Kebabs,
a.k.a. shashlyk / Image courtesy of Давай сходим!
For a few years now, the Russian contingent of the American Literary Translators Association has
organized a workshop for translators working in either direction with our two
languages: Russian and English. The discussions at these workshops are
completely fascinating and have become – for me – one of the highlights of the
ALTA conference. In a sense, those discussions amount to a kind of
crowdsourcing, with seasoned and novice translators alike all pitching in their
ideas to solve problems. Anyone can bring a handout with translation
conundrums, and all who attend are welcome to take part in the conversation.
This year, the theme of the workshop – organized by Shelley Fairweather-Vega
and Annie Fisher – was “Only in
Russia,” in which our aim was to “discuss translating concepts, objects, or
practices that are specific to Russophone culture (or that have no easily
identifiable equivalent in Anglophone culture).” My own approach was to
highlight a handful of completely mundane but ubiquitous words and phrases that
I took from poems by Boris Slutsky, Irina Yevsa, and Linor Goralik. Each of my
examples involved objects or concepts, especially from the Soviet period, that
any native speaker of Russian would instantly understand but that translators
might find tricky to capture in English.
For instance, nearly every
Soviet kid strove to become an «октябрёнок», but how
does one import into English the whole context of Young Pioneers and their age
gradations? (My solution: the kid became a “Pioneer Cub,” on the model of the
Boy Scouts and their younger comrades, the Cub Scouts.)
And what to do with a poem
that has its characters playing «в города»? Should
the word game even be mentioned? Won’t it distract from the action of the poem?
(My solution: they played “I Spy” instead.)
But my prime example –
which, in the event, we didn’t have time to discuss – was something I brought
in to demonstrate what I deemed untranslatable: the opening lines of a book by
Timur Kibirov in which he catalogs the characteristic odors of his Soviet life.
How can you translate scent, that most immediately specific, memory-bound, and
place-based of the senses? I thought it couldn't be done. I didn’t even want to
bother trying.
