Translation comparison: The Comely Cook
Last summer I decided it wasn’t right to let Nikolai Karamzin’s “Poor Liza” (Бедная Лиза, 1792) represent the whole eighteenth century in a survey course. I doubted I’d be able to teach Mikhail Chulkov’s The Comely Cook, or The Adventures of a Debauched Woman (Пригожая повариха, или Похождение развратной женщины, 1770), because what were the odds it had been translated? But it had been, twice.
Here’s a passage from the first part where the focus is on the narrator and there are lots of proverbs:
— Государыня моя! теперь, я уже не тот, который намерен был обобрать у вас всё, я вам всё уступаю, владейте им по пословице: «Деньги железо, платье тлен; но кожа всего нам дороже». Прошу вас об одной только милости, не сказывайте моему господину, что я был вам знаком; а в благодарность за это я буду держать вашу сторону и помогу вам разорять его до конца.
Признаюсь, сколько я ни была бессовестна и сребролюбива, однако такое камердинерово усердие к своему господину показалось мне негодным. Впрочем, добродетель мне была и издали незнакома, и так на двух словах согласилися мы с прежним моим любовником проматывать его господина; однако не удалося нам произвести намерения нашего в действо, по пословице: «Не всегда-де коту масленица, бывает и великий пост». А что воспрепятствовало, то можно увидеть далее, ежели господин читатель не скучил еще читать мое похождение.
And here’s how Harold B. Segel translated the above in 1967:
“My lady! I am no longer the same person who intended to take everything away from you. I am giving it all to you; please have it in the spirit of the proverb: ‘Money is iron and cloth is perishable, but our skin is most precious to us.’ I only beg of you one favor—don’t tell my master that I knew you. In gratitude for this I’ll be on your side and I’ll help you ruin him.”
I must admit that no matter how unscrupulous or money-crazy I was, the butler’s diligence regarding his master seemed to me low. However, benevolence was equally unknown to me, and so in two words I and my former lover decided to ruin his master. However, we did not have the chance to accomplish our intentions, for as the proverb has it: “Shrovetide does not last forever; there comes Lent.” What prevented it, that the reader will soon discover for himself if he is not already bored reading my adventures. (34)
In David Wayne Gasperetti’s 2012 translation, these two paragraphs and the one before have been combined into one long one:
“Madam! I am no longer the man who intended to fleece you of everything; I surrender it all to you. Take possession of it according to the proverb Money is mere metal, and clothes do not last, but we value our skin most of all. I beg you for the sole favor of not telling my master I was familiar with you, and to show you my gratitude for this, I shall take your side and help you to ruin him completely.” I must confess that no matter how unscrupulous and greedy I might be, the valet’s zeal for his master seemed improper to me. However, virtue was unfamiliar to me even from a distance, and so in no time my former lover and I agreed to ruin his master; however, we did not manage to transfer our intention into action according to the proverb Life isn’t only carnival time, Lent always comes around as well. In good time you will be able to see exactly what hindered us, if My Dear Reader has not become bored reading of my adventures.
I like both of these, and I like that Gasperetti is not just rewriting Segel.
At first I thought Segel was trying to simulate an eighteenth-century calm elegance and Gasperetti was shooting for modern, comprehensible language, but some of the difference might just be the 45 years that elapsed between the translations. Segel sounds older with “the butler’s diligence regarding his master seemed to me low“ vs. “the valet’s zeal for his master seemed improper to me” and when he uses “benevolence” for dobrodetel’ vs. the straightforward “virtue.” (Or maybe Segel chose “benevolence” because dobrodetel’ could mean charity or generosity in the eighteenth century besides being the opposite of porok ‘vice’?) On the other hand, Gasperetti’s “sole favor of not telling my master I was familiar with you” sounds older than Segel’s “one favor—don’t tell my master that I knew you.”
My biggest reservation is Gasperetti’s treatment of the proverbs, which are deceptively hard—they roll off the narrator’s tongue, and the reader may not immediately notice when one has been altered or is used illogically. Dahl has den’gi zhelezo, a plat’e tlen ‘money is iron, while clothes are subject to decay’ as a set phrase. It sounds to me like the original sense of the saying contrasts money (of permanent value) to things you can buy with money (which depreciate). And Segel keeps that contrast with “money is iron and cloth is perishable,” so that the apparently tacked-on third element (“but our skin is most precious to us”) is potentially funny. But when Gasperetti says “money is mere metal, and clothes do not last,” the addition of “mere” undercuts the contrast between money and clothes. Even though I stylistically like “we value our skin most of all” in Gasperetti better than “but our skin is most precious to us,” I feel like the whole thing works better in Segel.
(After thinking about it for a while—probably longer than either translator had time to, since they had to go on to the next page and the next—I think there must be a way to end this expanded saying so it sounds more saying-y. Something like “money is iron, and cloth is perishable, but if you don’t have yourself in one piece, what have you got?” That’s kind of wordy, though. “Money is iron, and cloth is perishable, but saving your skin is what matters.” Or “…but who cares if you can’t keep body and soul together,” with the reader meant to take the English idiom as about avoiding death by violence instead of starvation. I don’t know.)
In other places Gasperetti seems to be trying harder for an old-sounding text where Segel is going for transparency, including the part where the main character’s young lover tricks her old lover by passing himself off as her sister (the Russian, by the way, is usually easy for readers used to today’s language to understand, but noticeably archaic throughout):
Признаюсь, что я никогда столько не радовалась, как в это время, что могла столько удачливо обмануть моего неусыпного надзирателя; но и мальчишка так был искусен представлять девку, что ежели бы я не знала, то конечно бы обмануться могла. В это время образумился мой старик и начал спрашивать меня, какого я роду, чего ему никогда и в голову не приходило; ибо, выключая любви, ничего тогда в уме его не находилось. О роде моем сказала я ему так хорошо, что ни он, ни я не могли действительно растолковать, какого я происхождения; но, впрочем, не дала я ему вдаль распространять такого разговора, который бы не принес мне много прибыли; а начала выхвалять изрядные качества приезжей моей сестры и сверх того говорила, что она хороша и гораздо меня прелестнее.
I’ll mark the places where I subjectively think the translators are trying to archaize the language:
I must admit that I never enjoyed myself so much as when I was finally able to deceive my vigilant supervisor so successfully. However, the boy was so skillful in his masquerade that if I had not known better I would have been convinced myself that he was a girl. At this time my old man regained his senses and began to ask me about my family, which never before entered his head, because except love he had nothing else on his mind. I told him all about my family so well that neither of us were actually able to determine what my origins were; besides, I did not give him a chance to continue a conversation that obviously would not have brought me much gain. I then began to praise the good qualities of my sister, on top of which I added that she was beautiful and a great deal more charming than I. (Segel 45–46)
I must confess I have never rejoiced as much as I did when I was able to deceive my vigilant overseer so successfully, but the boy was so artful in representing himself as a girl that had I not known, I most certainly would have been deluded myself. At that time my old man came to his senses and began asking me about my family, which is a question that had previously never entered his head, for excepting love, he really had nothing on his mind. I gave him such a wonderful account of my familiars that neither he nor I could in reality come to apprehend what my ancestry was; however, I did not give him the opportunity to prolong such a conversation, which would not have brought me much profit, but rather ventured to commend the exceptional qualities of my visiting sister and above all noted that she was handsome and far more charming than I. (Gasperetti 81–82)
Last year I quoted Gasperetti’s translation of a different passage and was persuaded by Languagehat that both Gasperetti and I had misunderstood the Russian. I checked, and Segel takes it the same way as LH: “Many have already found out from their own experiences that after a while passion completely leaves the excited man and he completely forgets all that he said as a lover, just as a sick person after a fever or a madman after regaining his sanity” (56).
The Russian text on lib.ru and Wikisource starts with two dedications and a preface in verse. Gasperetti reproduces these nicely: in his translation, the first dedication to an unnamed powerful person is 90% footnote, as in the original, and the second dedication starts on a new page, so it’s typographically clear that it’s odd. Then the verse preface starts on a new page again. Segel runs the two dedications together without even a line break, does not use a footnote in the first one, and skips the preface altogether. I haven’t looked at the 1950 Russian edition that Segel used and may have faithfully reproduced. It’s not obvious to me what printed edition the lib.ru text is based on.
Details about the translations below. As usual, my bottom line is that they are both very good, though different in interesting ways; I may use Segel if I teach this again, or have people read Gasperetti’s dedications and preface and Segel’s main text.
Gasperetti, David Wayne, trans. Three Russian Tales of the Eighteenth Century: The Comely Cook, Vanka Kain, and “Poor Liza.” DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois UP, 2012. 58–107.
Segel, Harold B., ed. and trans. The Literature of Eighteenth-Century Russia. Vol. 2. New York: Dutton, 1967. 26–68.
Posts past and future
Programming notes:
- Don’t miss an interesting comment Languagehat made on a 13-year-old post. I think back to that serfdom/slavery conversation whenever I teach an art or literature course that covers the Russian Empire, but didn’t realize anyone else remembered it.
- I discovered two old but new-to-me Leskov translations: “Chertogon” (Чертогон, 1879), trans. Bernard Guilbert Guerney, and “The Sentry” (Человек на часах, 1887), trans. Avrahm Yarmolinsky, both in the above multi-author, multi-translator 1946 collection. They’ve been added to the 11-year-old “Leskov in Russian and English, story by story,” along with three by Maria K. from 2018 and 2019, including the first translations known to me of “Peacock” (Павлин, 1874) and “A Mysterious Incident at the Mental Institution” (Загадочное происшествие в сумасшедшем доме, 1884).
- I’m working on two translation comparisons, including one on Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground (Записки из подполья, 1864). I want to focus on a few specific parts of the text and compare them across all the translations I can find. Which parts? Probably section 9 of part 1 plus a section to be determined of part 2, but I’m open to suggestions. And let me know if you’re aware of any English translations beyond these: C. J. Hogarth (1913), Constance Garnett (1918), David Magarshack (1955?), Ralph E. Matlaw (1960), Andrew R. MacAndrew (1961), Serge Shishkoff (1969), Jessie Coulson (1972), Mirra Ginsburg (1974), Michael R. Katz (1989), Jane Kentish (1991), Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1993), Hugh Aplin (2006), Ronald Wilks (2009), Kyril FitzLyon [a.k.a. Kyril Zinovieff] and Jenny Hughes (2010), Natasha Randall (2012), Kirsten Lodge (2014). Like Fathers and Children, this is apparently the right combination of popular, good, and short to have attracted a lot of people and publishing houses.
Veltman in English
I gripe a lot about how much effort is spent retranslating the same nineteenth-century novels—and I mean person-decades of work by people whose English style and Russian proficiency I envy—instead of translating what was unjustly passed by. But I should do less of that and more celebrating the lesser-known works people do translate and publish, like Fiona Bell translating Avdotya Panaeva, or Michael Katz translating Evgeniya Tur, or Joe Andrew translating Elena Gan, or Nora Seligman Favorov translating Sofia Khvoshchinskaya, or Maya Jenkins translating Alexei Pisemsky.
Another is Stephen Bruce translating Alexander Veltman’s The Wanderer (Странник, 1831–32). The way I found out about this book was funny—I was about to include The Wanderer in a list of works that should be translated instead of the same familiar set, and then, thank goodness, checked, and learned my information was out of date. I pre-ordered a copy and am looking forward to reading it. Eleven years ago I posted about Boris Bukhshtab’s view of The Wanderer and Veltman’s other prose, but I still don’t know Veltman as well as I should.
And Bruce’s new translation is not the only Veltman in English. Northwestern University Press is reissuing James J. Gebhard’s 1998 volume of Selected Stories in paperback this year. One of the five stories in that collection, “Travel Impressions, and, among Other Things, a Pot of Geraniums” (Путевые впечатления и, между прочим, горшок ерани, 1840), also seems to have appeared in a book of stories by various authors translated by David Lowe in 1979.
Disclaimer: I’ve met or corresponded with Andrew, Bell, and Favorov.
Full Stop
I recently got to talk to Anna Berman about translating Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya’s “Behind the Wall” (За стеною, 1862), a story I first learned about from her, and our conversation is at Full Stop.
Free e-book: “Behind the Wall” by Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya
After lots of generous suggestions and many small improvements, “Behind the Wall” (За стеною, 1862) by Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya—seen on this blog in 2023—is finally out as a dual-language e-book! You can download it for free from Minnesota’s University Digital Conservancy. It’s published under a CC BY 4.0 license, so you’re welcome to read it, distribute it, modify it, or whatever you like, with attribution.
While you’re there, help yourself to any of these past e-books:
The Meeting by Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya (V. Krestovsky), a translation of Свидание (1879).
It Didn’t Come Off by Sophie Engelhardt (Olga N.), a translation of Не сошлись (1867).
“The Old Man” by Sophie Engelhardt (Olga N.), a translation of Старик (1857).
“The Symmetry of a Hoax”
Mikhail Chulkov’s The Comely Cook, or The Adventures of a Debauched Woman (Пригожая повариха, или Похождение развратной женщины, 1770) starts with the words “Part 1” and ends abruptly without ever giving us a second part, so many have reasonably assumed it was unfinished. But in 1988 Alexander Levitsky made a good case that this is wrong, and the work as we have it stands on its own, and furthermore everyone who sees social commentary in it is misinterpreting it.
The Comely Cook is narrated by Martona, a young widow who sets out “to assure financial security for herself” through a series of affairs with men that begin two weeks after her husband’s death at the Battle of Poltava (109). Soviet and Western scholars from Dmitrii Blagoi (“Chulkov’s novel deals with the bitter lot of a common person—the poor wife of a sergeant… who is forced to sell herself”) to John Garrard speak of Chulkov’s realism and “presumed ‘social concerns’” (99–100). But the novel isn’t plausibly situated in any real place and time. Russian place names are mentioned, but the characters’ names (Martona, Sveton, Akhal, Svidal, Oral) don’t sound Russian. Nor does the chronology hold together. If Martona’s husband died at a battle that took place in 1709, it’s odd that Chulkov has a clerk read an ode by Lomonosov that year, when Lomonosov wasn’t even born until 1711. The only way it works is if it isn’t in contemporary Russia or Peter’s Russia, but a “fictional Russia” connected not to Peter’s actual Russia but to the fictional “Petrine tales” (100–01).
Nitpicking digression: I’m convinced by Levitsky’s argument that a social reading of The Comely Cook misses the point, but he says “the only mention of what could be construed as society’s possible ‘guilt’ are the semi-pathetic utterances at the beginning of Martona’s narrative” (101), yet surely the best evidence for society’s guilt is three paragraphs in, when an “honest old woman” starts the recent widow on her path by bringing a “young and handsome man to cheer me up.”
Levitsky thinks Chulkov is moved by not sympathy for actual widows, but a desire to mock his pretentious neoclassicist contemporaries who would grudgingly allow novels inside the literary tent only if they were proper and useful and centered on “an authoritative, ‘sophisticated’ image of the author” (98). Chulkov “succeeded in combining serious attention to the narrative function of the ‘author’ with an understanding of literature as a form of entertainment, free from utilitarian aspects” (98).
As for the work being complete, it begins with Martona wanting financial independence, and at the end she achieves it, so “we may be reasonably certain that any ‘remainder’ or ‘Part II’ would have been a different story altogether, entitled perhaps The Comely Martona but certainly not Cook since the comely proprietress is no longer a cook, and no longer needs to be debauched” (110). The work’s structure also hints it is complete.
The text can be divided into two sections (not counting the “two mock dedications” and “mock apology in verse,” 102). The first part: “events directly affect Martona, she is almost always the object of direct discourse, and she makes continued use of proverbs” (107). Through her proverbs and not-so-edifying digressions, Chulkov mocks the figure of the serious, moralizing and intellectual author figure that his contemporaries idealized.
In the second part, there are fewer proverbs and Martona is less central, but there is a tighter structure than has been appreciated. Using theatrical terminology in the text, Chulkov sets up a tragedy with a comedy inside it and a story embedded in the comedy. Two men, Akhal and Svidal, want Martona, and Svidal tricks Akhal into fighting a duel with unloaded pistols, fakes his own death, and thereby gets Akhal to flee the scene. That’s the first part of the tragedy, which now goes to the back burner. Now a comedy starts, involving a servant poisoning Martona’s friend’s merchant husband to make him seem insane. In the middle of the comedy, a character explains events to the husband through an ostensibly fictional story that is clearly the husband’s own story. After the end of the comedy, the tragedy ends, with Akhal taking poison and willing his estate (bought with Martona’s money, which he had tricked her out of much earlier) to Martona. This nested ABCBA structure already suggests design (it’s not just an adventure story begun and ended whenever), but the parts are further connected: “poison is an element in all three episodes,” and in each “the central character seemingly loses his wits and is held forcibly on the bed” (108–09). The comedy and tragedy end with two similar women, Martona and her friend, receiving estates (109).
The irony is that Chulkov’s later champions praise him for the things he disavowed and explain his formal innovations away as unfortunate lapses (107). In his metaliterary mockery, he “concentrated on the very techniques by which the new prose fiction aspired to prove itself; and, while attacking them, he pioneered alternative techniques in the process” (104). His narrator’s speech is full of juxtapositions of high and low style, as well as “stylistically contrasted epithets” like “toothless Adonis,” “stout maiden,” and “gray-haired cupid” (104–05). The plot, meanwhile, is full of twists and reversals, and Martona “reacts to them by shifting from sad to happy moods just as rapidly as the events unfold—indeed, too rapidly for the reader to suspend his disbelief” (111). The rapid changes in verbal style, plot, and the narrator’s mood echo each other and can be seen as a series of returns to whatever mode one takes as dominant, just as the characters nearly all “return to each other at some point or other either physically or in their memories” (111).
There is even more in this article, including possible illustrated subtexts (“Martona’s story is told in easily visualized scenes that rather resemble those pictures in Hogarth’s classic The Harlot’s Progress,” with further similarities to Russian lubki, 106–07) and Chulkov’s tendency to play games with his readers and his “established history of failing to acknowledge his sources” (109–12). In that last connection, Levitsky speculates that The Comely Cook may prove to be “an adaptation of some Western literary model” (112). (The Comely Cook is often mentioned with Daniel Defoe’s 1722 Moll Flanders, which also has a first-person female narrator. John Garrard in 1970 [23n18] thought Chulkov probably hadn’t read it, and I think Levitsky is suggesting there could have been a much closer borrowing from a more obscure Western source. I’m waiting to read this interesting-looking 2015 article by Emma Lieber until I finish Moll Flanders.)
See Alexander Levitsky, “Mikhail Chulkov’s The Comely Cook: The Symmetry of a Hoax,” Russian Literature Triquarterly 21 (1988): 97–115. I like the format of the long-defunct RLT: in one issue they would publish (or even commission) translations of untranslated works from some corner of Russian literature—the eighteenth century here, women writers in 1974—then print a bunch of exceptionally readable articles analyzing that corner the next issue.
“The Retirement Party”
I recently read an English translation of a very short and rather good story by Natalya Baranskaya (1908–2004) called “The Retirement Party” (Проводы, 1968). Baranskaya started publishing fiction at 60 after retiring from a museum in 1966, and this story is one of her first. It’s the kind of story where everything feels ordinary and so especially bleak.
Anna Vasilevna Kosova, a conscientious but little-noticed accountant whose husband died in World War II, is retiring at 58. She was born in 1907, so the story must be set in 1965 or 1966. The first layer of sadness is that it’s clear her co-workers will soon forget her, and many don’t know her well even now; she will be alone and trying to live on a monthly pension of 50-odd rubles when even her full salary of 70 rubles isn’t enough.
The next layer is the gradual revelation of how she came to retire. At her retirement party, after formulaic remarks from the chair of the trade union committee and the director,
The head accountant asked to say a few words. With some effort he ascended the stage, pulled out a handkerchief to clean his glasses, then shoved the glasses into the pocket where the handkerchief had been. Realizing what he had done, he quickly pulled them out and placed them back on his big nose. In a mournful, quiet voice he began:
“Dear Anna Vasilevna, we have worked together for many, many years. You’re an excellent worker and a very, very dear friend…” His voice broke. He remained silent, then added in a whisper, “Forgive me, please,” and went back to his seat.
Anna Vasilevna stared at him in astonishment. But at this point, a short-legged girl with a glowing pink complexion, freckles, and carrot-colored curls, jumped up onto the stage. Tilting her head, she shot a glance at the director and exuberantly announced:
“The local trade union committee cordially invites all of you, on behalf of Anna Vasilevna of course, for a cup of tea. Let’s all go to the accounting office. There’s enough room for everybody.” She glanced at the director again and giggled. Wiggling her hips, she jumped from the stage and, running toward the door, added: “The bottom gave out in our samovar… but we’ll make do somehow! Bring the new cups because we don’t have enough!” (137)
Но еще попросил слова главбух. Он с трудом взобрался на сцену, вытащил из кармана платок, протер очки, сунул их было в карман, затем надел обратно на свой большой нос и сказал печальным, тихим голосом:
— Уважаемая Анна Васильевна, мы много-много лет работаем с вами. Вы очень хороший работник. И вы очень-очень хороший товарищ…. — Он замолк, потом добавил совсем тихо: —…извините, пожалуйста, — и пошел на свое место.
Анна Васильевна взглянула на него встревоженно. Но тут на сцену вскочила коротконогая рыжая девчонка, пылающая румянцем, веснушками, морковного цвета кудрями, тряхнула головой, стрельнула в директора быстрым взглядом и весело заорала в зал:
— Наш профком приглашает всех на чашку чаю от себя лично… и от тети Ани, конечно, так что просим к нам в бухгалтерию… всех вас просим… — Она опять взглянула на директора, хихикнула, спрыгнула вниз, вильнув бедрами, и уже на бегу закончила: —Самовар не варит, чайник отчаялся!.. Чашки новые несите, посуды мало!
The new teacups mentioned by the girl with carrot-colored curls (Lelka) had just been given to Anna Vasilevna as a retirement present. But what is going on with the head accountant?
The director, Shavrov, pressured the head accountant Yakov Moiseevich Zuskin to get Kosova to retire, even though her work was good and she needed the money. Zuskin objects—“I’d hate to hurt a good person like her if it can be avoided”—but does not feel able to stand up to Shavrov (141). He does, however, refuse to take part in organizing the retirement party, which falls to Rozhnova from the trade union committee, who helps Shavrov push Kosova out. Kosova meekly fills out the necessary forms; it is easy for Shavrov and Rozhnova to make Kosova and Zuskin feel like they have no choice.
So why this intrigue to engineer the retirement of a good accountant at 58 instead of a few years later? Office gossip understands why:
The staff now tried to guess what the new replacement would be like. “It’ll probably be some femme fatale,” quipped Kharitonova. Lelka proceeded to imitate this unknown femme fatale. She puckered up her lips, cooed, and strode between desks on her toes without bending her knees. Spreading her fingers wide like prongs, she made a few calculations on the abacus. Then, rolling her eyes languorously, she lisped, “The sum total is one million kopecks and one hundred thousand roubles.” Everybody laughed; with Lelka around there was never a dull moment. But Anna Vasilyevna’s heart ached. She was already forgotten. (143–44)
Начали думать и гадать, какая будет она, новая сотрудница? «Небось фря какая-нибудь», — сказала Харитонова. Лелька стала представлять ее, эту будущую — фрю. Складывала губы трубочкой, едва цедила слова, сюсюкала, ходила, не сгибая колен, на цыпочках, считала на счетах, растопырив пальцы рогульками, и говорила, томно закатывая глаза: «В итоге имеем миллион копеек и сто тысяч рублей». Все смеялись: с Лелькой, известно, не соскучишься. Но у Анны Васильевны щемило сердце — они ее уже забывали.
Virtue is punished and vice rewarded, but in this world virtue and vice and reward and punishment are all lukewarm.
The word Anatole Forostenko translates as femme fatale is interesting and new to me: fria, which evidently went from being an indeclinable word nobles used for the queen in a deck of cards to a regularly inflected noun used in slang to mean someone with an inflated opinion of themselves. Vasmer treated fria as a diminutive of frant, but Jakobson thought it came from German Frau, and another etymological dictionary proposes that, if fria came from Frau, then its negative meaning was influenced by similar-sounding Russian words like fifa.
See Natalya Baranskaya, “The Retirement Party,” trans. Anatole Forostenko, Russian Literature Triquarterly 9 (1974): 136–44. Baranskaya is best known as the author of A Week Like Any Other (Неделя как неделя, 1969) and was the grandniece of Vasily Rozanov (1856–1919).
Passion and memory
This has got to be one half-serious and one satirical quotation of some classical commonplace, right?
From The Comely Cook, or The Adventures of a Debauched Woman (Пригожая повариха, или Похождение развратной женщины, 1770), by Mikhail Chulkov, my [slight modification] of a translation by David Gasperetti that I’m thoroughly enjoying:
Он начал говорить и уверять меня в своей любви, а мертвые никогда не изъясняются в такой страсти. Таким образом, узнала я действительно, что он жив и любит меня столько же, сколько я его, или, может быть, и меньше, в чем мы с ним не рядились, а полюбили друг друга без всякого торгу. Восхищения нашего в сем случае описывать я не буду для того, что лишнее будет входить во все подробности слов, действий и движения, которые производятся в любовном беспамятстве, и многие уже различными опытами удостоверились, что спустя несколько времени страсть восхищенного совсем пропадает и совсем позабывает все, что любовник тогда говорил, точно так, как больной после горячки или сумасшедший опамятовавшись.
Svidal began to speak and to convince me of his love with the type of tender passion the dead are never able to muster. Thus I knew for certain that he was alive and loved me as much as I him, or perhaps somewhat less, but we didn’t bargain over this and loved each other without any haggling. At this point I will not depict our delight because it would be superfluous to recount in detail all the words and actions and movements that are produced in a frenzy of passion, [and many have already confirmed by various experiments that after a certain time]
the passion of the enraptured one vanishes and she completely forgets everything her lover said at that moment[Update 9/1/25: Languagehat convincingly suggests this substitution, see comments: “the passion of he who had been enraptured vanishes and he completely forgets everything he had once said as a lover”], exactly as it happens with a patient after a fever or a madman after recovering his senses. (93)]
From Memoirs of Hadrian (Mémoires d’Hadrien, 1951), by Marguerite Yourcenar:
Cloué au corps aimé comme un crucifié à sa croix, j’ai appris sur la vie quelques secrets qui déjà s’émoussent dans mon souvenir, par l’effet de la même loi qui veut que le convalescent, guéri, cesse de se retrouver dans les vérités mystérieuses de son mal, que le prisonnier relâché oublie la torture, ou le triomphateur dégrisé la gloire. (22)
Nailed to the beloved body as one crucified is to the cross, I learned a few secrets about life that are already fading in my memory, by the effect of the same law that demands that the convalescent, once cured, should cease to recognize himself in the mysterious truths of his illness; that the prisoner, once released, should forget his torture; or the victor, once sobered, his glory.
I’m reading these books at the same time for different reasons and have nothing to say about this other than a general “huh, I wasn’t expecting that.” Oh, and it’s fun that a man writing a female narrator and a woman writing a male one both used this.
Nearly done with the “Behind the Wall” e-book
I’m finally almost ready to publish an e-book of Nadezhda Khvoshchinskaya’s “Behind the Wall” (За стеною, 1862), seen here in serial form in 2023. I’ve already had some wonderful feedback from colleagues, readers of this blog, and students (my own and others’) who have read a somewhat revised version. Even when I’m about to pronounce it done, though, I keep finding things, and I’d love to hear any advice you may have (no formal/informal pronoun stuff this time, I promise).
The tenant’s own personal servant
Russian from the 1880 text:
На другой день, осторожные шаги его “собственной” прислуги показали, как дрессирована эта прислуга и, следовательно, как светски воспитан господин. […] Из его комнаты раздались звуки скрипки, замолкли тотчас, и его “собственный” служитель явился ко мне с извинением, что меня обеспокоили. (11–12)
How it looked on this blog in 2023:
The next day the careful steps of “his own” servant showed how well this servant had been trained, and consequently to what aristocratic habits the master had been brought up. […] The sounds of a violin rang out from his room, were silenced immediately, and “his own” servant came to my rooms with an apology for having disturbed me.
Then I changed it to this in 2024:
The next day the careful steps of his “personal” servant showed how well this servant had been trained, and consequently to what aristocratic habits the master had been brought up. […] The sounds of a violin came from his room, immediately ceased, and his “personal” servant came to my rooms to apologize for the disturbance.
A student at Carleton College asked a question I couldn’t answer: why is “personal” in quotes in that last version? Well, because sobstvennyi ‘one’s own’ is in quotes in Russian. But this is like the quail in Fathers and Children—the quotes might be in the same place, but the reason for them doesn’t come across. So why are there quotes around sobstvennyi in the Russian text?
Sobstvennyi and the related noun sobstvennost’, which imply private ownership of something, come up four times in the story: twice here to describe the tenant’s servant (as opposed to the landlord’s servant, whose services come with the apartment), once about a different apartment that the man owns rather than rents, and once when the woman explicitly and shockingly says she wants to be the man’s property and his slave. This is 1862, a year after the emancipation, and Khvoshchinskaya in 1865 talks about this story by contrasting the “time of serfdom” to the “new life beginning.” Are the quotation marks the narrator’s way of dissociating himself from the serfdom-era habit of saying people belong to people? If so, maybe I should partly revert to 2023 and replace “his ‘personal’ servant” with “‘his’ servant,” possibly with a footnote. Or is there a different way to take the quotes around sobstvennyi?
Flowers on her mind or a wreath on her head?
This is emotional elliptical speech where you need to figure out what verb is implied.
Russian from the 1880 text:
— Ну, кто ж мешает? вдовствуй себе честно, салон открой! Ну, мужа ей камер-юнкера, флёрдоранжи ей в голову. Каравай ей, попа, благословение родительское… (44)
How it looked on this blog in 2023:
“Well, who’s stopping you? Be the honest widow, open a salon! Fill her mind with dreams of a courtier for a husband and fleurs d’orange at the wedding. And the traditional loaf of bread, and the priest, and the parental blessing…”
What I’m thinking of changing it to in 2025:
“Well, who’s stopping you? Be the honest widow, open a salon! Get her a courtier for a husband and a garland of fleurs d’orange. And the traditional loaf of bread, and the priest, and the parental blessing…”
A trap I keep falling into, but didn’t know about before I started trying to translate things, is clinging to a misreading because it felt clever when I thought of it. I thought I’d seen something when I decided v golovu had to imply putting ideas into someone’s head, not flowers in their hair or (as I now believe) a wreath of flowers onto their head. Anyone know for sure? Fleurs d’orange for a conservative-minded bride are in both Khvoshchinskaya stories I’ve translated.
Better-looking or just better?
Russian from the 1880 text:
Год, в самом деле, больше года мы не видались… Ты мог и забыть, и встретить лучше… Лучше меня не трудно встретить, что же, не мудрено, пожалуй… Но никто не может тебя любить так, как я, нет, невозможно! (32)
How it looked on this blog in 2023:
For a year, really for more than a year we didn’t see each other… You could have forgotten me or met someone prettier… It wouldn’t be difficult to meet someone prettier than me, I’m sure it wouldn’t be as hard as all that…
And in 2024 I stuck with “prettier” though I changed some other things:
For a year, really for more than a year we didn’t see each other… You could have forgotten me or met someone prettier… I’m sure it wouldn’t be so very hard to find someone prettier than me, it would be quite natural…
Here’s the thing. Khoroshii means good, and luchshe means better. But the short form khorosh can mean “handsome/beautiful, charming in appearance,” and it often did in the nineteenth century. And luchshe can be the comparative for that meaning too. Both things are logical in context, and I know some people prefer “better than me” in this passage, not “prettier” or “better-looking.”
There is a line running through the story where the woman worries the man no longer finds her attractive and another line where she worries he loves her only because he finds her attractive. They fell in love when she was a 25-year-old mother married to someone else, and now she is 30, if we take the man’s words as precise. I like the “better-looking” interpretation here because it continues the note of anxiety from earlier, when he says she has grown more beautiful (pokhoroshela) and she is afraid she will seem old to him. But I may just have this wrong, and I don’t want to activate associations that shouldn’t be there.
Correcting a slander
There’s no question here, but I made a significant enough mistake that I want to call attention to it.
Russian from the 1880 text:
Вдруг она вскочила, стремительно бросилась к двери и защелкнула ее на ключ; я слышал, как она упала на колени; я слышал слова ее молитвы, если только это были слова, если только эта агония была молитва… (27)
How it looked on this blog in 2023:
Suddenly she jumped up, rushed to the door, and locked it; I heard the words of her prayer, if they were indeed words, if that agony could indeed be called a prayer…
How it should have looked and will from now on:
Suddenly she jumped up, rushed to the door, and locked it; I heard her fall to her knees; I heard the words of her prayer, if they were indeed words, if that agony could indeed be called a prayer…
Generations of readers of Anna Karenina thought Stiva Oblonskii was more reprehensible than they should have thought he was. The word raskaivat’sia occurs twice, 18 words apart, and a copyist accidentally skipped those 18 words, which would have told readers that Oblonskii actually did feel bad about cheating on his wife.
I managed to duplicate that poor copyist’s mistake even though I had electric lights and word processors and a much, much shorter text. I skipped from one ia slyshal to the next and missed the part where the woman kneels to pray, unaware the narrator is listening. This is of course a big deal later when the man is questioning the sincerity of her Christian faith. So there’s one advantage of my slow pace finishing this!
Once university libraries bound paper issues of journals into books that you could only check out for 3 days. Now you can check them out for longer, but no one does, because it’s quicker to get a .pdf of an article. But I had them fish the bound Russian Literature Triquarterly for 1974 out of storage and was rewarded. It’s the exact layer of culture that shaped those of us who spent the Reagan years watching Free to Be You and Me (with “Ladies First” and “William Wants a Doll”) every year in an elementary school where we called our teachers by their first names.
The first thing I looked for was Antonia Glasse’s “The Formidable Woman: Portrait and Original” (pp. 433–53), which I was led to by my reading about saints’ lives. Glasse identifies a type that goes across centuries, genres, and languages, the formidable woman, who is “shrewd, resolute, energetic, an overwhelming and overbearing bully, determined to do what she thinks is the best and right thing”; no “frail vessel,” she is “middle-aged, closer to sixty than forty,” and “as big and strong as a man (frequently bigger and stronger) and, in general, shows many masculine qualities (deep voice, manner of walking, manners in general)” (434). She is never important in her own right, but very useful for showing the passivity of more important characters through contrast (436–37). And she is not to be confused with the tyrannical woman, a “cruel, dark, and evil” type who can be a “more fully developed, psychological” character (436).
Who is the first formidable woman in Russian letters? St. Theodosius’s mother. The type continues with Moscow society ladies in Griboedov’s Woe from Wit, Ivan Fedorovich Shponka’s aunt in Gogol, the mother in Saltykov-Shchedrin’s The Golovlevs, Akhrosimova in Tolstoi’s War and Peace, all these characters’ real-life prototypes, and the surly cashiers and waitresses Glasse met in the USSR. Outside Russia it encompasses the Queen of Hearts from Alice in Wonderland, various aunts from P. G. Wodehouse, and, age notwithstanding, Lucy Van Pelt from Peanuts.
To my delight this is the same issue that published Andrew Donskov’s translation (pp. 160–219) of Pisemskii’s Baal (Ваал, 1873), along with Donskov’s article “Pisemsky’s Talent as a Playwright” (pp. 486–95). These were squeezed into an issue “devoted to women in Russian literature” through the qualifier “both as characters and authors” (facing copyright page).
Here’s part of the front matter:
After lots of translations of women poets and prose writers, the issue had a humor section with unsigned English parodies of Tsvetaeva. There was one called “Poem without an End,” mocking the great Poem of the End (Поэма конца, 1924), and two shorter ones, including this:
Once you stared greedily
As I sat in my fur;
Once you named easily
Clear charms that were
Mine. O, your honey is saccharine
And your chocolate is carob;
You’re good at loving
Like Pasternak is an Arab. (598)
I’m guessing the irreverent soul who wrote that actually finds Tsvetaeva’s enjambments across stanzas as earthshaking as I do.
There were also reviews taking Russian textbooks to task for the disproportionate number of masculine verb forms used in examples. Women learning Russian from these books can’t easily master the forms they need to talk about themselves in the past tense, and anyone using these books will have trouble talking to a woman on familiar terms. The reading passages are mostly about men, and what women you can find are cast in stereotypical roles (“it is hard to explain why the women in the stories never leave the kitchen when even in America half the married women work, and in Russia, equal rights have been on the books at least for fifty years,” 571). Starling Walter found 114 total “model female sentences” in Townsend’s Continuing with Russian and grouped those below as “Women: An Intellectual Profile.”
She talked incessantly (without stopping).
She talks very much.
She keeps talking about her son.
She keeps on / is still talking about her son.
There is someone for her to talk to.
She will be happy to say a few words.
“That’s not so” she said to herself.
She tried to persuade him for a long time, and finally she succeeded.
She succeeded in convincing him. (562)
Most interesting to me was the opening to Sydney Schultze’s review of a set of other textbooks:
“Are those guys really hugging and kissing on page three, or did I just translate it wrong?” Robin, brought up on Stilman and Harkins’ Introduction to Russian Grammar, unable to imagine a female narrator, especially one following in her father’s steps in studying to be a biologist, had ignored all the feminine verb endings and turned Domik na bolote‘s Valya Kostrova into a male. When Valya and Volodya embraced, she found it more likely that they were homosexuals than that Valya was a female. (571)
Nowadays the gendered past tense forms in textbooks are much more evenly split, but students look in vain to learn which verbs are used to talk about same-sex marriages or which endings non-binary and trans Russian speakers use for themselves or how Russian speakers hostile to unconventional gender identities might react to different approaches.
An epilogue to my tour through 1970s feminism: while reading the 1974 article by Glasse (1933–2019), I learned that she was denied tenure in 1976 when the dean overruled her department’s recommendation. Along with several other women, she sued the university, arguing that a less qualified man was given tenure the year before, finally losing the lawsuit in 1983. If they had given Glasse tenure, I might have met her, but I never even heard this story when I studied in the same department in the mid-1990s. By then it was made up of three men and two women with tenure, plus one woman with a “visiting” title.
XIX век 
