Good evening and welcome to this week's Big Tent Live event.
Part of our live online event series, the University of Oxford itself, part of the humanities cultural programme.
One of the founding stones for the future, Stephen A. Schwartzmann Centre for the Humanities.
My name's Wes Williams and I'm the director of Torch, the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities.
I'm also professor of French Basters and Edmund Hall.
We had Torch bringing you this event programme online and we hope that you're safe and well during this time.
Everyone is welcome in our big tent as we explore big ideas together.
Tonight, we bring you translation and retranslation priorities, discoveries,
pleasures in which two leading translators from Russian all of a ready and Sasha Dugdale will discuss their work.
If you would like to put forward any questions to our speakers during the event tonight.
Please put them in the comments box in the YouTube chat below.
We encourage you to submit these as early as you can so that we have time to answer as many as we can at the Q and A,
which will follow at the end of their discussion. They will be joined by our chair for tonight's event, and I'm delighted.
It's an honour to host and welcome Professor Katriona Kelly. Well, just wait while she comes on screen.
Hello, Catriona's close with a close colleague at New Colet.
Born and brought up in Russian sorry, in London, she studied Russian there and at the University of Varnish in what was then the USSR.
She has taught at CS in London as well as here in Oxford and has written more books that you could shake a whole sheaf of sticks.
My research has done much to expand the field of Russian literature and Russian cultural history more broadly encompassing modernism,
gender history, the history of childhood, national identity, the recent history of cities, Leningrad and Petersburg in particular,
and the institutional and production history of Russian and Soviet cinema.
She's also published extensively on the preservation of architectural heritage and more germane to our discussion today.
Katrina has worked on oral history and published literary translations, particularly of poetry.
She's been a member of Jewry's for literary film, book and translation projects.
So it's hard to think of anyone better to chair this session and to introduce our two Prize-Winning translator scholars in turn.
Welcome to you all and thank you again for joining us this evening. I'm going to sit back and listen and return.
You just returned just at the end to say goodbye. Thank you, Katrina.
Over to you.
Thank you very much, West, for that extremely generous introduction, and before I introduce in more detail the two participants in the dialogue,
I would like to thank very much everyone that torch as well, as well as Liz and Meyer for their tremendous amount of help and their fantastic welcome.
They've given to us for this event. I'd also like to thank the Isla Vista Fund of the Faculty of Mediaeval and modern languages
at the University of Oxford that's helped with some find that much sponsorship for the event.
But I'll now turn to introducing festival Sasha Dugdale. So you'll see her on on screen in a second.
And Sasha is a writer in residence at St John's College, Cambridge,
and she has a extremely distinguished career as a publishing poet and a Prize-Winning poet also.
So recent prises include the forward Prise for Best Single poem in 2016 and Chumbley Award.
And as many of you will know, she was also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prise this year with some fantastic achievement.
And alongside that, she's translated a real whole list of things,
including various Russian dramatists to the Royal Court and a list of really important poets of the present day.
Tatiana Spino, for example, for Blood Acts Books, and she has recently completed a collection by Merriest Upon the Fur,
The War of the Beasts and the Animals, which will be out also from Blood Acts, I gather, later this year.
So a fantastically talented and Wide-Ranging translator.
And we are lucky to have an equally talented and wide ranging translator only of prose in Dr.
Oliver Reddy, who is I'm just gonna wait till he appears on screen as well, which will happen in a few seconds.
And Oliver is the research fellow in Russian literature and culture at some Antony's College Oxford.
And so he's a specialist in Russian literature who's published on The History of Folly,
the ways that writers have represented fully in recent Russian writing, a fantastically interesting study.
But he's also very widely noted as translator, including for a retranslation of Dusty Excuse, Crime and Punishment, which came out a few years ago.
And just to not sparing all of his blushes to quote from A.N. Wilson,
who is not notably kind and friendly critic, but who described this as a genuine event.
This translation and a truly great translation of this English version really is better, I think not than the original.
But the one suit that had come before was what was intended. And Olive was also translated for De Mosharraf, which had an equally approving review.
I mean, indeed,
a very enthusiastic review from racial Polonsky as his rendering of the clarity and directness of Sharaf's prose was was absolutely wonderful.
So we have to first rate translators.
The final thing was I'm going to say before handing over to them is simply to beat the drum of books with modern languages and to
say that both Sasha and Oliver are actually studied Russian at Oxford and even attended some of my own translation workshops here.
And of course, the translation, which is generally one of the main ways of teaching and teaching modern languages here.
It's absolutely great to see people who have continued with this,
and it's long since we could claim any purchase a toll on their achievements, but at least kind of getting them enthusiastic to begin with.
I think we possibly can claim some small part of that.
So with that, I shall hand over to Sasha and Oliver for what I'm sure will be an absolutely fascinating conversation.
Please don't forget to keep the questions coming. We'll take about ten minutes or so at the end.
To deal with those questions. So please. Over to you. Thank you.
Thank you very much. It turned out that was a very warm introduction for both of us.
We'll try to live up to them. And thank you for coming up and speaking to Katrina.
Thank you for coming up. This idea in the first place. It couldn't have been better timed because I'd just been reading Sasha's wonderful collection,
which is just mentioned, Defamations and Washerwomen that comes through in the picture.
It's incredibly struck by the daring and bold collection of poetry that this is.
I don't know whether we'll be able to get onto the to where translation and poetry cross in your work session.
I hope you will at some point. But we'll stick to translation as as our main focus.
And Sasha and I have known each other for folks for some time. We both, as Professor Kelly would, saying we both studied here in Oxford.
We then we're in Moscow at the same time as Sasha was at the British Council
when it was flourishing in Moscow and she was driving its cultural programme.
I was at the Moscow Times, not very far away, also involved in Moscow's cultural life.
In fact, we both had very close friendships in the same household in Moscow of a pair of dramatists who sadly died a few years ago.
You know, I mean, we've got a few Sasha in particular was very close to and which I think was quite crucial to your translation career,
because you then became heavily involved in the documentary theatre programme in Russia and translated a lot of contemporary drama.
So in a way, we've moved along some parallel paths, a great deal in common in our careers.
But before we get on to perhaps the similarities, I thought maybe we could start by the difference.
I mean, my my my focus, as has been said, has always been prose, not necessarily intentionally, but it seems that that's how it's panned out.
And in fact, a very particular tradition of Russian prose, beginning parts with Gogol going onto the stage of escape.
And those writers, descendants and in contemporary writing, which is perhaps my main focus,
I've always wanted, as you have to, to bring new names into into English.
Whereas you, Sasha, really worked across a broad range of genres, poetry, drama, fiction, non-fiction as well, of course, as your poetry.
So perhaps begin by just asking you to talk about what it's like to to to move between those different genres as a translator.
And how distinct in your mind all those activities,
how different other priorities that you have in your mind when you return from one genre to another?
Thanks, Oliver. What a great question.
I I've always, until quite recently, I've been a translator of poetry and drama, and both of those are really voiced mediums, at least in my mind.
They are. They come from. They both have roots. And so they're all about shaping, shaping sound.
And they seem very similar practises to me.
I've always been really scared of prose and prose translation. And the amount of scrupulous work that goes into it.
So taking on a memory memory was quite frightening to me.
But when quite recently was a few years ago now. I read your translation of Crime and Punishment to my son as a book at bedtime.
I don't think it's a very suitable book at bedtime, but it seemed to work for him.
But I realised when I was reading it that it was actually also a work of voice.
I think that's the first time when I, I realised that translating Russian prose could also be about shape and voice.
And and this sort of aural qualities of of literary work.
So, in fact, maybe the difference isn't so, so huge, but that's certainly how I've always seen it,
that it's that the mediums that I've always practised have been to do with speaking aloud.
And in fact, that's how I translate. I took aloud to myself, which rules out working in any library or cafe.
I completely agree with what you say about voice and morality in Russian prose as being just as important as in the other genres.
And probably that's one of the things that was thrown me to Russian literature.
That's it's always seems to be a literature intention with the very idea of literature, of books against bookishness.
In a way, I'm trying to trying to preserve the vividness of the spoken voice.
Well, I mean, you have all of these. Well, just unreliable narrators, but I'm often crazy narrators of various kinds.
We'll get onto Goggle later. But just flipping around, what would you say to those who, like me, might be nervous of translating poetry?
Who who are you? Stick in one genre and avoid, avoid, avoid poetry.
Do do do. Do you see. Do you see your own work as a poet in English as a sort of crucial qualification to translate Russian Russian poetry?
I don't think I do. On balance, I think it's quite often said that you have to be a poet to translate poetry.
But I don't think you have to be a published poet or perhaps even a poet who writes poetry.
I think the act of translating poetry makes you a poet.
So it's that there are certain there are certainly qualities that you bring to translation of poetry, which are very particular.
But then, no, I don't think that you have to to to be published or think of yourself as a poet in order to bring those qualities,
I suppose, because you had a long and very.
Revolutionary stint as editor at Moscow and modern poetry and translations and translations just from Russia, but from all over the world.
For many countries, his poetry had not been translated before into English,
but with the kind of conversations that you would have with translators of poetry, he was submitting poems to empty modern poetry in translation.
What kind of things would you end up discussing when it came to evaluate evaluated the translation of Persian?
Well, it's a really interesting thing because every poem brings its own wave.
I'm sorry, my dog is just outside. Every poem is its own.
Well, I think it's been like Wordsworth said, you know, it creates its own taste to every poet,
creates the landscape in which they go to be appreciated.
And I think that's true of translation, particularly from languages like Russian, where there isn't maybe as much as we'd like.
Particularly contemporary work in translation. So the translation is also thinking about as they translate the poem,
about how to create a future for the translation in an English language publication of English language, tradition and culture.
And I think that's something that well, I know that we're going to come on to talk about.
But it's something that occupies you a great deal as well. You know how to create that.
The atmosphere ready for for the work that you're translating.
You know the answer, please tell me. It's I mean, I wish we could we could indeed turn up because we know the way we were both engaged at the moment.
I'm quite similar tasks of presenting and bringing into English a long work of prose in your case.
This is the work you just mentioned. People may not be aware of.
Sorry if I hold it up. But this is in memory of memory by merriest apologiser a poet.
She's famous as a parrot, in particular the ballad form.
This is a 500 page work of shall we call it an essay or in any case, non-fiction dealing in the area of family history.
But above all, as the title in memory of memory suggests, interrogating what's the contemporary fascination with memory says about us?
What are its. Dangers, perhaps, in terms of how, how, how, how it takes us away from the present.
Well, you can tell me more about that. But in any case, this is a going to be undoubtedly one of the main publications of the year.
From from Russian into English, coming out with Fitzcarraldo, who recently had such amazing success with women from the Slavic world.
God took us to Cannes, Alexievich. And now Marie is the kind of I'm sure.
And I've been working on continuing with my projects of translating the novelist of Lady Machado's who died sadly in 2018.
You would have been 69 next next month. So you died quite young.
Again, the novelist dealing with the past. He was a historian before he became a novelist.
He was also a poet before he became a novelist. It's very important, often forgotten about him.
But in both cases,
authors who are coming from a very specific cultural context and present all sorts of challenges to us to bring them over into English.
But the other big similarity here is that we both knew our authors well.
You know, your author is the kind of you're in touch with their looks. I became very close to Churov in his in his last year.
So I thought perhaps we could talk about this question of what is gained by developing a close relationship,
friendship, collaboration with the author you're working on.
I was quite struck, Sasha, in your translator's note, back in memory of memory.
You say. Merriest opponents met as the panel was in memory of memory is a living text and
the English translation has been changed and modified from the original Russian.
In collaboration with the author. That sounds fascinating.
Can you tell it? It took us through that. That's what was.
In what way did it change through your collaboration with the author?
I've just been reading this week the sheriff novel that you've just translated,
and in fact, there are so many parallels in the occupations translating these books.
Neither neither kind of cool little novelettes or could have the whole world.
They're both world creators, I think.
And so in order to translate you, you have to enter into this world, in effect, this imaginative world, and begin translating.
And when reached upon me, asked me if I would translate memory of memory, I, I was I have to say, I was really anxious.
I didn't know whether I should take it on. I was quite frightened. It's such a huge book.
It's such a huge world and it's such a complex book that I had all sorts of misgivings.
And I'm very good friends with Maria. And I will talk about that in a minute.
But I was very tempted to say no.
And then I think I took it on pot in a spirit of friendship because I wanted to, I suppose, make that act of friendship for the former.
But also, I took it on because there's a sort of certain amount of serendipity, I think, in translation.
And you think it's it's almost like, you know, which boat shall I guess on and where will it take me?
And I thought, well, I know if I get on this boat, it will take me somewhere I never been and I will get a lot out of being on the boat.
And so I took it on in that spirit. But it was a kind of terrifying it novel to translate.
And Richard does call it a novel, although, you know, for many people it would be, I think, seen as non-fiction.
It's actually a novel of her family within the context of of Soviet and Russian history.
It was incredibly important being friends of Maria and being able to talk to her about the book.
We spent we spent a long time. I've known Maria for many years,
and we spent a long time having those Russian conversations in the kitchen where you talk for hours and hours about all sorts of things.
I mean, you solve all the problems the world. And so bringing that that I had her voice in my head.
And that's always been very useful for translating her poetry, because I keep hearing her when I read the Russian that it was incredibly useful for
for a memory of memory because I just it felt like a long conversation in her kitchen.
So I just kept thinking that every time I I was at every point when I started to struggle with the prose,
I just started thinking, this is something Maria might have said.
And if I hadn't understood it, she would have explained it and I could have entered into a conversation with her about it.
So that's the sort of the kind of the way I took on the translating.
And then there were there were all sorts of fantastic moments.
Marie is a poet and her prose is incredibly poetic.
And she said when I started translating that, it was up to me to recreate it as poetry or poetic prose in English.
And I took her at her word and I tried very carefully to to make it poetic prose in English as far as I was able.
And that's difficult because the one there's a sort of, I don't know,
a spectrum of possibilities that the one and there's a very free translation at the other end.
You're very you've got the Russian and you're trying very hard to convey what the Russian says.
And Emrys case, often very theoretical arguments, arguments about memory,
about the visual visual arts and the way that perception and memory are interrelated.
And those were exceptionally hard to translate and keep poetic on that because you're sort of trying to deal with
theoretical arguments and keep them whole and keep them understandable and at the same time make them interesting,
make them lively and and also reproduce the Russian.
So that was quite that. That sort of spectrum and approach to translation was really hard.
So Maurice and we we knew from the start that it was going to be a translation for an English language audience.
And we had already had the book translated into German and the German issue had been edited quite heavily.
So, for example, the Charlotte Solomon chapter in Memory of Memory, which is quite detailed,
some quite detailed history of Charlotte, some Salamone, the German Jewish artist that was cut short in the German issue, Ed.
As far as I know, because the German audience was thought to have more understanding and knowledge of her, her work.
So there were all sorts of small changes made that German edition.
And again, the English edition,
we we tried very hard to adjust certain elements in the English edition more not so much the big arguments, but the smaller moments just.
Just them so that they work for an English language audience.
And that was particularly because in memory of memory, unlike the sheriff.
This is something I'd really like to talk to you about.
The shower is very focussed on on Russia, and it's kind of looking in and it's whereas nearest opponent is looks out words.
And it's all about, I think, making links between this family unit and then this Russian history.
And then this sort of European history or international history.
And so. There were parts to it which were for a Russian audience.
But about the outside world and so needed to be reframed for an audience living in the outside world.
And so there was some small slights of hand around that.
Really not. Not things I can particularly enumerate.
More tiny things where you'd just adjust the wording very slightly because you knew that.
Everybody knows that. So but they don't know this. So we need to turn it round.
So it's like I like the phrase like you probably think that it's her.
Yes. The covers it covers a multitude of sins and virtues in translation.
And I kind of think that the area of hidden activity that we've read or know about.
It's so important for the finished product. Tell me about the sheriff translation, because that is it's been a mammoth task.
I've just been as I said, I've just been reading it. And what's remarkable for me is it was an incredibly Russian landscape.
And as I was reading it in translation, I understood it.
Absolutely. Translation is completely translucent. I mean, it's beautifully translated.
Everything just so elegantly translated. And wonder if the rhythms and the sound of the prose is wonderful.
But I know that well. So I could almost slip through the pros and see it.
And I wondered if he thought a lot about your audience, perhaps those readers who don't know Russian Soviet culture so well.
You've got I know you've you probably talk about the footnotes because they're not unto themselves.
Yeah. We'll actually ask. So, I mean, Shadowville. Just to play some a little bit.
I'm sure that many people have won't be too aware of what kind of novels he writes.
In fact, in the same year that he died in the end. The new Oxford history of Russian literature that came out.
They said that he invented a new form of writing about the past, which is not a small claim.
And I think. But I think I think true. In fact, a new form is novel, in my view.
But based very much on his historical knowledge.
He began as a historian of mediaeval Russia. And so although his novels tend to be more about the modern period and informed by tragedies,
again linking with Mr. Panopto in his own in his own family to two thirds of his larger family were shot or died in the camps by his, by his, by his.
To quote him,
his novels are rooted in a much a much older understandings of what he sees as the recurring motivations driving forces of Russian history.
A sense of Russia as a chosen people. Eschatology messianism leading as he sees two recurring cycles of revolutions, schisms, civil wars.
It's a it's a sort of mirror image of the kind of Putin view of Russia.
Russian history is continuous, where you sort of write out the revolutions with shadows.
It's all about repeating schisms, revolutions, following similar patterns.
And. So perhaps his most famous book in Russia is it's called The Rehearsals.
And I spent quite a lot of time we should organise in his last years.
And one of our trips was to the New Jerusalem monastery, which is outside outside Moscow,
which was founded by Patriarch Nick on back at the time of the schism in the Orthodox Church,
was shut off as the sort of the main event in Russian history.
I think one is one of them.
In the seventeenth century and the idea was that he would create this monastery to replicate the lands around the monasteries,
replicate the holy lands. This idea of Russia as a third room after room after Constantinople, the new kind of chosen land was salvation would happen.
And so in that novel mission, we went to visit the site. Nikken comes up with this idea of creating a kind of mystery play.
In which peasants would first from the local area would be trained to play all the different parts in the gospel.
Except that nobody would be allowed to play Christ.
And so they start acting out the gospels and acting around Christ in the hope that by acting out the gospels,
Christ will eventually come and bring salvation. Of course, Christ doesn't come.
The roles get handed down from generation to generation through the centuries until we eventually get to the 20th century.
And within the troupe of actors, peasants, all sorts of disagreements, and especially about what God wants from us,
what one wants us to be doing, how how he wants us to save ourselves and break out, and you get some killing bouts and cycles of violence.
And that's to give away his most simple plot in the different novels I've translated to give an idea of the kind of novelist he has.
And as you say, Sasha, to come back to it.
To your point, because I do say this in my forward to the current translation, how translatable is shuttled in the senses.
You know, you or I know enough about the historical background to be able to place place this.
Is that this kind of fiction? And to be able to have a sense of where shuttle is departing from the historical record, whereas fantasy is taking off,
where he's perhaps not departing so much as filling in areas of Russian history that he thinks have always been left out of the textbooks.
We would have a sense of that. Somebody doesn't have a background in Russian studies.
Couldn't be expected to do that. Does that mean that we shouldn't translater rights like that?
I'm not trying to make a comparison between when we read The Divine Comedy, we have the quotes and the billions.
We have an incredibly intricate network of politics and influence at that time that, you know, requires the first person opening,
opening Dante for the first time, a huge amount of footnote reading to be able to be able to to orientate yourselves.
But of course, you don't have to do all that work a huge amount in DUNTA, which comes out, which is just purely human drama, as there is in Sharrow.
So. So certainly I feel it's absolutely worth bringing into English.
I'm also realistic about the fact that it is off putting to have all of this historical background.
I try to. I tried to smooth the reader's path by using footnotes.
I mean, I think for a long time there has been a sense that especially with fiction, there weren't footnotes,
footnotes break the spell, which is true, of course, in a way, Sharat himself, when we talked.
He never wanted me to use footnotes. But I think we had a very similar issue,
I think with your journalism of in the sense that he totally was one of total trust and freedom from his point of view.
He really. Was that help me to explain.
Talk about his work in a way that has stayed with me.
You know, I've got six more novels of his to go. If I go through all of them, I have his kind of those conversations in my head to help me.
But he he never wanted to impose a solution anyway.
He didn't think, Schuckert.
But it seems to me actually that especially in maybe an Anglophone publishing, there's an increasing appetite for footnotes or end notes.
I particularly found that with my Crime and Punishment, which I did a lot of notes,
and readers have been extremely appreciative of my efforts to contextualise the novel in nineteenth century Russia at that time.
So I think I think there's more of a willingness for that kind of added value
that comes with with with with with additional material work there where,
you know, you don't have to go to the notes. But if you do want to understand more about the background, then it's it should be worth going to them.
And you don't just go there for two words, but for the chunky paragraph telling you about this, Gizem, was what I said.
So I have come to believe that footnotes and then notes are important.
But yes, otherwise it I hope I mean, I've tried to involve other intellectuals, other writers,
Russianness to to provide to to to get them interested in and shut off to, to write about him in the press.
Beyond that, I don't really know what to do in order to in order to in order to bring him to it to a greater audience.
It's difficult. Some it certainly feels like it's worth doing.
I wasn't sure. And I think Maria wasn't sure either.
How in memory of memory would be received. And we were.
I was we were both quite anxious about it. I think the only because it took a very long time to translate.
I mean, like the sheriff, it's a it's a long period of your life.
And I was working through it. I didn't know what the audience looks like for this book.
I mean, it's me. I like it. I'm the ideal audits. I'm really enjoying it.
But but who else is going to read it and who's going to have the time and this investment into it to want to get all the way through it?
And I didn't mean I was doubting its quality. I simply was just interested, I suppose.
And it was taking such a long time and it was such a huge effort. And in some ways I think the response has been as really confounded us.
There's been a definite audience for it and people have really enjoyed it.
But I think one of the things that's really helped is actually oddly locked down.
I think the book Appearing in lockdown has meant that a lot of readers have had time and they've also had other,
bigger, big, bigger experiences that they bring to it.
So they're not trying to fit it into busy lives or they're trying to fit into a situation which is very unreal around the world.
And I wonder if that hasn't affected the reception of of in memory of memory.
He just also a lot of people are thinking about the past and their lives.
It's a point of reflection. So in that sense, I think.
Yeah, that the circumstances in which people are reaching the book that have helped
it and I don't by any means want to imply that I but I certainly was worried.
I was worried, first of all, that, you know, would it find an audience and then would would people what would they think about the translation?
Because it's a difficult book. And so it used to keep me up at night is I suppose I'm trying to say that it's been good so far.
I think people have found it. I've seen what it is.
And I think it will be also partly for the reason you gave them this memory of memory really does engage with.
Western cultures and theory in particular, around photography, for example, around art,
memory in a very direct way, which is unusual, and in in books that come into translation from Russian.
And I would just pick up on whether Shut-off is an insular. I think actually he's not.
Although the novels do seem to turn into Russia, actually they turn in only to sort of almost go down to more universal level.
And so he himself said that Russian history is a commentary on the Bible.
So you actually get, you know, this this idea of Russia is the third room.
The Russians is the chosen people. That leaves shadow issues of Polish Jewish background, of Jewish background,
factory to to make all sorts of comparisons with the fate of Jewish people, for example, in the Bible.
But there's also, at least in every novel, there's always one major character who comes from a different culture.
So in the rehearsals, the theatre director who's employed by me come to stage the place.
This is a Breton and before enduring, there's Madame de Stall plays.
It plays a large part, bridging the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution.
And then in this latest novel, Bee as Children. When you've just been reading, it's it's really about colonialism.
It's about Russian empire and their engagement with the northern peoples, with this small indigenous peoples.
And then that's the end. It's not just in the far Siberian north.
In a way that I find very interesting, because I travelled that part of the world the same time we were in Russia.
And I saw I saw a lot of this with my own eyes.
What's happened to those people? So I don't think. I don't think he is insular.
But it looks that way. Yeah, I'd certainly agree with that.
I mean, it's brilliant. It's like an enormous, sprawling, wonderful thing.
But I think that, you know, knowing Russia certainly helps to get get into it.
In fact, when you mention the minutes and it's there's just been an exhibition at the British
Museum about the Arctic peoples and there's quite a lot about Arctic peoples.
But it's like the post-Soviet space, in fact. And and so reading those parts and novel just reminded me of that.
And of course, those peoples are entirely sort of migratory.
They're not too limited to one space. What kind of political space?
So. So I want to go back to what you're saying before about you said that when you when you're translating it,
you never doubt the quality of what you're translating. I always doubt the quality of everything I translated.
Isn't a natural. I want to talk more now about the process of translation.
You know, the stages when we work through the book like this, you're using a word about, like, struggling.
I mean, I find the actual that the initial phases when you're getting that first draught down, it's a constant.
You're always arguing with the author.
I am talking to the author and sometimes arguing with them in my head and wishing maybe something was different or something, you know?
Is that just me or do you draw? Do you also find the US wrestling with the text in his initial phrases?
How does the actual process from the first draught to the completed?
That's a really interesting point. Particularly with Russian. Well, I see it in portraying the drama and in memory of memory.
If you were to start a sentence off in Russian and you read the beginning of the sentence,
if you were then to go away and complete the sentence, you could almost guarantee that you wouldn't complete it as the author had completed it.
There's never for me this almost never any crossover of.
I find that repeatedly in the drama it often happens the ice, but the phrase will begin and I'll think, oh, I know this is going.
And then it won't be so utterly different. And I really like that quality on it completely.
It's always very humbling because I start something. I think I know what I'm doing and then I don't know what I'm doing too.
And I don't seem to ever learn what I'm doing either. I don't seem to improve on that.
It's and that's brilliant. It's completely brilliant because you're you're never quite in control.
And I. I really love that feeling. I end it's there very much in in Mushes poems, which I all set out, translating the Morrissette out, reading them.
And even if I've read them and I sort of thought about them and I've made notes of them when I set up translating them,
it's still exactly the same thing that I start, I think. Oh, I know. I think where this is going, it takes me somewhere else.
And so there's always so this the struggle is between the two voices, I suppose, my voice and the author's voice and how.
How we wrestle with those kind of angels, I suppose, is really it is really, really interesting to me and and kind of in a sort of philosophical way,
not just in a sort of sense of the day to day translation process,
but but but just that the feeling of of of never quite knowing another person well enough to encapsulate them.
They're always coming back with something surprising.
Which is which which is why I often think of translation in a way as a sort of a human relationships,
something like, you know, friendship or partnership. You know,
knowing that you will that you always in a sort of dialogue of equals is how does that how does that struggle between
your voice and the author's voice tend to then resolve itself or what you tend to be guided by at that point,
if you can never go to a Russian conference by translation without hearing the word of civility.
But a million times. Yes. Interesting.
Russian doesn't have a kind of word autonomous self, but he has this word for in translation, putting stuff in from yourself and in a bad way.
This is something one shouldn't do. You shouldn't. You shouldn't. You shouldn't. Bring your own personality into its gratuitously.
You have a similar allergy to the idea of a beatin, I imagine.
Know you don't. It sounds like you think this kind of dialogue between voices is a productive one that, you know, your voice is.
Equally important, I don't know if you could translate if you thought of yourself as a neutral, empty space.
There has to be an element of your voice in there.
And I think if you thought that it wasn't, and that would be a problem as well.
So in some senses, it's coming clean about, you know, why you're standing and what you're feeling and saying I do this.
I do think this is sort of this policy that keeps you negative capability thing, which is very helpful for me.
That as a thought about translation, that you'll never reaching for certainties, that you're letting them come to you.
But in a very practical way, and I don't know if you find this,
that might fit the differences that I can say that again, such as Redemption Island culture.
You're about about the negative capability and how that implies that you're you know, you're not reaching for certainties then you will.
And that that strikes me as a good way to think about translation in a very practical way.
You know, it's sort of nuts and bolts of it. I quite often find that all translates page.
And then I'll go back over it.
And the weakest points are where I've added stuff and I've actually gone back and quite sort of scraped it back again to where it was in the Russian.
And that that never fails to be the case, that if I've added anything, I'll end up putting back and taking it out.
So I do understand sort of resistance to oxybate, it seems.
And you kind of. That quite often following the line is is better than not following the line, although that's sort of a nuts and bolts approach.
I think not necessarily anything to do with the bigger thoughts about translation.
How about you? How does that with this in this most recent work.
Been really helped by the fact that so chateaus is a in many ways, he's not typical of late Soviet writers,
because I don't think he he had all the neuroses that many say they say your prose writers often had
about being unpublished work and or being an unrecognised genius isn't the way short of his book,
defensive in the way that I recognised from many writers of that era.
Something of habit in the in the.
But in terms of publication process, it's very typical because he starts writing in the early 80s with no hope of being published.
And and in a way, he writes kind of without any restrictions.
He doesn't even use punctuation. His wife has added the punctuation, all his writing.
Apparently, he doesn't even use full stops and comments.
So when you hear him when I heard him read his works, it was like a sort of liturgical torrent of language.
But you couldn't really put any. It really affected the way I then wanted to translate.
It made me think a lot about punctuation and the extent to which I was typing him up in English.
I'm sure that in the future, hopefully, there'll be other translators and shadows. We'll take a more radical view.
And he is probably less tidy punctuation than I have. But anyway,
what I'm trying to get at is that there's been a kind of ongoing editing process in his in his
throughout his career so that as he became more better known in the last years of his life,
his works began to get republished. They would also get repetitive and rewrite by him.
And with this particular novel will be his children. I've been able to compare the original version that came out in 2008, which I read then.
And then the one he revised in 2017. And although he told me that there were just tiny revisions, actually,
they're really revealing revisions about things I suspected were his priorities already.
But it sort of confirmed it for me, such as, you know, to avoid at all costs any kind of obviously literary language to be as direct as possible.
An invoice, be as immediate as possible.
Is definite in a way. So there's a really interesting tension in his writing between the sort of the complexity of the material,
the entanglement of the material, and with the plots and the stories of his characters and the kind of lucidity he's aiming for,
an expression which somehow I find really attractive in a way that his writing
is never more his expression is never more complicated than it needs to be.
Sometimes it does need to be complicated because the actual thing he's describing is very complicated,
but it's not gratuitous, gratuitously complicated in any way.
And so comparing the diversions you gave me has given me a real stare in terms of when I revise my own translation.
I tried to do this to work along the same lines in a way that I saw him in working along to do the kind of scraping back that you're talking about.
But I've also had the incredible privilege working on this last novel, too, to have Carol Emmerson, emeritus professor at Princeton.
He's fascinated by sort of reading every single page of my translation pretty much as I was doing it and giving me huge amounts of ideas and feedback.
That kind of collaboration has been really important in my mind. I've had it twice to that level.
First, the first long book I did was with my newspaper editor in Russia.
So he was a Russian, but totally bilingual.
I'm a kind of Nabokov and level who did a sort of paragraph, paragraph critique of my translations, my first translations.
And now I've had a really good fortune of having Carol at my side while doing this novel.
And that kind of collaboration for me is also been very formative because he has this it looks like collaboration and translation.
Sometimes when things can't you do come on, do a translation by consensus.
Could you not do a translation of this novel? Or is this because you're shaking your head?
And I sort of think the same. And similarly, when you see old classic translations of Tolstoy being revised by a modern scholar or whatever from me,
you feel a kind of, I don't know, this sort of tension that I can't quite get work around, you know?
When I read it. So it sounds like we feel the same.
It. It isn't an individual task, the translation. But these are these are these aspects of collaboration are crucial to just looking at the times.
See, how are we going? We haven't talked about where we're going to get onto retranslation.
Yes, I've got some. I've actually got some quotes I I from the end of the sheriff from Carrolls and Peace Inadmissable.
She says a couple of things. One is how to quote from Epstein that sheriff felt his heart history organically as an extension of his own.
I was thinking that was just so fantastic because in some senses that applies, I think will say tamarisk upon us,
that she's feeling history, 20th century history through her own person persona, her own, her own self.
And that's true not just of in memory of memory, poetry to spoiler and war of the beast in the animals.
In fact, in spoiler, she sort of explicitly links the that the writer, the the lyric ego, the feminine with Russia, the country.
And it's so there's I, I was really struck by that.
I just wanted to say, as I know, we're running out of time and would be able to go into that in any debt.
But also one thing that perhaps we won't manage to talk about, but just really struck me was the idea of the words literature being better at summing
up history than scholarship because literary words were infinitely imprecise.
And that idea really, really struck me because I thought that there's so much truth in that the sort of multiplicity of points of view.
And it's a really good point in history to even be thinking about.
This is something Shettleston this is something Sharrock said. Yeah. Because it helps explain why it was removed from history to fiction.
Yes. It was it the fiction to provide him with the history. It's a wonderful, wonderful quote about language being infinitely imprecise.
Of course I do. Maybe I'll just finish by saying, what is it like to be a translator?
Infinitely precise. Well, yes.
Has written a novel about Bhogle.
And I think that's where a lot of this comes from, sort of a recent experience of translating some vocals, goggled stories.
And I don't know what Koko's language. Infinitely imprecise, but infinitely.
Flippy. So what I'm looking for a slipper, yes.
Where the where the tone is is is susceptible to so many different evaluations at any given point.
And. Yes.
Sorry, maybe maybe this is much more than we want to get on the whole question of retranslation,
I know that there's a conference going on at the moment on retranslation, which if you are, I'll be talking to the participants about tomorrow.
You've had some experience session with retransmitting some short stories.
I remember in your collection of Moscow telling him. Yes, I did.
We invited you. Yes, I did.
I retranslated well, actually, not that many, because we only in fact,
the only one missed done a sub which called the Chekhov short story lady with a little joke,
which has been translated probably infinite number of times. But I actually I just went for it.
I didn't read the other translations and I just translated it because I, I loved it and responded to it.
So but I'm not sure that was that was a very different context in a sense.
It was a short story within a book with stories.
So I didn't feel as if, you know, I was replacing one definitive translation or it wasn't quite I didn't quite have that same function.
I didn't think. But that is the big question, isn't it, whether one takes that attitude.
I'm not going to even look at the previous translations and I'm just going to
beat my own path or whether one sees history of translation of something that,
you know, where we create knowledge as we go along. We in a way, we should draw on predecessors' for ideas approaches.
And I learnt from what works and what doesn't work. It would be nice to think that the translation moves forward over time.
Yes, I suppose. I mean, there's an extent to which that happens.
I think naturally, because we're creatures of our time and we translate in a different way to, you know, constants.
Got it. Or any of the other sort of interim translators. And we I don't know whether it's a move forward or simply a very different viewpoint.
I've never felt it to be a sort of pyramid scheme simply.
And I feel really just like simply another reader in a way, pulling on different things, different elements in the story that attract me.
And that's that's always been my approach to translation. I've always felt that it was temporary and contingent in a sense.
And the other translators would come after and if the translation translated before.
But it's different, of course, if it's a contemporary work, because you're often establishing the righteous the first time.
So there's other responsibilities to that.
I suppose it's a question of whether we think that with successive translations we are somehow moving closer to the original.
Maybe we can ever reach them in translation we're with, you know.
And that's the discourse around translation.
This translates to finally bringing out the humour in that work or this translation finally bringing out the.
They're no longer smoothing it out.
They're roughing it up, whatever would have them insane, the discussion about transactions that over time one gets closer to two, this sort of ideal.
Or one takes the view that there is no such thing as. As that original that we we're aiming for, it's a question of interpretation.
There's one other thing I want to bring up from Henry which questions because I'm thinking this is a torture event mean the research elements.
One question around translation, which fascinates me also because I know I also work as a solitary scholars.
What is the what kind of knowledge does does translation bring us here that that perhaps one
doesn't have by approaching the text as a reviewer or a literary critic and vice versa?
It's a funny position, isn't it? As a translator, because you're not the author.
But you are the author of the text of the translation. So you're not standing.
You're standing where the authors should be in in in the case of the translation.
And you're not the you're not the reader, although you were the reader.
So you're in a you're in a curious position and you're inside the text.
Whereas I think the scholar stands outside the text, the scholar is not part of creating it.
So although they can be really, really helpful in interpreting it and eliminating it.
So I'm always really struck by scholarship about works that I've translated,
because quite often I realised that my knowledge about texts that I've translated has been actually quite instinctive.
And not a too conscious. And when I read the scholarship and I see it written down,
I realise it's it's things I thought about the text, but just simply turned it to the translation.
So they never appeared in my conscious mind is thoughts. And so that's that's interesting to me.
They quite often things that are unvoiced have underpinned how I've seen syntax.
And then occasionally you read things about the text that you utterly disagree with almost sort of viscerally disagree with.
Because you know it differently. It doesn't mean that they're wrong, but simply that you've made a completely different connexion with it.
How about you both scholar and translator?
Well, I know I think that there must be a way in which we we as translators can.
Yeah. What's the practical way?
The practical, real realities of life as a translator is that you move you finish one book and you move on to the next.
And you don't always have time to write down fully what you've what you've what what insights you've gained by translating.
I do think there must be a particular access to the Texas game by having to think about every single word,
you know, you have to do when you're translating.
And whereas, you know, when you think of myself, not anybody else, but when you're trying to write a an article or an article,
literary scholarship, inevitably you will focus on a particular section of the text probably or particular features of the text.
And inevitably also to not have time and or you may just find it convenient to pay much less attention to two other parts.
So. So is the fact that you're kind of slow and total reading, the translation goes,
I think does have a lot if to two, to our understanding of literature.
I think it's particularly in terms of form and in terms of language, in terms of how authors create the effects that they create.
I mean, with Crime and Punishment, I feel like I learnt a lot about.
Why it was that, you know, in the hot one, when we're in Rusk Comikaze Mind and was constantly as he's as he's preparing to do the murders.
Now, just he uses such a limited range of vocabulary.
You know, this kind of neurotic circling around around around certain words.
Whereas, you know, then as the novel moves out from the most traditional 19th century novel, you get a much fuller sort of vocabulary.
That doesn't that is kind of minor. I mean, it's one minor point,
but that's just one example of the sort of things I think one becomes very aware of almost whether you want to be or not.
When you're translating that, you would you would you know, you wouldn't necessarily notice as a reader.
I mean, I'm also I've also been shocked. Now, I reviewed these children, not just translated.
I reviewed it when it came out in Russian. When I look back at that review, I don't recognise the novel anymore from from where I am now.
So, yeah, I think I think it's a very interesting question.
You know, in the humanities, we can think more about how to, you know, the synergy between translators and researchers.
Then maybe this I don't mean this is a good moment to bring in like Katrina and see what questions I see.
There are some questions that come up in the chat. Yes, I'm just reappearing.
Thank you very much. That was fascinating and not only a dialogue between translators, but, of course, a discussion of translation as dialogue.
I mean, that was extraordinary the way you were able to bring that out and your relationship with the authors.
And I mean, this sort of might be helped by Jim's concept of dialogue, which is sometimes taken as essentially a formal investigation.
But now a lot of specialism think things this this actually has a sort of communicative
and also a sort of moral and possibly even see a logical dimension to it.
But I didn't want to sort of talk really about that kind of philosophy. I mean, I do want to pick up a couple of the questions that have come in.
I am one of them deals with the question of choosing to retranslate.
And I think we've actually dealt with that quite fully beforehand.
I mean, fortuitously, I wanted to ask, though, I mean, first of all, to throw a bit of a spanner in the works.
I mean, that was sort of one one comment, Mr. Simply, about the perfectibility of translation.
And it occurs to me that, I mean, to make a rather banal comment,
perhaps one obvious way in which that doesn't apply is to do with reality that we've lost.
I mean, if you think about translations in the classical Greek, I mean, the fact that we just simply don't understand,
even from archaeology, a lot of that world, something which is nearer to our own time.
I mean, the German historian Reinhold Kosilek has talked about the fact that really aquacultural in the culture of the horse has not disappeared.
We no longer live with horses in the same way. And I mean, Tolstoy is a horse obsessed writer.
And I think it really does matter that modern people don't really understand the horse in the same way.
And that Al-Mahmood, of course, is the translation at the time and actually did understand these realities.
So that's just one observation when it comes to back to throwing a spanner in the works.
I mean, I think things have changed. I mean,
there was a really sort of it was very difficult for Russian as a we're talking at the
end of the Soviet period to feel kind of trust to people who were translating them.
I mean, they lived in a culture. They considered isolationists. They didn't really see how Western is willing to understand it.
So I think my first experiences of Russian writers, which were in some cases exceptionally difficult, are not characteristic these days.
I mean, you know, obviously you can build up trust relationships and things have altered in that respect.
But I have had problems which may be sort of more widespread, which is that sometimes writers have got a key informant.
They don't feel that they know the English terribly well themselves. But they have a friend who kind of apparently does.
And I think that can get very difficult because almost always in that situation,
the person concerned has an extremely fundamentalist attitude towards the author or real text.
They're not really prepared to allow any diffie deviation from it.
And then that the accusations of CBH and I mean this sort of putting yourself into the text tend to proliferate.
So I'm just wondering whether that was something that you'd come across or whether you were sort of ways in which relationships,
obviously not with these two authors you've been mainly talking about with others, perhaps at an earlier stage, could have been difficult.
And then the other situation, which can become difficulties with publishers as gatekeepers.
So they're sort of conception of what the the reader can understand.
I mean, I found, you know you know, again, my experience of this goes back some time,
but it used to be really quite tricky, often with American publishers,
because, you know, if they were major sort of high street publishers, as it were,
because there's a notion of what readers would like it to understand.
And I mean, an example of this, which is sort of stayed with me as an American publisher, altering people, talking in the Kurylenko.
So the smoking room of a Soviet workplace and replacing that by by the WaterCooler, which, of course, you would not find it in a Russian office.
Unisys is supplied by the plastic barrels, by the various that would have spit in companies, but nobody in the late 1980s had even heard of.
And the whole idea of buying water at that stage would've seen protests.
So I suppose it's it's those and I think that it's probably taking YouTube too far away from this sort of very sensitive discussion that you've had.
Maybe you don't want to talk about it at all and you haven't come across these problems. But I just wondered whether you wanted to say what to.
But that. Well, maybe Sasha is here.
The question of. Perhaps this isn't exactly what you're asking good about.
Mary has the panel, which does have excellent English, doesn't she? And she also has a very.
Good knowledge of Anglo American literary culture is inhuman, was it is she able I mean,
or does it interfere in any way or is it an advantage in the process?
I mean, it was before she famously said in an interview that she read the book a day.
So her literary understanding of Anglo American literature is far better than mine.
And quite often, I told time she recommends books to me, books that she's chewed up in a day.
You know that I remember she actually gave me all the Alice Smith books because she was over and she'd read the law and she passed them on to me.
So I feel in some ways she's so extremely knowledgeable and so well immersed in in Russian and English language that that it's really,
really helpful always to talk to her. And she's she's she's a translator stream because she she accepts very much that
you have to change what you're translating in order to make it resonate sometimes.
And other times she could stay very close and she's just very aware of all of that.
And I've never if she makes a suggestion, I always accept it because I know that she's never likely to say something sort of gratuitously.
It's always going to be founded in her her rather brilliant understanding of the literary culture.
So that's not been the case with Maria.
However, I wanted to say that it certainly was a case in the 90s because the Soviet post-Soviet world and the kind of English language,
well, was so different culturally that often that you would find these moments of friction.
And I think one of the things particularly hard was when I was doing play translations of
obscenities because the Russian theatre world had limited tolerance for obscenities on stage.
And I mean, it still does. It's illegal now.
But you would if you brought to an English language play to Russia at which they they usually the translation would get rid of all the obscenities.
And there was one case where a pretty well-known British playwright went out to read on occasion.
No, not not Ravenhill. He was I look to say it, but it wasn't Mark.
He was brilliant. But they came out to Russia and they had a sort of informant who told them that all
the obscenities had been taken out of their play and they were absolutely horrified.
So they all had to go back in and we'll just sort of run our hands because we knew that the audience wouldn't be able to cope with it.
And it was true. The first night, half the audience laughed loudly.
And as the of the play proceeded, I think those sort of cultural differences are always really, really fascinating.
And I was I was working at the Moscow News at the time that Sandra can, you know,
sessions and some of the off was translating mock, even Hill's most famous, the scene play shopping and et cetera.
And he was calling me up in the in the in the newsroom asking me to explain to him this will that phrase from the play, which was always right.
But interestingly, they call busy shopping and [INAUDIBLE] because, yes, it was so much less looking out for everyone.
Was in terms of the gatekeeper question. That gives me the chills supposedly to say how grateful I am to Eric Lane Dedalus,
who publishes the shut off because he's so committed to two shuttle that I don't know that I would've found another publisher.
So it's not always get you, but sometimes you find publishers who just share your enthusiasm.
And that's that's what's wonderful when that happens. And it's absolutely essential. But I wonder who the real gatekeepers are sometimes.
And I think agents have a very important role, you know, which forces to do the big agents to side to to to to take up as much as publishers.
And I my my impression working with publishers is that they are guided as much as they themselves make decisions in the way they have.
They have either their trusted translators or they or they are persuaded by this or that proposal.
This is what prise. It's been won in a different country. So I'm not sure.
But at least in my experience, it's not so much that publishers are keeping authors out as.
How they get to their attention in the first place, because they used to be clearly a much more efficient system of reporting readers reports.
I think that that seems to have a large extent falling into abeyance.
So I wonder often how well-informed publishers, big publishers are.
And there's there's so many independent publishers doing amazing work, furniture, you know,
situation has improved massively compared to ten or fifteen years ago, especially when it rolled, especially from what I know of Russian.
And I'm sure it's true. Masses, a career in literature and Chinese, Japanese, this is amazing growth.
So clearly, things are going in the right direction of who.
Yes, I mean, I would certainly distinguish myself and I just say highstreet publishers in the past,
that there would be this sort of sense of, you know, particular sort of possibly not very well informed readership, which is a paradox,
because I think I would be rather well-informed readership would tend to buy foreign fiction in any case.
But if I can just move on to something else, another question that that's come through was was to do with something that both of you mentioned,
which is about the kind of war, particularly, Sasha, perhaps about the sort of anxieties before you start and the sort of scrutiny of your process.
And I've been asked to pass on a question which is about whether this actually alters.
I mean, as you get more experience, say that.
I mean, do you get a sort of stronger sense or is it always you new text as my own experience of translation would suggest.
I must say that, you know, there's always a challenge. And, you know, do you feel better equipped for it or do you not?
If I could just pass that that back to you, perhaps. I you institutionally e I can see I mean, my anxieties start after publication day.
I find my worst experience ever in translation was when I realised I loved working from punishment.
But after it was published.
Because now because now publishers can print on demand much more quickly and you get many more opportunities if you wants to to make corrections.
And I had it in my mind, I must not do this.
Well, I just finished this project. I'm not going to go back to it.
And then, you know, I got an email from the managing editor of and saying, you know, we're going to be republishing Syrians.
So, you know, she won't make any changes. And then and then I sat down with it, read through it again against my better wisdom,
really, and spent three weeks furiously tossing some bits out and putting them back.
In the end, it's almost complete muddle about it. And just chucked your book and and such anger and asked you to make the changes.
It was it wasn't that there weren't that many dropped by to give up that when the point
being that I find the actual process of translation quite enjoyable and largely anxiety.
Well, exactly free. But, you know, there's a sense of progress. There's a sense of momentum that develops.
And I particularly enjoy the phase of working on the draught once it's finished and shaping it.
But it's the bit after once it's been published, once you suddenly all your word is only fixed on the page.
That's when I find. Anxiety creeps in, and it's almost better just not to look back too much and just carry on to the next project.
But I think Sasha was talking about responsibility as well, so that I mean, maybe that's something slightly different from from anxiety.
So anyway, over to you, such as a high school. Well, it's sort of related.
I was just going to say how you treat the text differently when you're translating.
And when it becomes a thing. And that also is how it how it is.
So when you when you first read it, if you think you're going to translate it, you're reading it in a very kind of quizzical way.
Can you do this? Is it possible then you start translating and you're looking at it almost like a sort of map.
You're reading it like a map. It's going to, you know, where is it going? And then you you start reading back your own translation and you're correct.
And then at some stage down the line, all of a sudden it becomes a text again that you're reading in it.
And I have that moment with the memory of memory.
Probably about the third time I did the proofs because it's been published in America, in the U.K. and I was doing the proofs for each one.
And the third time I did the proofs and I thought they were more or less there.
I mean, there was there's always stuff to do. But it was okay. And I started reading the chapter about your dad, who is Maria's distant relative,
who served on the Leningrad front in the Second World War and was killed. And that particular chapter in the book is really affecting.
And I started reading it and it suddenly really affected me.
I just I was just just suddenly found I was crying and I hadn't actually had that that response to the chapter at any point until then.
And I wondered if that's the same view all over.
There's a point when you suddenly go back to seeing the whole endeavour again in terms of a text that's
closed and can affect its reader rather than some sort of roadmap that you have to proceed along.
No, I mean, I do see the process of translation is one of discovery. Yeah.
And no, I think I do have had that same experience, really, that you describers of.
But it's not even that you then have the same necessarily emotional reaction to the text that you did when you read it in the original language.
It's actually something entirely, entirely new. Because by that point, you're rereading it in your own translation.
Your understanding of the homeworkers obviously developed a lot, a lot, a lot more from the first time you read it in Russian.
So, yeah, no, I don't see it as a kind of linear itinerary that you follow.
It is. It is. Process of discovery and deepening of your your understanding text, and so it does create moments like that, certainly.
That's why we do it. Yes, there's just one sort of short question, which is about formal organisation was applied particularly to poetry.
But I think to some extent, of course, that might apply to Russian prose as well,
because it's got a very specific rhythmic structure, which may be some tactic as well.
So perhaps just very briefly, I mean, how do you feel about that agnostic?
I mean, sort of dependent on the case?
Or do you kind of have a commitment to a particular commitment to sort of honouring the rhythmic formal organisation of the texts?
Maybe turning to social first and then all of a might have something to add to that?
Oh, yes, I really do. And in fact,
that was my problem with translating prose that I used to treat every sentence like a line of poetry and try and keep something of the rhythm.
And I fought for that quite hard in the editing process as well.
If I thought I could get away with it and without it, you know, it wasn't.
It wasn't. It wasn't terribly stilted or it didn't inhibit the understanding,
the reader's understanding that I tried to keep that because it's so important to me.
You can hear it's important to me that you can hear the Russian in the English.
And I don't know if you feel like that as well, all of it. But I feel really strongly committed to that sound as well as the meaning.
But the sound of someone speaking that feels integral to the text.
And as far as possible, I, I really strive to keep that. And it's it's of course much easier in drama and in in poetry.
And by keeping the Russian through the English. You mean. Well, you can't read the play.
You can't always reproduce the word order. But there are certain espe aspects of the word or that you desperately want to keep
because there's so much there's so much about the voice and the fall of the sentence.
You know, there's a sort of point that the sentence falls away from and you feel if you reorganise that into something very,
very English, then something will be lost. There'll be some tonal drop or some shift that will be be lost.
So if I do fight, I mean, I know you can't you can't always do it. Perhaps you can't do most of the time, but I do fight for that.
And that's that's part of the big struggle for me, that every sentence is a sort of miniature struggle over the loss of sounds.
If I looks almost the other way around in a sense that I find myself drawn to creating rhythmical patterns and that sometimes I'm bringing them in,
where when I look at Russia, not necessarily there. And then you have you know, you need to ask yourself whether.
You need to you need to eat. You should actually be aiming towards the Texas more emotions perhaps in what you're creating.
So. Yeah, I'm always on the watch out for pictures of natural tendencies I have towards certain certain features, almost unconsciously,
and I try to sort of when I can bring them back that I don't always do so, including not always respecting the word order.
Harold has been excellent with the shadow show Schwartzel for doing just what you mentioned, that often there is a real,
although the English might more naturally want to, wants to rearrange the word order for the now place the beginning or whatever that can be.
There can definitely be many cases where that consideration should be trumped by the placing of of of the word at that particular point.
It needs to be preserved. So yeah, these are things we all we obviously are always think about on a case by the sentence by sentence basis.
But I think I think both of us plays quite a lot of stress on actually reading
out or translations and that that certainly is an important part of the process.
We have to. I like the idea. Just just briefly to extend on that, that perhaps not so much in prose, but in poetry and perhaps drama,
you can really affect what people are writing in English by by doing things that haven't necessarily been done before in
translation and that that people might then pick up on that as a ploy or possibility in writing original work in English.
And I know that happens. I mean, I do that myself.
I read translations from other languages and they affect how I see English and how I think English can be used.
And so they sort of extend the possibilities a bit for other writers.
I do see that as a little bit of a responsibility to just to try to enrich English, I suppose.
A new new new sounds. New shapes.
This this is absolutely wonderful.
I mean, there are few things more depressing them on people talk about how a translation should sound like an English poem,
as if it were just kind of one canonical poem in the English language. And I think the idea of broadening the language,
the sort of creative expansion that you have dialogue with the receiving language is is is absolutely amazing.
I mean, what's so fantastic about your translations is they aren't flattens and well managed in the way that sometimes that's been the pattern.
And also that you are treating writers, I mean, in dialogue with writers who have got voices, you have your own explicit voices.
And it's not the same kind of late 19th, early 20th century pattern of translating a load of horses just because they happen to be famous,
which is a retreat back to that about sort of ten, fifteen years ago, which was actually, I think, definitely a step backwards.
But we're not going to reach a conclave conclusion.
I think we should leave it there and just thank both of you very warmly for an absolutely fascinating discussion.
And with that, I shall also sort of step back.
And I think West is about to say goodbye to salsa.
I am indeed. Before I do, I'd like to echo your thanks, Katrina, to both Sasha and Oliver.
That was a really, really interesting discussion. And I find myself both agreeing and disagreeing with you at various exciting points.
And in a sense, that's that's part of the point, really, isn't it? But I think that where you ended up,
which is the idea that the sort of practise of translation also changes changes you as a
writer and change and opens up the possibilities of what sayable when one's own language,
I think is really, really interesting. And to do the full loop takes us right back to what Katrina said is beginning about the kind of the worth of
studying other languages is not just to kind of learn how to how to be somebody else in another language,
but also how to relate differently to one's own language and one's own set of cultural norms and so on.
I hope I'm not putting words into your mouths there, but it did seem to me that that's that's one of the places that you were were working within.
So thank you ever so much for a really instructive.
And I would say another great thing about today's discussion is that the the sort of humanities cultural programme,
part of the point really is to put together research and practise and to see where they are in dialogue.
You know, it's not like research is over here and then poetries over there or practise or translation or something else is over there.
You've both really wonderfully demonstrated the intermingling and the and the the dialogue in the
balcony and sense of of that of those those different but nonetheless intimately connected activities.
So thank you so much, both of you, for a really, really nourishing hour and a bit of thinking and talking.
I think that brings us to the end of the session.
Then, as I say, thank you to our brilliant speakers, Sasha and Oliver, and also our chair, Katrina, for this wonderful event.
Until all the viewers at home for your questions, for watching and for your continued interest in what's going on here in this big tent.
The last thing I should say is to say that we'll continue again next week.
Thursday at 5:00 p.m. will be the last big tent of this term where Homy Barbar
will be in conversation with Elizabeth Fraser from the politics partment here.
Another colleague of Katrina is at new college.
While they are there, Bangui, who's the professor of race relations, and also Stephen Tuque, the historian.
They'll be discussing a number of sort of recent themes in around the fragility of democracy,
conspiracy theories, and also just sort of the place of culture within the global political scene at the moment.
Thank you again to everyone involved in this evening, including the Bache backstage team Torch and goodbye for now.