Categories: "Art of translation"

Миллиард

by Don  

Let's say a young Russian student is composing an essay and decides to write “I want to earn a billion dollars” in Russian. He knows the word for million is миллион, so he figures a billion must be биллион, but, being an enterprising student, he quickly double-checks his Russian dictionary. He is pleased to note that the word is exactly as he expected, so he writes «Я хочу заработать биллион долларов.» Alas, he has made an error. Even though you can find the word биллион in Russian dictionaries, people rarely use it. Instead they say миллиард:

Я хочу заработать миллиард долларов. I want to earn a billion dollars.
Бюджет штата Аризона уменьшили на два милларда долларов. The Arizona state budget has been reduced by two billion dollars.
У бывшего премьера Таиланда отобрали полтора миллиарда. (source) One and a half billion dollars have been confiscated from the former Prime Minister of Thailand.
Минобороны потратило пять миллиардов рублей на неудачные испытания беспилотников. (source) The Ministry of Defense has spent five billion rubles on unsuccessful drone aircraft experiments.

If you are translating from English to Russian, you must be quite careful if the source document has the word billion in it. In the US the word billion always means 1,000,000,000. That's not necessarily true in other English-speaking countries. For most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in England the word meant 1,000,000,000,000. (In the States we call that a trillion). The US system is known as the “short scale” system of naming numbers, and the old British version is known as the “long scale.” In 1974 the UK officially switched from long scale to short scale, but there are still people in Britain who use the word the other way. That means that a good translator will take the time to determine the nationality of the author and the country in which the source was published before he finalizes his translation, and even then it's a good idea to see if the source document has some internal confirmation of which meaning is intended.

Не (часть вторая)

by Don  

After two weeks of studying Russian every student knows that не means not. Thus «Я не говорю по-русски» means “I do not speak Russian.” Seems pretty simple. Nonetheless, не can sometimes be misleading because Russians often use не in offers/suggestions to make them softer, more polite, less pushy. Consider the following sentences and translations:

Не хочешь пойти в кино? Would you like to go to the movies?
Не хочешь чая? Would you like some tea?
Не будем смотреть телевизор? Shall we watch TV?
Не передашь мне журнал? Could you hand me the magazine?

Notice that none of the English translations have ‘not’ in them. The не in the Russian sentence simply makes the request a bit more polite, and therefore the best translation of such sentences often contains could or would in them.

Notice that a beginner might be tempted to translate «Не хочешь чая?» as “Don't you want some tea?” That would be a bad translation. When an English speaker asks “Don't you want some tea?”, he is asking because he is surprised that the other person doesn't seem to want tea.

«Последний тост» Анны Ахматовой

by Don  

In June I came across a poem by Anna Akhmatova that was new to me. I disliked the translation that was presented with it, so I decided to make a new one. To go about the process, I began with a word for word gloss next to the original:

Анна Ахматова
Последний тост

Anna Akhmatova
Last toast

Я пью за разорённый дом,
За злую жизнь мою,
За одиночество вдвоём,
И за тебя я пью,-

I drink to the destroyed home
To my cruel life
To loneliness two-together
And to you I drink

За ложь меня предавших губ,
За мёртвый холод глаз,
За то, что мир жесток и груб,
За то, что Бог не спас.

To the lie of lips that betrayed me
To the dead cold of eyes
To the fact that that world is harsh and crude
To the fact that God did not rescue
27 июня 1934, Шереметьевский Дом June 27, 1934
Sheremetev Palace

I wanted my final translation to reflect the original rhyme scheme, but I couldn't come up with any lines with “did not rescue” or “did not save” that flowed in neat iambs, so I eliminated the “not” approach and rephrased it in the positive with “God let this be.” With that established, I could then work backwards so that all the previous lines would lead up to it. Here's what I came up with:

The Last Toast

Here's to our family, now in shatters
And here's to all my cruel days
The loneliness of two in tatters
And cheers to you and all your ways

Here's to the lips that fin'lly cheated
To cold dead eyes that cannot see
A world where justice is not meted
And cheers to God that let this be

June 27, 1934
Sheremetev Palace

What can we say about this translation? It captures the bitterness and despondency which are the essence of the original. That by itself makes it a decent translation. It flows decently in English. That makes it a good translation. It captures the irony of each line of the toast, and it approximates the ABAB rhyme scheme of the original. That combination of successes makes it a very good translation.


Notes:

  • I am not an Akhmatova scholar and have never properly researched her life, so it is entirely possible that my translation misses autobiographical references from the original.
  • Akhmatova lived in an apartment in the garden wing of Sheremetev Palace on the Fontanka embankment from the mid 1920s till 1952. (Wikipedia)
  • If you are interested in poetic translation as a topic, you can see some variations I played with here.
  • The third line means “to the loneliness of two together.” It is so concisely put in Russian that I don't know of any way to capture its punchiness in English. The word одиночество contains the root один one, and “two together” contains the stem дв- ‘two,’ and the contrast between them is heart-rendingly obvious in Russian. (The English word ‘lonely’ also comes from a phrase that used to mean “all one,” but we no longer feel the ‘one’ part of the word as clearly as the Russians understand один in одиночество.) The only option is to find some phrase in English that gathers heartbreak neatly. “In tatters” is my best attempt.
  • Line 7 is the one most open to criticism. It is only loosely connected with the original in that a world without justice is ipso facto a cruel world. Doubtless I will be accused of отсебятина. If anyone can come up with a line to replace it, making whatever other adjustments are necessary for the poem to work, I'd love to see it.
  • The word “cheated” in line 5 will be first interpreted by the English reader as meaning spousal cheating. If upon study it turns out that it was betrayal that had nothing to do with the marital relationship, then the line needs to be rewritten. That of course means the rhyme in line 7 will most likely have to change as well.
  • Feel free to add your own translation in the comment section.

«Дело было в январе» Агнии Барто

by Don  

Translation is a complex art. You might want a translation to:

  • clearly indicate the words and grammatical structures of the original. This kind of translation is useful for people who have some skill in the original language and are trying to fine-tune their language skills.
  • clearly indicate the informational content of the original without overly worrying about mimicking the grammatical structure of the original. This kind of translation is suitable for technical documents and newspaper and magazine articles.
  • reinterpret the original for a specific target audience in such a way as to catch its emotional content, which is the approach you want to use for poetic translations.

This topic came to mind recently when I ran across a blog entry from the Director of the Vladimir Bakanov School of Translation, in which he cited a poem by Агния Барто, a Russian author of children's poetry whom I had never read before. Judging from this first example, she was talented. I decided to try to produce a translation of the poem for American children. Before I show that translation, I'll adduce the poem along with a fairly close word-for-word translation. And then I'll give you a more poetic interpretation.

Russian original Word-for-word translation
Дело было в январе,
Стояла ёлка на горе,
А возле этой ёлки
Бродили злые волки.
The incident was in January
A fir-tree stood on a hill
And near this tree
Evil wolves wandered
Вот как-то раз, ночной порой,
Когда в лесу так тихо,
Встречают волка под горой
Зайчата и зайчиха.
So once аt night
When in the forest it was so quiet,
A rabbit and her bunny kids
Come across a wolf at the bottom of the hill.
Кому охота в Новый год
Попасться в лапы волку!
Зайчата бросились вперёд
И прыгнули на ёлку.
Who would want for the New Year
To end up in the paws of a wolf!
The bunnies rushed forward
And jumped into the fir.
Они прижали ушки,
Повисли, как игрушки.
The pressed their ears down
And hung there like toys.
Десять маленьких зайчат
Висят на ёлке и молчат.
Обманули волка.
Дело было в январе, —
Подумал он, что на горе
Украшенная ёлка.
Ten little bunnies
Hang on the tree and are quiet.
They tricked the wolf.
The incident was in January.
The wolf thought that on the hill
Was a decorated christmas tree.

When you reinterpret a poem, you hope to first of all produce the overall meaning of the original. That's a minimum. Then you attempt to reproduce the emotion of the original, which is tricky because conflicting cultural values may mean that what's emotionally important in the source culture is not as important (or worse yet, emotionally important in a different way) in the target culture. If you can do those two things, then you have a good a translation. And if you can throw in some relatively non-essential aspects like rhyme scheme or rhythm in addition to those other two, then you have a very good translation.

My translation below has one important modification: I have replaced the New Year imagery with Christmas imagery since the latter is the more important winter holiday for most Americans. The poem also reproduces the rhyme scheme of the original, though not the rhythmic structure. Feel free to comment on the translation's inadequacies.


Months long before the springtime thaw
A pine stood 'neath the winter's gray.
Nearby within a snowy draw
The hungry wolves would prowl for prey.

One winter's night when all was calm,
When no one would expect it least,
Ten bunnies and their bunny mom
Perchanced across one hungry beast.

In the month of Santa Claus
No hare would ever care to be
Consumed by such ferocious jaws,
So they jumped into that lone pine tree.

Those bunnies who had no defense
Just hung like Christmas ornaments.

Ten bunnies hung without a word
Where only snowflakes could be heard.
They tricked the wolf so thoroughly,
Quite long before the springtime thaw,
The only thing he thought he saw
Was a decorated Christmas tree.

(Translation © 2008 Donald E. Livingston, Jr.)

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