Platonov's Chevengur - “But communism’s about to set in... Why am I finding everything so hard?”

Another remarkable Russian novel finally made it into English last year, Andrey Platonov’s Chevengur, written in 1929 but not published until 1972, in Paris. Robert and Elizabeth Chandler have been translating Platonov for decades now, and this novel and the apparatus they include with it are a triumph.  The Foundation Pit (1930) is a better novel, more focused and inventive, but this one is an event for English-language readers.  By current standards, Chevengur is at least the fourth best book published in the last twenty-five years.

Platonov was, to reiterate my distant last post, not just a writer but an engineer, somehow a scientist but also a mystic who deeply believed in communism but also in its inevitable failure.  In Chevengur, his first novel, this is all as clear as fiction can make it.  A character theorizes about “the possibility of destroying night for the sake of an increase in harvests” (141) – you know, keep the sun out perpetually, by means of science or collective Leninist willpower or something – and although Platonov recognizes that the idea is crazy he, and not just his character, also kind of means it.  It is like, a descendant of, Charles Fourier turning the sea into lemonade.  It is like a communist Atlas Shrugged, if you can imagine that book continually undermining its own ideas, which in a sense it does, but I guess I mean knowingly.

The novel begins in pre-Soviet crisis: famine, typhus, war.  An orphan theme runs through the whole book.  “Horselessness had set in” (91).  “Horselessness” is a fine piece of Platonov, a screwy word that accurately describes the disaster.  There is also hopelessness, of course:

“Where are we going”? said one old man, , who had begun to grow shorter from the hopelessness of life.  “We’re going any which way, till someone curbs us. Turn us around – and we’ll come back again.” (92)

Yet the novel is also a comedy in the tradition of Gogol and Dostoevsky, full of hysterical laughter, as well as Gogol’s tendency for anything to come alive.  The mechanic Zakhar Pavlovich “began to live with resignation, no longer counting on universal radical improvement” (62), a sad condition in a Platonov novel, but he can still talk to the locomotives he repairs:

“I know,” the locomotive sympathized in a deep voice – and sank further into the dark of its cooling strength.

“That’s what I say!” Zakhar Pavlovich agreed.  (64)

The comical catastrophes turn into a long picaresque section, characters wandering through the ruins of the Revolution, bumping into Dostoevsky – “The lame man was called Fyodor Dostoevsky” (140) – and a crazy man named God – “Dvanov set off, along with God” (99).  One of the wanderers is openly a Don Quixote-figure, horse and all, although unlike Quixote he has a strong socialist horse.  Then later there is a second Don Quixote, this time with a suit of armor and a pile of disarmed grenades.

In the second half of the novel, the characters concentrate in the steppe village of Chevengur where perfect communism has been established by the usual bloody methods, but where the great joke is that none of the surviving peasants and rural villagers have any idea what Marxist-Leninist communism is.  They are just making it all up, based on, more than anything, Old Believer Russian Orthodoxy.  How did Platonov think this could be published?  Anyway, things end pretty much as they have to end.

The Chevengur half of the novel is full of heightened Soviet revolutionary language so bizarre that it was soon abandoned.  This makes for a challenge for the translators which they often solve by means of notes.  It is all, unfortunately, not much fun.  Somehow the bleak but lively picaresque half of the novel is a lot of fun, but the static, dialectical village half is not.

“But communism’s about to set in!” Chepurny quietly puzzled in the darkness of his agitation.  “Why am I finding everything so hard?” (290)

Exactly.  Languagehat read Chevengur in Russian fifteen years ago and had a similar experience with the switch between the first half and the second.  And here are two useful posts about reviews of the Chandler translation.  Chevengur got some attention last year.

I will tack on some funny bits about books and reading:

Dostoevsky’s home housed a library of books, but he already knew them by heart.  They brought him no consolation and he now had to do his own personal thinking.  (141)

My worst nightmare!  A few pages later, in “a grove of concentrated, sad trees” we meet a forester who studies his father’s “library of cheap books by the least read, least important, and most forgotten of authors… life’s decisive truths exist secretly in abandoned books”  (150).  “Boring books had their origin in boring readers…” (151).  Chevengur was tough going at times but never boring.

 

Andrey Platonov's "Soul" - the universal happiness of the unhappy

I read Andrey Platonov’s novel Chevengur (1929) not too long ago and the collection of stories Soul (1935-46) last month.  Here we will have some notes.  These are the Robert and Elizabeth Chandler translations (four additional translators assist with Soul).  Those dates are for the completion of the writing; publication was always a complex story for poor Platonov.

Platonov was a rationalist and engineer but also a mystic.  He was a true believer in the, or let’s say a, Soviet experiment, but also fully understood, for rationalist and mystical reasons, that the experiment would always fail.  He had a great writer’s imagination but – no, this should be “and” – had lifelong trouble adapting himself to Soviet censorship.  He was hardly alone there.

I think I will stick with the Soul collection today, and quote from the novella “Soul,” “published” in a single proof copy in 1935, in censored form in 1966, and finally complete in 1999. Which is also when the Chandlers published their English version.

“Soul,” like much of Platonov, is mercilessly grim:

He foresaw that it would probably be his lot to die here and that his nation would be lost, too, ending up as corpses in the desert.  Chagataev felt no regret for himself: Stalin was alive and would bring about the universal happiness of the unhappy anyway, but it was a shame that the Dzhan nation, who had a greater need for life and happiness than any other nation of the Soviet Union, would by then be dead.  (75)

Ambiguous phrase there, "the univeersal happiness of the unhappy."  Chagataev is a young engineer, tasked with leading his “nation,” a nomadic tribe subsisting, barely, in the deserts and marshes between the Caspian and Aral Seas, to Soviet civilization.  Which he does, eventually – happy ending!

The entire Dzhan nation was now living without an everyday sense of its death, working at finding food for itself in the desert, lake and the Ust-Yurt Mountains, just as most of humanity normally lives in the world.  (108)

An unconvincing happy ending given what happens along the way.  Platonov foreshadows the environmental destruction of the Aral Sea and the demographic decline of Russia (the nomads, by the time Chagataev returns to them, are almost all elderly, somehow living off grass and hot water).  Horrible things happen to everyone for many pages.  Chagataev is almost eaten by carrion birds.  But only almost!

Chagataev felt the pain of his sorrow: his nation did not need communism.  It needed oblivion – until the wind had chilled its body and slowly squandered it in space.  (“Soul,” 102)

Animals are treated terribly in “Soul,” and in other stories, no worse than the human animals, but still, the reader sensitive to such things should beware, and in particular get nowhere near the story “The Cow” (written 1938, published 1958) which is like an entry in a “saddest story ever written” contest.  Possibly my favorite thing in “Soul” is a few pages on a flock of feral sheep:

And for several years the sheep had lived in the desert with their sheep dogs; the dogs had taken to eating the sheep, but then the dogs had all died or run away in melancholy yearning, and the sheep had been left on their own, gradually dying of old age, or being killed by wild beasts, or straying into waterless sands.  (62)

“[D]ying of old age” is remarkable; the “melancholy yearning” of the absent dogs is a superb Gogolian touch.

The other stories in the Soul collection are also good if you have the emotional strength to read them.

Chevengur tomorrow.

The ethics of the anti-smooth translation - to do right abroad, this translation practice must do wrong at home

The multiple translations of Andrey Platonov’s The Foundation Pit and Nabarun Bhattacharya’s Hārabārta fall along a continuum of the domesticated and foreignized translation.  What makes both of these cases so interesting is that the same translator has created translations at different points on the continuum, which cannot be too common.

Joe at roughghosts, who pointed me to the Bhattacharya novel, notes that the practice or something like it in fact is common in translation from Afrikaans.  Here we see Leon de Kock, the translator of Marlene van Niekerk’s Triomf (1994), describe what happened to them:

We’d been counting on a South African publisher only, so we were making a mixed language polyglot translation, and suddenly Marlene’s agent in London came up with a contract with Little, Brown, a major trans-national publisher. She phoned me up and said, “We have a big problem here. We can’t go on with this mixed, bastardized publication. We have to render it in straight English.”

The translator actually moved in with the author.  Together they squashed the “Afrikaans-isms” and “South African-isms.”  The result was two translations, one for the South African market and one for everyone else.  De Kock thinks that maybe today this would not be so necessary.  “[P]eople have begun to realize that it’s OK that not everything be in proper English anymore.”

He might be right.  The newer versions of The Foundation Pit and Hārabārta suggest he is.  Even with a more domesticated Harbart from New Directions and a wilder Herbert from Seagull, both are more linguistically out-there than previous translations.

I thought I would remind myself about what I meant by “domesticated” and “foreignized,” so I took a look at Lawrence Venuti’s The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (2nd ed., 2008).  I was surprised to see that the distinction was so old, going back at least to Friedrich Schleiermacher:

In an 1813 lecture on the different “methods” of translation, Schleiermacher argued that “there are only two.  Either the translator leaves the author in peace as much as possible and moves the reader towards him; or he leaves the reader in peace, as much as possible, and moves the author towards him” (Lefevere 1977:74)*.  (p. 15 of Venuti)

The translator chooses, Venuti paraphrases, between domestication, “an ethnocentric reduction of the foreign text to receiving cultural values, bringing the author back home,” and foreignizing, “register[ing] the linguistic and cultural differences of the foreign text, sending the reader abroad” (p. 15).

Schleiermacher and Venuti make an ethical case for the foreignized translation.  You should want more messiness and obscure references and endnotes explaining it all.  The last thing you should praise is the “smoothness” of the translation.  “Fluency” is the word Venuti finds in professional review.  We have been lectured that we should say something about the translation, so professionals say it is “fluent” and amateurs say it is “smooth.”  The hell with that, argues Venuti: “to do right abroad, this translation practice must do wrong at home, deviating enough from native norms to stage an alien reading experience” (16)

I don’t know.  On the one hand, yeah!  That’s what I like.  That’s what Joe argues for: “If you read literature from foreign cultures, don’t you want your equilibrium challenged a little along the way?”  But he is not quite willing to make an ethical argument, and – this is the other hand –  I am not either.  It is more an argument about taste.  It is too much like telling people what to read.  If you want smooth, read smooth; there is plenty of that.   But it is great to see translators and publishers who recognize that there is also an audience for foreignness.

* André Lefevere’s Translating Literature: The German Tradition from Luther to Rosenweig (1977) is Venuti’s source for the quotation.

Notes on The Foundation Pit's strangeness - thoughtfulness among the general tempo of labor

France, this summer, was pleasant, but I did not want to write about it.  I do want to write about some French books, lots of them really, so I am going to organize my French reading from the last couple of years and see if I can make anything of it.

But I will freely interrupt that project.  I will begin by interrupting it, first with a couple of books with bold translations.  Books with multiple translations, weird and less weird.

Andrey Platonov’s The Foundation Pit (written 1929-30) is a nightmare in prose about recent and ongoing events in the Soviet Union, famines and forced collectivization and the liquidation of the kulaks and so on.  The events of the novel are in a sense satirical or allegorical or satirical – I mean, one of the characters is a bear, who is also a blacksmith and is always hammering, when he is not liquidating kulaks.  That seems like it might be symbolic in some way.  But I am not sure that allegory or symbolism is the way to go.

Actual life, everything around Platonov, a civil engineer who had abandoned (public) literature, had become the equivalent of a nightmare.  What literary language is capable of representing the nightmare?  I think that is the problem Platonov was working on.

It is the problem the translators are working on.  I read the most recent translation by Robert and Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson.  Robert Chandler had co-translated a previous version, too, but was dissatisfied.  It was not wrong enough.  He and his colleagues wanted this version to be as messed up as the original.  This is how I understand the problem.

I will stick to the first few pages.  Voshchev, the first character Platonov introduces, not a protagonist , exactly, is “removed from production” at the factory for “thoughtfulness amid the general tempo of labor” (1).  He wanders by “a large house where children with no family were being habituated to labor and use” (1) – an orphanage, I would call this, but not Platonov.   In the bar, he “listen[s] to various sad sounds, and feel[s] the torment of a heart surrounded by hard and stony bones” (2).  He and a creepy dude are watching a parade of Pioneer girls, and “he was glad that socialist children would always be beyond the reach of this freak of imperialism” (7).

There is something like this every few sentences, something odd, a slogan or awkwardness or peculiarity that in a more ordinary text would need to be fixed.

The Soviet regime has transformed, mutilated, and corrupted everything, including language, metaphor, and thought.  Even more than contemporary Soviet novels like We (1924) and Envy (1927), The Foundation Pit looks like a radical attempt to represent the destruction.  Or so these translators make it appear.  Maybe they are wrong.  How would I know.  I am convinced.  The apparatus in the NYRB edition, the notes and afterword and so on, are half as long as the novel and are superb.

The novel’s structure and characters are similarly broken.  But it is the language, and its problems for the translators, that really caught my attention.

The odd thing is that at my distance, in time, language, space, and trouble, the entire book becomes an exercise in “make it strange.”  Mere aesthetics.  But I know that is not the source of the strangeness, and my understanding is that for many post-Soviet authors Platonov looked like a way out, an escape from the Soviet novel.  His publication is complex, but for Russians he was effectively an author of the 1990s, his books appearing at just the right time.