Let me step away from Bazarov for a bit. Fathers and Sons is an unusually well-written book. Unusual even for Turgenev. I think – this is hardly an unusual opinion – that it is his best writing, alongside the best stories from A Sportsman’s Notebooks (1852). This is what I mean, from just a couple pages into the first chapter, where a father awaits the return of his son who has been absent at university for several years:
The servant, out of a sense of propriety, or perhaps because he didn’t want to remain under his master’s eye, had gone to the gate and lit his pipe. Nikolai Petrovich [the master] bent his head and began staring at the decrepit porch steps; nearby, a large mottled young chicken strutted with a stately gait, treading firmly with its yellow legs; a scruffy cat, curled up in a most affected manner against the railing, observed the chicken with hostility. The sun was scorching; a smell of warm rye bread wafted from the dark passage of the carriage inn. (Ch. 1)
Turgenev is introducing the first of the three estates that will be the main settings of the novel. The passage gives a lot of information about the estate and its master – it is worn down, the servants and chickens do their own thing in the face of the incompetent masters and lazy cats. But it is homey and pleasant, smelling of fresh bread, even if the Superfluous Man who owns it cannot even manage a farm properly.
Now, this is the introduction to the third, much poorer, estate, Bazarov’s home:
But then, on the slope of a gently rising hill at long last there appeared a small village where Bazarov’s parents lived. next to it, in a grove of young birch trees, they could see a small manor house with a thatched roof. Two peasants wearing caps stood in front of the first hut and traded insults. “You’re a big pig,” one said to the other, “worse than a piglet.” “And your wife’s a witch,” the other retorted. (Ch. 19)
Those peasants could be borrowed from a Nikolai Gogol story. Turgenev signals: this setting is different. He even includes a pipe to link the two scenes, but this time it is smoked not by the servant, but by the father (“the pipe was bobbing up and down in his fingers,” Ch. 20) who unlike the previous father is too poor to have servants to smoke his pipe for him.
The other estate, encountered in between these two – I am just finishing the thought – is well-kept and orderly, even sterile, so it is introduced by its architecture before any people show up, and when they do they are “tall footmen in livery” and a portly butler in “a black frockcoat. “[E]verything was clean and sweet-smelling, just like in a minister’s reception room” (Ch. 16) – no pipe-smoking allowed here.
I was honestly planning to just point out some of the most pleasing sentences and images of Fathers and Sons, of which there are plenty, but I seem to have moved into structural matters as well. The two work together, the prose and the construction. Like I said, it is an unusually well-written book.
When you praise a writer's work--"the prose and the construction"--I have a question (assuming you are not reading the Russian original): how much of the credit goes to the translator? Whenever I think about the problems of translations into English, I am always frustrated when I read translations, wishing that I could instead read the original language versions.
ReplyDeleteA lot of credit, is my answer. Michael Katz is the star here. The Norton Critical Edition is the book.
ReplyDeleteGood translators are artists themselves. They are also competent professionals. They know what they are doing. You are safe in their hands. Relax, relax. The translated text is just another text. Your New Critic tools still work.
Yeah, good translators need to be good writers in the target language. She gets a lot of smack written about her, but one reason I keep going back to Constance Garnett's Chekhov is that her English prose is better than that of most other Chekhov translators.
ReplyDeleteI love the 13 vol. Garnett Chekhov -- can be read and reread with pleasure. My desert island choice.
DeleteBut let's not forget that it was Turgenev who put that chicken, that cat and that rye bread into the scene in the first place.
ReplyDeleteHere's Garnett's translation (the only version of F&S I've read) of the first passage quoted above:
ReplyDeleteThe servant, from a feeling of propriety, and perhaps, too, not anxious to remain under the master's eye, had gone to the gate, and was smoking a pipe. Nikolai Petrovitch bent his head, and began staring at the crumbling steps; a big mottled fowl walked sedately towards him, treading firmly with its great yellow legs; a muddy cat gave him an unfriendly look, twisting herself coyly round the railing. The sun was scorching; from the half-dark passage of the posting station came an odour of hot rye-bread.
Side by side with Katz's translation, I declare them both pretty good. I don't know why I'm talking about Garnett all of a sudden. You wanted to talk about structure and language.
Wait, how does a muddy cat turn into a scruffy one?
DeleteNo idea. I like "muddy," though; it's a surprising adjective. I've read about lots of scruffy cats.
DeleteI checked the Russian. The word used is "zapachkannaya" which has a range of meanings, including both muddy and scruffy. I'd say that "grimy" is closer to correct than muddy, though. The root word, zapax, suggests an ODOR of uncleanliness, so "muddy" seems a bit off.
DeleteJeffry, thanks. No translator is going to "solve" that word.
DeleteOh good, what does Garnett have for "most affected manner"? "[T]wisting herself coyly," I see. That phrase is a nice example of the artfulness of vagueness. It is hardly visual at all, and more disruptive than precise. You may well imagine something but there is no reason to think you are imaging what Turgenev imagines. He gives his reader a little gap to fill in.
ReplyDeleteThe only significant difference seems to be the exact interpretation of how the chicken is walking. "Crumbling" looks like an error to me. Wooden steps are unlikely to crumble, not if they are still used as steps.
Yeah, Garnett's fine, and her Chekhov is better than that.
Garnett worked too fast, which led to two problems:
ReplyDelete#1: she solved certain hard problems by skipping them.
#2: she made lots of errors.
I will bet this is an error, corrected by Katz, even if the scruffy cat is a more common creature.
Somewhere I wrote a bit about an "iron tombstone" Garnett inserted into Karamazov. These kinds of errors are the cost of reading Garnett.
It's sooo easy to criticize translators from the pre-internet days who had to toil without the tools we take for granted. I remember reading a translation of these famous lines from Nietzsche where Arria got rendered as Arrio (and thus was forcefully transgendered). If you don't know Latin and have no access to the internet it's very easy to assume that Arria is a typo written instead the much more famous Arrio:
DeleteA Holy Lie. The lie that was on Arria's lips when she died (Paete, non dolet) obscures all the truths that have ever been uttered by the dying. It is the only holy lie that has become famous, whereas elsewhere the odour of sanctity has clung only to errors.
I think that what Garnett did was amazing, despite the flaws. It was a tremendous task and I am grateful to her.
DeleteI also wish that whenever there was a new translation, the publishers could find something better to say about it than that it doesn't have Garnett's mistakes. Often, you know, it also lacks Garnett's feel for English-language prose. I've run into some translations that may have been more accurate than Garnett's, but they were not as readable.
I think that Garnett knew little about Russia itself, and she misunderstood some idiomatic speech and references to rural (and plain old non-England) things. And yes, she just churned through the stuff, page after page, day after day. I think she was paid by the page.
ReplyDeleteGarnett traveled twice to Russia, once in 1894 and again in 1904. Her home in England was known as Dostoevsky Corner as she was surrounded by a small community of Russian exiles whom she befriended. She followed events in Russia as a matter of course and was invited to translate for Lenin when he visited England -- she deferred to a Russian friend in that instance because she was unfamiliar with Marxist terminology in Russian (although she had read Marx in English). The majority of her work was done in collaboration wit native Russian speakers although each of them were clear that their role was subordinate to hers. The notion that she just churned through the stuff can be attributed to D.H.Lawrence. Typical romantic hogwash.
DeleteD.H. Lawrence, no kidding? Where did he write or say that?
DeleteBy my sense of "churn," Garnett churned. The logistics of what she did required some churning.
Come to think of it, I am less interested in the source of the Lawrence story than the source of its debunking.
DeleteI do seem to remember some writing by Lawrence - it could have been a letter, or a diary entry perhaps - in which he describes Constance Garnett at work, scribbling page after page at breakneck speed. At least, I think that was Lawrence: I could be mistaken.
DeleteAJ kind of jogged my memory - that is the passage where Lawrence describes the pages piling up beside Garnett as she works.
DeleteMore anecdote: I recall reading something, I think from her grandson's biography (which I have not read), about Garnett sitting on a patio with a pot of tea, a Russian novel, a great stack of paper and a pen, and just going on steadily, one page after the next. How else could she have translated 71 volumes? "Churn" is not an insult; I mean by it that she was quite industrious and steadily so.
DeleteI have discovered that I'm wrong about how she made money off her translation. Her husband published them in affordable editions. It's all admirable. I don't know the Lawrence story.
That must be what I'm remembering, too. Huh.
DeleteNot particularly easy; also necessary.
ReplyDeleteScott, do you still see that, an anti-Garnett PR push? I think the pendulum has swung a bit - recent treatments are more likely to resemble this Guardian squib: "My hero."
ReplyDeleteThe Herzen I have been reading is a "corrected Garnett" which seems like a reasonable way to go about the translation business. The last Dostoevsky I read was Garnett, and it seemed suitably Dostoevskian, by which I mean looney tuney.
Still, reading her Anna Karenina is a mistake, reading her Gogol a worse one. Translations can be replaced even more easily than other works of art.
It is the survival of her Chekhov that is so impressive. I have never found a translation of his stories that does not sound at best exactly like Garnett. Either her influence is all-pervasive or she really caught his voice. I assume the latter.
In the introduction to the Folio Society edition of Chekhov's stories, editor Gordon McVay writes:
Delete"Garnett's versions are generally accurate, and particularly felicitous in conveying the rhythms and textures of Chekhov's prose, and his descriptions of nature and people. Her dialogue, however, is often stilted, and she frequently fails to capture Chekhov's deliberate repetition of significant words and phrases. Accordingly, I have revised Constance Garnett's translations for this edition, in the hope of bringing them even closer to the spirit and letter of Chekhov's text."
Hmm, interesting. So it may matter a lot that Chekhov does not depend on dialogue so much, while Dostoevsky and Turgenev really do.
DeleteAnd equally interesting that, as you say, Chekhov does not depend on dialogue so much when he was also a playwright. (And a rather good one too, I gather...)
DeleteAh ha! Garnett's versions of Chekhov's plays are not nearly as esteemed as her translations of the short fiction.
DeleteBut of course the plays have been continually tested on the stage. Any line that is a little bit off is replaced.
It can be such a minor difference, what makes a perfectly ordinary line wooden or natural, even in the mouth of a fine actor.
No, good point. A lot of the stuff I'm reading now about translations is a decade or more old (see below). I'm always late to the party, shaking my fist at people who are no longer part of the argument.
ReplyDeleteI like Garnett's Dostoyevsky, but of course what I really love is her Chekhov. Having read 13 volumes of her Chekhov translations, I wish she'd done more. I'm collecting other editions by other translators now, to read the stories Garnett didn't translate. Many of these editions are pretty old, one from 1960, etc. The editors/translators haven't been kind to Connie, but the prose in none of them comes close to hers for grace and style.
I think there were similarities in the way Chekhov worked, the speed of it anyway, and the way Garnett worked. That probably has nothing to do with the results. I don't know. I have yet to come across a mistake of Garnett's that fundamentally changes the way a story is to be interpreted, so I tend to believe she did a pretty good job. She has close to saint status at my house.
I haven't read her Karenina, though. Or her Gogol, not that I know of. I'll have to click on that Guardian link.
Maybe we should talk about Turgenev. Remember him? He wrote that book on child-rearing.
ReplyDeleteOK, fine. Turgenev was a decent man, as a matter of fact, he was a very good man. This is taken from one of the last letters he wrote, addressed to Tolstoy:
Delete'I have not written to you for a long time because I have been sick and now I am, to speak frankly, on my deathbed. The purpose of this letter I am writing now is to tell you how happy and honored I am to have been your contemporary...'
Now that is class. Something a fellow like Nabokov wouldn't recognize if it crashed against his window like a waxwing deceived by the false azure in the windowpane.
DeleteScott, you might enjoy this languagehat summary of Garnett's historic role. I enjoyed it.
ReplyDeletelanguagehat reads Russian and is happily pro-Garnett. Pro-translation in general.
Turgenev, Herzen, Chekhov - Russian literature perhaps had more than its share of great writers who were also decent men, just as it had more than its share of - of - um - men with unusual and strong personalities.
Now where did the Nabokov crack come from? Are you trying to goad me into some rash action? You going to bash Sebald next?
ReplyDeleteHey, you're the one who started it by mentioning Russian writers with Strong Opinions and unusual interests (cough Lolita cough!).
ReplyDeleteThat languagehat post is good, thanks.
ReplyDeleteNabokov had unusual genius, not unusual interests. I was in no way referring to him. In the division above, he belongs in the category of decent men. I am not sure why you are pretending to misunderstand Lolita.
ReplyDeleteNabokov is one of the household gods of Wuthering Expectations, The attack on his lack of "class" is baffling.
I'm sorry about that, it is not my intention to offend or disrespect. Of course Nabokov was a decent man, a great literary genius and a generous soul. However, I do bear a little grudge against him for his meanness against an even greater genius: Cervantes. Some people, myself included, find open admiration of those more meritorious to be classy.
DeleteIn the course of the last decade, Spanish, Brazilian and French newspapers polled a hundred of the top writers of each of their countries about which were their favorite books and the results were clear, Cervantes and Proust by a landslide. On aggregate, both of them got two to three times more mentions than writers on the next tranche.
As for the misreading of Lolita, It's not entirely my fault: I'm an impressionable young mind and I was misled by some of Martin Amis' articles about Nabokov, which pointed out how writers tend to write about what interests them; and The Enchanter, Lolita, Ada and The Original of Laura (and another book I don't remember now) betray a sustained interest on a certain subject matter.
You should track down Guy Davenport's piece on Nabokov's Cervantes lectures. Or the essay in the recent Simon Leys collection. They write about the Nabokov book with open admiration and reject the charge of "meanness," as do I. They both take the book as a valuable addition to Don Quixote criticism.
ReplyDeleteAll works of art demand criticism. No book, not even Don Quixote, does everything. And how can a critic do anything but work on the text in front of him? Every writer I read is more "meritorious" than I am. Perhaps you think criticism is inherently "non-classy."
I do not understand the argument about the polls. If a writer does not pick Don Quixote and Swann's Way as his two favorite books, has he done something wrong?
Nabokov did write about what interested him. Butterflies, for example, and cruelty. "The laureate of cruelty," Martin Amis called him, back when he was a better reader of Nabokov.
That list of books makes terrible evidence, by the way. The Enchanter is a draft version of Lolita - of course they are about the same thing! And Nabokov's later books are full of self-parodying reworkings of his own books, which must make the books incredibly tedious to many readers, but proves only that Nabokov became too self-referential. Bruce Stone makes the same points in this long piece - you might want to skip to the comments, to chain #2, to see the argument laid out most clearly.
I am planning on reading Turgenev for the first time soon and I will likely being with Fathers and Sons.
ReplyDeleteI also was thinking the question that RT asked about the translator. I am often hesitant to comment too deeply concerning the language, sentence structure, etc. when it comes to translated works. I spent a little bit of time researching translators before reading The Brothers Karamazov. It seems that the translators of these great Russian novels have themselves generated a massive amount of commentary and criticism in of themselves. I agree with your comment about them being artists in their own right.
You will get a lot out of Fathers and Sons, I guarantee it. Your kind of novel.
ReplyDeleteIf it helps overcome your hesitation, which I regard as a neurosis, employ this technique: every time you write "Turgenev" replace it with "Turgenev and Katz." Just pretend that they are collaborators, like you are reading a Beaumont and Fletcher play.
And when you are writing about Shakespeare, replace "Shakespeare" with "Shakespeare and his unknown co-writers and his series of editors and transcribers and the actors in his company," all of whom contributed in some way to the text in front of you.
And "the reader," add him to the list too, It is all a convention, in fact a fiction. The Turgenev in my Turgenev posts is not the actual author but the implied author who I have created in cahoots with the real author, his translators, his editors, and who knows which critics.
Some of the greatest writers are actual creations. For example, a Century after Kabir died three collections of his complete poetry were published in India by three different religious groups. The problem? Not a single poem was shared between any two of those books. Also, for Centuries after his death collections of new Kabir poems would continue to be published. The cases of Li Bai and Quevedo are also very interesting, but I'll save those for later.
ReplyDelete"Some of the greatest writers are actual creations."
DeleteDaniel Defoe was another. It was the custom to attribute just about any anonymous memoir or book whose author was otherwise unknown to him until people realised he literally couldn't have written that much and the process of deattribution began.
Mr. Anonymous, do you know when that was - the attribution , or the de-attribution? These are all such good stories, all new to me.
DeleteQuevedo? Francisco de Quevedo? I am on tenterhooks. Some other Quevedo? Then I don't care.
ReplyDeleteNo, that was just a joke. I do not know whatever story you might tell, that is true.
I just read a Simon Leys essay, "The Chinese Attitude toward the Past," where he works through the example of the greatest single work of Chinese calligraphy, "Preface to the Orchid Pavilion," which was "studied by calligraphers for centuries although nobody has ever seen the original" and "may in fact never have existed!"
Francisco de Quevedo, Lord of the Tower of Juan Abad, second only to Cervantes among Spanish writers, second to none among Spanish poets was possibly more than one poet and less than one.
ReplyDeleteFirst, let's deal with the more than one poet part. Quevedo edited and published the poems of the priest Luis de Leon and those of an unknown poet's manuscript, who Quevedo guessed was someone named Francisco de la Torre, but no biographic information was available to him. The next editor of Francisco de la Torres' poems spilled the beans by revealing that Francisco de la Torre was an alias for Francisco [de Quevedo, Lord] de la Torre.
A few Centuries later some scholar disagreed with the attribution to Quevedo of de la Torres' poems and provided some unsourced terse bio info for Francisco de la Torre. Since the manuscript Quevedo claimed to publish from had the original author's name erased with soot and smoke, and the poet's name was only Quevedo's guess, the facts are murky, at best.
Later, I'll explain why, when we claim that Quevedo is the summit of Spanish poetry, we should mention that this summit consists of two peaks, at least according to Quevedo's first editor, friend and co-author, Gonzalez de Salas.
I have never seen anyone call Quevedo anything like the second greatest Spanish writer or the greatest Spanish poet. That sounds like something I would say, although not about Quevedo, out of ignorance. Most of what I have read of him is prose.
ReplyDeleteThat's my argument with translation, that there is not enough of it.
Well, Borges, for one, is on the record as claiming that 'Quevedo, I believe, is inferior to no one' (and then he proceeded to enumerate the list of Quevedo's equals: Homer, Sophocles, Lucretius, Dante, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Swift, Melville and Kafka)… 'Three hundred years have passed since the death of Quevedo, but he still continues to be the leading artist of Hispanic letters. Like Joyce, like Goethe, like Shakespeare, like Dante, and like no other writer, Quevedo is less a man than a vast and complex literature'.
ReplyDeleteTo Octavio Paz, Quevedo was the first modern poet; 'with Quevedo begins what has become the main line of Western poetry…'.
To Pablo Neruda, Quevedo was 'the greatest spiritual poet of all times'… 'The father of the Spanish language'. 'Gongora may be more original, the presence of Grace may be more abundant on Juan de la Cruz, bitterness greater on Baudelaire, and visions more supernatural on Rimbaud, but compared to them or any poet, Quevedo's greatness is greater.
According to Cuba's founding father and national poet, Jose Marti, 'those of us who are living today speak borrowing Quevedo's language'.
I could go on, but yes, to say the least Quevedo is a most interesting poet to study.
Fascinating. Homer! Shakespeare!
ReplyDeleteI will have to read more about this some time. I doubt there is any way to capture this status in English at this point. In English, Quevedo is anything but vast.
Maybe someday I will work on my Spanish. Similarly unlikely things have happened.