Insatiable Titillation

Pevear and Volokhonsky have “inexhaustible delight,” while Jesse Coulson has “hugely delighted,” and Kirsten Lodge offers “insatiable pleasure,” all of which are renderings of the Russian “неутолимое наслаждение,” which reminds me of a Russian TV commercial for the Mounds chocolate bar from the 1990s (someone asks Mounds if he’s tried Almond Joy and when he says no, the person responds with the slogan current at the time “райское наслаждение!” (heavenly enjoyment)). But the problem here isn’t the noun, it’s the adjective, which makes the enjoyment somehow unquenchable. I think enjoyment is enjoyment and if it goes on forever, so much the better, but if it’s something that is unquenchable, unappeasable, insatiable—and this is the sense I understand from the word неуталимое—then it isn’t enjoyment, it’s something that’s almost but not quite enjoyment, and that’s more like teasing or titillation. And so this is what I think about the phrase in question.

Когда к столу, у которого я сидел, подходили, бывало, просители за справками, — я зубами на них скрежетал и чувстовтал неутолимое наслаждение, когда удавалось кого-нибудь огорчить.

There’s so much here to comment on. He was just sitting at a table. They are petitioners looking for information or perhaps documents. He would grind his teeth at them? What the heck is that? He would gnash his teeth at them? Still don’t get it. Isn’t grinding and gnashing one’s teeth something that is usually directed inwardly? Here I rather like Jane Kentish’s use of the verb “snarl.” This is what a mean civil servant would do to others, I think. And then there’s that unquenchable enjoyment, which doesn’t make much sense either.

I offer this:

Whenever people came up in search of information to the desk where I sat, I would snarl at them and feel an insatiable titillation if I was able to insult anyone.

There is no fulfillment in his enjoyment. He never quite reaches it. He is always unfulfilled. I think this is part of the point. It is implicit in the position of salaried dependency and a critique of the bureaucracy that is structured into the narrative. Russian bureaucracy and just plain bureaucracy.