Illustration by G. O. Valk / Image courtesy of Либрусек
A Russian-speaking colleague of mine once told me that she
had to toss aside an English translation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita because the
character Ivan Bezdomny was presented on the page as “Ivan Homeless,” which
drove her crazy. Bezdomny is his name, after all, and translating it seemed
ridiculous. I agreed with her.
And yet, at precisely the same time, I was translating a
poem by Timur Kibirov that included character names for which I felt compelled
to find English equivalents. Hypocrisy! So how did I justify my choice? Well,
for one thing, there was not just one information-packed name, but many of
them, and for another, they had all been imported from an intertext beloved by
Russian readers: Nikolai Nosov’s Neznaika
books.
The popular children’s series dates to the 1950s, and two
Moscow-based publishers put out English translations of it back in the early
1980s by Margaret Wettlin, an American expatriate who lived for five decades in
the Soviet Union. (Surely, those editions are relics of the Cold War’s cultural
battlefront.) In Wettlin’s translations, the main character Neznaika, whose
name derives from the negated verb “to know” (не знает / не знаю), quite reasonably becomes “Dunno,” although
Wikipedia also offers “Know-Nothing” as an alternative. He and his diminutive
comrades live peaceably in a town sheltered by daisies, dandelions, and
honeysuckle; hence, the first of Nosov’s stories is called—in Wettlin’s
translation—“The Mites of Flower Town” («Коротышки из цветочного города»), but in
my own translation the “mites” become variously “shorties” and
“midgets,” depending on what I needed for the sake of rhyme or alliteration.
Kibirov’s poem approaches Nosov’s flower town at a slant. It
is called “Fairy Tale” («Сказка»),
and it concerns the missionary travels of Sir Reepicheep, a stout-hearted mouse
that the poet has expropriated from C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia. Reepicheep sets about to visit every land in his
jumbled yet familiar (to us) fairytale realm—from Tove Jansson’s Moominvalley
to Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland—in order to spread the good news of Narnia’s
Christ-like leader, the lion Aslan:
A small ship soars atop the swells,
the Narnian rodent at the helm.
The mouse must visit each and every
magic land to tell of Aslan’s
glory.
Rejoice, Moomins! Looking-Glass,
gleam!
O Emerald City, sparkle and shine!
(По синему морю кораблик летит, / Нарнийский грызун у кормила стоит.
// Он должен объехать волшебные страны, / Чтоб всем рассказать о победе Аслана!
// Ликуй, Мумми-долл! Зазеркалье, сияй! / О Град Изумрудный, лучись и сверкай!)
