Russian-English

— The experience meeting which the Club held last month on the problems of translation has set me to thinking of the difficulties which confront the translator from the Russian. Whether or not we wholly accept Shakespeare’s dictum that

there are yet some of us who deduce for ourselves the axiom that the mind’s construction betrays itself fairly well through the tongue. Every sentence which reaches our ears furnishes us with circumstantial evidence, through its tone, construction, and pronunciation, of many facts concerning not only the speaker, but his whole nation.

No prose writer, assuredly, has ever known the heart-secrets of his own tongue more thoroughly than Turgeneff. Almost the last words he wrote confirm this view as to the revelatory character of language. “ In days when doubt and boding thoughts as to the fate of my fatherland oppress me,” he cries, with his customary sadness, ☺“ thou alone art my staff, my support, O thou great, true, and free Russian language ! It is impossible that such a speech should have been bestowed on any but a great people.” We may omit the opinions as to the physiognomy of language uttered by competent judges of other lands, since our interest lies, for the present, solely with Russia.

Probably no one more fully appreciates this eulogy than he who attempts to do justice to Russian masterpieces of literature in translation. He recalls the miracle of tongues at Pentecost, and begins to wonder whether the marvel was not wrought in the atmosphere or upon the ears of the hearers rather than in the tongues of the Apostles, and whether he can be as successful as the medium which was so potent on that occasion in conveying words and thought.

For, in truth, it is much the same sort of miracle which the translator is called upon to work at the present day. The thoughts of great speakers must pass through him to hearers of another land or time. In him they must he so transmuted that not alone may every man hear them in that tongue wherein he was born, but he must also be almost persuaded that they were originally written therein.

If it be objected that the translator’s work generally appeals to the eye rather than to the ear, as this theory demands, the answer is simple : the eye not only hears every word that it reads in a language with which it is acquainted, but tries to fix a sound upon every foreign word whose letters it can decipher. Assuming that the translator’s mind, the medium through which the speaker reaches his hearers, is more tangible than the wonder-working medium on Pentecost, it is well to define its form. The translator’s mind is a prism. Its three sides are formed by the three possible manners of reproducing the light which it has received. First, the translator may reproduce it crudely by translating literally, school - boy fashion. The result is apt to be both awkward and ridiculous, nay, even misleading, like the child’s “ cow’s buttons ” for boutons de vache. Second, he may use perfect freedom, in the style chiefly prescribed as an antidote to the preceding. It is the favorite French method, and, like the first, is also popular with heedless zealots of inaccurate knowledge. It is a covert insult to the reader, since it assumes that he is incapable of comprehending any style, idea, or vocabulary but that of the machine-made novel ; and it is an open insult to the author, who is thus rebuked and martyred by the pen of the uncritical and inartistic executioner. The American translation, through the French, of Count Tolstoy’s My Religion furnishes an instance. How many readers suspect that the twice or thrice mentioned “ Sea of Galilee ” really represents the author’s Galileo, French Galilée ? Third, he can resort to the alternative which we may call picturesque literalness, which is an art. The higher types of the first two methods may, at times, be applied to other languages without the results proving too disastrous ; but the picturesquely literal process is the only one which can be used with any justice or effect in translating Russian. Pray, do not fail to observe that my mind and Goethe’s, as set forth by Mr. Andrews, have been working independently on parallel lines.

In this modern Pentecost the translatorprism is not called upon to decompose the ray of white light which enters him into colors,—say, red, French, violet, Spanish, green, English, and golden, Italian. That is the philologist’s task. But what is demanded of him is really more difficult. He must decompose and recompose the white ray within himself, and send it forth uncolored by himself, as white as when he received it, but alive with all the possibilities of color. He must be like a pure block of Iceland spar, — he must allow the object to be seen perfectly through him, and he must also produce a copy essentially indistinguishable from the original. How is this to be accomplished without the gift of a sixth sense ? As a matter of fact, the intuition which is almost equivalent to a sixth sense is as characteristic of philologists and of first-class translators as it is of composers and first-class musicians.

In no case, among European languages at least, is this intuitive sense, which expresses itself in picturesque literalness, more requisite than in an attempt to translate Russian. In French, Italian, Spanish, one can dash along, with constant suggestions as to the proper word furnished by the text. The customs and the spirit of the countries are well known. The question of construction is practically non-existent. In German all the above is true except as to construction ; and there the translator actually receives valuable hints as to novelty and ingenuity, especially in poetry. In Russian hardly any of this holds good. A sort of reversed construction often adds piquancy or force to the original, but this is lost in the transfer. Russian is generally, but erroneously believed to be harsh. In reality, this Italian of the North is so soft that strangers find it difficult to pronounce, on account of the harshness of their own consonants and of their tongues in general. Hence the English translator encounters a sonorousness and melody which he is reluctantly forced to omit from prose, and which constitutes his despair in attempts to render poetry and blank verse.

Moreover, the delicate shadings of the language are as elusive and indescribable as the exquisite opaline tints of a June midnight in Petersburg. Verbal forms are differentiated until they remind one of Hudibras’s controversialists, who could “split a hair ’twixt south and southwest side.” Tenses are used out of time ; endless diminutives discriminate between the fine gradations of approbation, love, respect, friendship, scorn, worthlessness ; augmentatives, somewhat less numerous, indicate degrees of superiority, admiration, depreciation. Untranslatable words, syllables, letters, are thrown in with no aim save euphony or added intensity in some direction, and shift position, force, and sense at the will of the speaker. Racy turns of speech, as witty and apposite as those of Sancho Panza, abound. Add to this that the point of view is different from the Anglo-Saxon, and that one must possess, if not a practical, certainly a sympathetic and intuitive appreciation of it, as well as of utterly unfamiliar ceremonials and customs, if one is to render thoroughly characteristic passages, not to mention the general tone conveyed by constantly occurring delicate national touches. Evidently, this difficulty, entering into the spirit of the country, constitutes one half of the problem, which is equally important with the half presented by the peculiarities of the language, and its tense, terse, grammatical forms.