The Little Golden Calf:A Letter from the Translator

Here's a story for you. Well, two, actually.

Not long ago, I read and reviewed a classic comic novel of the Soviet Union by Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov. As I indicated in my video for The Collagist, I was delighted by this clever caper following Ostap Bender--who I've come to learn is an enormously popular figure in Russia still today. I was impressed to find the humor traveling so easily through time, space, and translation to leave me giggling from my armchair here in Detroit. At the same time, there's enough intelligence and insight in the novel, and enough political acumen, to give it an edge.

I read the translation by Konstanin Gourevich and Helen Anderson, published by Open Letter Books. It's a smooth and appealing edition, though as I noted in my review, I found myself wishing for more context--especially in how the translators handled wordplay--and more consistency in how they managed endnotes.

In a curious twist, Ilf and Petrov's novel saw its first complete and fair-minded translation into English in 2010 not only by one turn, but by two. At the exact same time that Open Letter published The Golden Calf, Russian Life published its own version of the novel--titling it The Little Golden Calf, and translated by Anne O. Fisher.

Upon reading some of what I'd said about this book -- including my fascination in how the different translation projects proceeded -- Fisher reached out and we have exchanged many emails about her experience with the work. What she had to say was interesting enough that I asked her permission to share it here on Isak.

I should also note that, having had the chance to look at Fisher's version, the translator's exuberance for the novel is apparent. She brings an academic's point of view to the text -- she did her Ph.D dissertation at the University of Michigan on the Ostap Bender novels -- and the much heftier Russian Life edition of the novel brims with notes, appendices, forwards, and prefaces. There's that context I was looking for, which is pleasing, if a bit overwhelming. Fisher is now working on a translation of The Twelve Chairs, the first Bender novel, and is working with Alexandra Ilf on a biography of Ilya Ilf, as well as a translation of the author's diaries.

And now, let's back off so the translator can speak for herself.

Dear Anna,

Thank you for the opportunity to expand on our conversation. I wanted to explain why my translation has so many paratexts. My PhD dissertation explored the reading and publishing history of the Bender novels and so it was partly a matter of convenience (I had all that information ready to hand for my translator’s foreword!). There are six sections in my foreword, dealing with Bender’s popularity in Russian culture, the phenomenon of dual authorship, the official reception of the novels, the problems Bender posed for official criticism, the two previous translations of the novel (about which I had quite a lot to say), and the planned, but never written, third novel about Ostap Bender. As a sort of crusader for Ilf and Petrov, I wanted to counteract what I have seen as rampant underappreciation of Ilf and Petrov by the Anglophone world precisely because of spotty translations and not enough context. For decades, most English-language scholarship of Soviet-era literature gave Ilf and Petrov a paragraph, if that, and essentially dismissed them as “important for Russians, sharp satirists, but not really lasting, important literature.” Given this attitude, I couldn't resist the opportunity to educate my readers. I also thought that the more Anglophone readers know about the humor of the novels (and the popularity of this humor with its native Russophone audience), the better equipped they will be to appreciate this humor. That was why I included the explanation of character names and the list of krylatye frazy or “winged phrases” that have entered the Russian lexicon. And I am deeply indebted to Alexandra Ilf, who humorously refers to herself as “Ilf and Petrov’s daughter,” for all her help with my research and translating over the years, so I was very touched when she was interested in providing an introduction (without any remuneration). It goes without saying that readers don’t have to read any of these paratexts to appreciate the novel, but for those who want to appreciate the novel as a cultural phenomenon, not just as a great read, there it is.

Having said that, though, I do think that extensive footnotes are essential for the contemporary reader. This is not only because both Bender novels (the first is called The Twelve Chairs) have been called "encyclopedias of Soviet life," and are indeed such perfect catalogues of their time that, today, even Russophone readers need explanation of some terms. This is also so that readers of the translation can catch all the satire and genre-bending that's going on. Bender fluidly and completely flagrantly mixes and matches jargon from various levels of society: criminal jargon, legalese, bureaucratic language - which, as you saw from the subplot devoted to the Herculeans, was its own special bane of Soviet existence, and one that Ilf and Petrov satirized to a T - political slogans, quotes from the classics that were drilled into every schoolchild's head and represent a shared cultural resource, even special terms from the worlds of opera (of which Petrov was a connoisseur) and finances (which Ilf knew all too well from his days as an accountant). It is Bender’s devil-may-care attitude, his refusal to respect the boundaries between social worlds, that makes him so attractive. Bender has a fluency in society, an ability to manipulate the rules of society to his own end, that most Soviet and post-Soviet readers could only dream of, but the English-speaking reader won't be able to appreciate this unless the translation adequately conveys the appropriate jarring sensation (when a quote is purposefully misquoted or ironically altered) and comedic effect of these virtuoso manipulations.

Every translator, I think, has an imaginary “ideal reader” they are translating for. My ideal reader was, narcissistically enough, me: someone who is coming at this culture from the outside, but who still wants to get every joke, every reference, every nuance, every pun. I will go against some Russophone fans of Ilf and Petrov and say that I think it is quite possible for a non-Russophone reader to understand all of these; but I do not think it is possible for one translation to capture all of these. The only translation that could do that would be the Platonic form of a translation, which is nothing I’m capable of producing! Overall, I wanted to recreate the reading experience of the original reader, so that every time the original reader chuckled about a pun, expletive, or “refashioned” quotation, my reader would too, but the problem of recognition made this very difficult. This problem is very characteristic of Ilf and Petrov. The thing is that Ilf and Petrov’s popularity with readers was, and is, based in part on how much their readers recognized in the Bender books: popular songs, slogans, fashions in dress, red tape, polar expeditions, offbeat artistic innovations, names of contemporary figures in sports, politics, and the arts, and so on and so forth. All these were things that Ilf and Petrov’s readers would have instantly recognized, and so they would instantly get the joke. But contemporary Anglophone readers do not recognize these phenomena, and it is a very tricky thing to try to “fabricate” the sensation of recognition. This is probably one of the biggest things I struggled with.

Stubbornness is one of the things that helped me most in translating Ilf and Petrov; there were dozens, if not hundreds, of places where my first reaction was, "well, that will be hard to translate,” or “that’s just one little joke, it doesn’t matter” or “that will be too clunky if I translate it to get the pun as well as the surface meaning,” but I always went past this initial reaction and figured out at least some approximation of the original effect. Every joke, every word, every nuance is important! One example that comes to mind is when Vasisualy Lokhankin is being whipped in chapter 13. There is a wonderful word-play there where the Chamberlain says, in a literal translation from the Russian, "I’ll give him some switches on his fillets" (nadaiu emu lozanov po fileinym chastyam), in other words, “I’ll whip him on his buttocks.” Then Bender interrupts, and so the next sentence literally reads something like “But Lokhankin didn’t have to know the chamberlain’s switch” (no Lokhankinu ne prishlos’ otvedat’ kamergerskoi lozy). But the main thing about this scene is that there is a very subtle pun going on with lozan and loza, the two words for “switch” in the two sentences (lozan and loza look like lozanov and lozy, respectively, when they’re used in sentences because of the grammatical endings, but don’t let that throw you off). The second word, “loza,” does mean “switch,” but it also means “vine, grapevine,” and in the Bible it is commonly used to refer to Jesus, “the vine,” or to wine. So in the second sentence, there is an additional layer of meaning for the word “switch,” and it actually reads something like "But Lokhankin didn't have to know the chamberlain's switch/taste the chamberlain’s grape." There are many Biblical references in The Little Golden Calf (including the title) and I wanted to translate this particular reference in a way that at least tried to keep some echo of this “switch/vine/wine” pun - hence my "But Lokhankin was spared from savoring the chamberlain's special vintage." I should also say that the idea of “knowing” (otvedat’) the instrument of punishment famously shows up in Bulgakov, too, when the dog Sharikov remembers being whipped by some store owners: “The brothers gave the dog a taste of insulated wire” (Tam, u brat’ev, pes otvedal izolirovannoi provolokoi). I really like Mirra Ginsburg’s rendering here, that uses “taste” instead of “know,” and I think it probably influenced my own decision on how to translate this part.

Here is an example of a place where I had to come up with an English-language equivalent that was both “recognizable” (ie. made sense without further explanation) and loyal to the original: the typewriter with the Turkish accent that Balaganov buys at the flea market in chapter 15. In the original, the typewriter is missing the soft vowel “ye,” so the hard vowel “eh” has to be substituted everywhere instead, and apparently this predilection for the hard “eh” sounds Turkish to the Russian ear. So I experimented with different vowel and consonant combinations, keeping in mind that I had to choose a fairly common letter to be the missing one, and that it had to be something whose replacement would sound Turkish in English, too, since the Turkish theme is important to the novel as a whole: Bender is, after all, "the son of a Turkish subject." (As a side note: in the bibliography, I list an excellent article by Charles Sabatos on Bender’s Turkishness. My translation was the first Charles had heard of the Turkish typewriter, since neither of the previous translations preserved it.) I couldn’t come up with anything as close as the hard and soft versions of the same vowel, since the English alphabet doesn’t really have that, but I did come up with substituting “e” for the missing “a,” which gave the necessary “Turkish” sound (and made at least some sense physiologically, for what it’s worth, since the mouth and lip positions for “a” and “e” are closer together than for other English vowels).

I’ll give one last challenge of this translation. This is the problem of knowing when the English translation is right. Ilf and Petrov belonged to that exciting generation that came of age in 1917, and so they both had a truly astonishing breadth of life experience. They were both expert at several different things and had held a number of different jobs, from police detective (Petrov) to worker at a hand-grenade factory (Ilf). And I think that the earlier part of the past century was generally a time when a lot more people were a lot more in touch with how things were built, made, put together, from cars to newspapers to steamships. So all of this means that I had to do a lot of cross-checking of my English to make sure that I was using the correct terminology. For example, it took me a lot of work to track down the correct translation of the smell Bender smells outside the film studio in chapter 24. In the Russian, it’s “essence of pear” (grushevaia essentsiia). I translated this literally - why not? - but as I was editing this it bothered me that it made no sense. Why would a film studio smell like pears? And why should this smell be exciting? Yury Shcheglov’s marvelous commentaries filled me in on what the word meant, but there was no corresponding mention of “pear essence” or “essence of pear” in English sources that I could find. In situations like this, translation requires arduous back-and-forth cross-checking between both languages. Finally I was able to track down some cinema textbook on Google Books that referenced banana oil, amyl acetate, and its characteristic smell, explaining that they are associated with the film industry since amyl acetate is used in the manufacture of film. Apparently it smells like pears to Russians, and bananas to us. (I learned later that “banana oil” is also a euphemism for “bullshit,” coined by the cartoonist Milt Gross in the 1920s-1930s, which was for a time quite popular and enjoyed wide usage by Jackie Gleason, P. G. Wodehouse, and others, and had a momentary, nonsensical panic attack that Ilf and Petrov were having one over on me!)

Translation is a rewarding experience, if a frustrating one, since there are always “coulda-woulda” moments when you go back and find things that you would now translate differently. But what’s most satisfying for me is the thought that I have made the cultural phenomenon that is Ilf and Petrov more accessible for Anglophone readers. In the first Bender novel, The Twelve Chairs, Bender is famously looking for “the key to a room full of money.” But Bender himself is a key, a key to understanding Russian (and Soviet Russian, and post-Soviet Russian) culture. I hope that my translation will help readers unlock its treasures for themselves, and draw them to reading the other great prose masters of the day, from Bulgakov and Olesha to Babel and Zoshchenko to less well-known figures such as (dramatist) Nikolai Erdman and, excitingly, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky, now available in marvelous translations by Joanne Turnbull and Nikolai Formozov.

All the best,

Annie

Comments

[freeverse21]

very interesting. thanks for sharing!

[Alexander Anichkin]

just to say that a lot of references in The Little Golden Calf are lost to Russians too, not only to anglophone readers. And I don't think it's the references that make the book funny, but the characters and the situations. I do hope the humour goes well in the land of Madoffs, it should.

Still, a mighty good job to translate it - with references and indexes. And thanks for this post.

[Anne O. Fisher]

Just found out a few months ago that lozan and loza aren't related, and so they don't make the pun I thought they did. Sigh... but at least I can set the record straight here!