Lost in Translation

Way back when, high school, I read Russian for a year. It was intended to be at least a two year stint, but The Powers That Be in the school system decided that our teacher was a latent Communist, and rather than fire the guy, pushed him into administration. And didn't get them a new teacher. Of course. It was the Cold War. Thus avoiding public scrutiny. Oddly, he was just a standard short Jewish American, who had been studying the language with a Russian native speaker, an older woman whose name I've long since forgot. This was Classical High School (no, I'm not making that up), designated as the city's college prep school, meant to rival the tony private schools that proliferated in my corner of New England. The number of languages on offer included Hebrew, of course.

All that by way of introduction to a long-ish piece in today's NYT on a husband and wife team of Russian literature translators. They've been at it for a while, and their output is considerable.

Both the NYT piece and the wiki page discuss their supporters and critics. The NYT piece points out that at least two of their critics don't read or speak Russian. I can't claim to have a perfect memory of the language from all those decades ago, but among other things, the structure is more Latin-esque than Latin itself. As in Latin, nouns have declension, while verbs have conjugation.

Here's the wiki for Latin declension: 6 cases
And for Russian: they go on and on

Yes, it was a bitch to keep it all straight. And, of course, the weird alphabet and script. CCCP isn't see-see-see-pee, y'all know, right?

I imagine that Russian is the toughest sorta, kinda Western language to render into idiomatic English. One point made in the NYT piece is that other translations leave some names merely transliterated into English alphabet; thus Foolsburg here is what the Russian word means in English. Previous translations just left the Russian/English spelling word. Unless you are somewhat fluent in Russian (I'll imagine the Russian word is a borderline swear word), you don't get the joke.

It's likely too extreme to say that translation of fiction is harder than writing fiction in one's own language. But it ain't like falling off a log.