In the mood for some Russians

 

I’ve been in the mood for the Russians – and so thought it was time to re-read Notes from the Underground. So I looked up Peaver and Volokhonsky’s translation, and by the second sentence I knew exactly what Janet Malcolm was talking about when she said these translations were not awful, just bland – and thus worse than awful.

The mouse-man says, in the (corrected)  Constance Garnett translation I read when I was a teen  – I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man.

Peaver and Volokhonsky bobble the sentence, one of the great sentences, by turning it into: I am a wicked man.

The Russian word is zloi. Other translators have used “angry”. That is a rather broad emotional term to start off with, without the bite of “spite”. The French translation by Bernard Kreise,  is “méchant”, which is mean or spiteful. Resa Von Schirnhofer, a friend of Nietzsche’s, reported in a memoir that she talked to Nietzsche about Dostoevsky in 1887, and he told her he had compared the French translation, L’esprit souterrain, with the German translation, and found the French better. L’esprit souterrain is a strange book, for the Notes don’t begin until page 156. The book is “translated and adopted” by E. Halperine and Charles Morice, and by this they mean that they have translated The Lodger or the Landlady and amalgamated it with The Notes from the Underground. Nietzsche’s sense of the  Notes – or the journal of a man beneath the floor, as it has been translated as well – was distorted by this presentation. Even in the Halperine and Morice translation, though, the spiteful – méchant – presents itself as the narrator’s defining characteristic.

The Halperine and Morice translation was read not only by Nietzsche, but by Gide and Bataille. One of the duties of the translator, to my mind, is to understand how a work has inserted itself into our general culture – a duty signally failed by Pevear and Volokhonsky.

I was glad to see, looking about, that Gary Saul Morson went to town on the issue of spite and P and V’s cackhanded translation in the Pevearsion of Russian Literature. It is a nice scalping.

“What has wickedness got to do with it? The underground man is constantly turning on the reader, taunting him, putting words in his mouth, answering objections to things he hasn't yet spoken of. During that pause between the first two sentences represented by the ellipsis, it's as if he were thinking: "So, you think I want your pity, and allow you to condescend to me? Well, I'll show you I don't give a damn what you think! I'm a spiteful man, so there!" As the best Dostoevsky critic, Mikhail Bakhtin, put it, the underground man is taking a sidelong glance at his listener, cringing in anticipation either of sympathy or contempt, and exaggerating so as to leave him deniability should someone pin him down by believing him. His prose is all loophole. Garnett caught that tone well enough for generations to experience it. P&V don't seem to have heard it.”

Luckily, I think that the P&V train, which seemed to be crushing Russian lit in the 00s, that awful decade, has not had the monopoly power it once seemed to hold.

Spite is, to my mind, such a characteristic Dostoevsky word – and such a characteristic temperamental call in the culture of pre-World War one Europe – that when I read the first paragraph of the Peaver and Volkhonsky translation, I went elsewhere. Then I looked about at the commentary on translating Dostoevsky and found that the issues are usually about whether a translation is literal or not, whether there are mistakes in grammar or not, but not ever about the effect of previous translations – about the reception that has already encoded Dostoevsky’s work in Germany, France, England and America. To be méchant, or spiteful, was, above all, not to be happy.  

The Hermann Roehl translation, which was made for Insel in the early 1920s, uses the word schlecht – thus, a bad man. Roehl’s was just one of the translations in those years. E.K. Rahsin – a pseudonym for Elizabeth Kaerrick – also translated a number of Doestoevsky’s works. Kaerrick was closer in spirit to the  Dostoevskian age than Roehl, who was a philologist with a concentration on ancient Greek. Kaerrick, on the other hand, could have had a walk on role in the Demons. She and her sister met the great impresario of Russian literature in Germany, Moeller van der Bruck, in Paris in the 1900s. Van der Bruck married her sister and persuaded her to translate Doestoevsky’s works for Piper. Piper was also involved in translating Mereshkovsky, who gave Kaerrick a hand in her translations – which is like a laying on of hands of Russian literature itself. These people formed a nest of gentlefolks with very Doestoevskian vibrations, always working on the margins, finding jobs, finding cafes, finding love affairs. From early on, van der Bruck was a convinced adherent of the Sonderweg – that Germany was, like Russia, not part of the  West.  I have a small and messy theory that part of the anti-colonialist discourse comes out of this impure source – the casting off of the “West” by certain German conservatives, up through Heidegger.  If you want to understand Germany’s radical conservative strain, 1906 is an important date – that was when Rahsin’s translation of the Demons was first published. Moeller van der Bruck is best known outside Germany, I should say, for coining the phrase “the Third Reich”, which of course had a long and horrendous history. But that phrase came out of the last years of his life, when he had abandoned literature for radical nationalism.

Spite. Wicked. Mechant. Schlecht. Zloi. So much depends on these faceless middlewomen of culture. So much of my own intellectual life. I owe you, Constance Garnett.