfully and coherently.’5 It is not the most sophisticated philosophy of translation, but it has its appeal. I will never know, of course, whether one of the silly alternatives presented above would have allowed me to eavesdrop on the treasury clerk uninterrupted. The thought of moolah, though, drew me out of the age of Catherine the Great and shoved me into a dimly lit production of ‘Death of a Salesman’ – an unhappy transition – and it was only with difficulty that I was able to overcome my irritation and return to the text.
- ‘You gulp down an entertaining book too soon, it sticks too much in your memory and imagination; it’s impossible to reread. A boring book, though, can be read with detachment, with relief – it allows you to forget yourself a bit, to dream; when you come to, you take up it again and re-read the passages you missed through inattention, etc. A boring book is more fun.’ (Englished with the help of Google translate and advice from PF, which I did not always take.) [↩]
- Modeled, perhaps, on Potemkin. [↩]
- My knowledge of Russian is limited to what one might pick up casually in a post-Soviet republic where Russian is not the primary language (молодец!). For those who are interested, however, the original (cf. old style in the 1790 edition) is: «Пока деньжонок своих мало было, то он от охоты своей воздерживался, едал по десятку, и то когда бывал в Петербурге» (emphasis mine). [↩]
- The entry in the OED made me wonder if ‘moolah’ had an afterlife in Australian English, but not to the extent of wanting to pay to subscribe to check in Macquarie. Cf. Google’s ngram for moolah – the nineteenth century spikes involve mullahs, not money. Perhaps a problematic approach to arguments on language use; my aim is the anecdotal, not the authoritative. [↩]
- Whether a translator should or should not be credited on the cover is a matter on which I have no opinion, save that a name is more likely to send me (as a reader) away than to draw me to a book I would not otherwise read; indeed, some names create an internal struggle which only ends in their favor if there is no other readily available translation of the same title. Take, for instance, the case of Pevear/Volokhonsky’s volume Novels, Tales, Journeys: The Complete Prose of Alexander Pushkin; aside from not, in fact, being ‘complete’ (it does not contain a translation of the text quoted in the epigraph to this post, for example), the only reason I ended up buying it was because it is not easy to find another affordable translation of Pushkin’s Journey to Arzrum. [↩]
high places
22 September 2021, around 10.47.
They have started to appear along the forest path. First there was one, and the precarity was amusing; between one walk and the next the stack usually would have toppled, either gravity or other passers-by objecting. Now they line the path, darkling signposts, and the sight unnerves me – one such is charming, but seven or eight per hundred yards is absurd, an unfortunate insistence on human consequence, the ominous asserted presence of some unseen person, who could, for all I know, still be watching.
It is not that I imagine the path traverses pristine wilderness; the decaying asphalt of the old highway underfoot precludes that notion, and the ill-tended forest too clearly shows human intervention. Perhaps it is the precarious tidiness of these towers that dismays me; I am not certain. They disrupt the landscape, both real and imagined, and they distract me from whatever my thoughts happen to be, jerking me away from trackless flow of footfalls to the measurable building of fragile things in the world. I am not of the age or the humor, at present, to delight in knocking down harmless structures that others have taken the time and ingenuity to build up simply because they irritate me, but the temptation is there.
the foyer inside
27 September 2021, around 7.00.
‘I keep a band of music in my ante-room,’ he said once to her. ‘It has orders to play without stopping; it renders me two excellent services. It keeps the sounds of the world from reaching the private apartments, and it makes the world think that dancing’s going on within.’ It was dance-music indeed that you usually heard when you came within ear-shot of Ralph’s band; the liveliest waltzes seemed to float upon the air. Isabel often found herself irritated by this perpetual fiddling; she would have liked to pass through the ante-room, as her cousin called it, and enter the private apartments. It mattered little that he had assured her they were a very dismal place; she would have been glad to undertake to sweep them and set them in order. It was but half-hospitality to let her remain outside; to punish him for which Isabel administered innumerable taps with the ferule of her straight young wit.
…but whatever else remained the same, the light had changed, and you cannot find the pearly dawn at noonday. The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same. And it would be astonishing to find how soon the change is felt if we had no kindred changes to compare with it. To share lodgings with a brilliant dinner-companion, or to see your favorite politician in the Ministry, may bring about changes quite as rapid: in these cases too we begin by knowing little and believing much, and we sometimes end by inverting the quantities.
Still, such comparisons might mislead, for no man was more incapable of flashy make-believe than Mr. Casaubon: he was as genuine a character as any ruminant animal, and he had not actively assisted in creating any illusions about himself. How was it that in the weeks since her marriage, Dorothea had not distinctly observed but felt with a stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had dreamed of finding in her husband’s mind were replaced by anterooms and winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither? I suppose it was that in courtship everything is regarded as provisional and preliminary, and the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken to guarantee delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will reveal. But the door-sill of marriage once crossed, expectation is concentrated on the present. Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight—that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin.