A Bit of Rudy Panko

While teaching this semester’s graduate seminar on Nikolai Gogol/Mykola Hohol, I noticed how inadequate all the existing translations of the earlier works are. The author’s distinctive style barely peeks through what often feels like basically explanatory prose in all the English versions. I also came to the conclusion that Gogol’s very first book is his most artistically coherent. That claim is something for another post, but the translation is something I thought (what a surprise) I could do something about. So here are the opening two paragraphs with the approach I would take.

Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka

Tales Published by the Beekeeper Rudy Panko

Part One

Preface

What in the world? Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka? Um, Evenings? And some kind of beekeeper plopping himself out front of the world! Bless his heart! Seems there’s still geese to pluck for pens and rags for paper! Seems there’s still folks of every rank and kind hankering to stain their fingers with ink! Must have taken this beekeeper’s fancy to follow in other folks’ footsteps! God’s truth, there’s so many printed pages these days that a fella’s hard pressed to come up with something to wrap up in it.

I been hearing and hearing a voice inside telling me all this for going on a month now! I mean, I’m telling you, when a bumpkin like one of us sticks his nose out of our backwoods into the wide world—good Lord! It’s like what happens if you step into some fine gentleman’s rooms: everybody gathers round and makes you feel like an idiot. That wouldn’t be so bad if it were just the upper butler types, but no, some spoiled rotten little kid comes in from the backyard to pester you: “Where do you think you’re going? What do you think you’re doing here? Get lost, you peasant!” You’ll never believe… oh, forget it! I’d rather go twice a year to Mirgorod, where neither the county court assessor nor the reverend Father have laid eyes on me in a good five years, than make an appearance in that high-born world. But if you do make an appearance, like it or not, there’ll be a reckoning.

The trick, I think, would be to give him a distinctive, folksy idiom with some elements of dialect (double negatives, distinctive lexicon) without making him sound like he’s from any particular place, e.g., Kentucky, Brooklyn, Venice Beach. And this is just one of several distinctive narrative voices in the collection.

There is some classism in the book that needs to come through, and then of course, the humor, some of which is in the idioms he uses. And then making each of the storyteller’s voices distinct. Not an easy thing to do, but as I look at the existing translations of this particular text, it doesn’t appear that anyone has ever really tried. And this could be one of the reasons that most English readers dismiss this and Gogol’s other early works as juvenile and merely preparatory for the important stuff that comes later. A shame really, as it’s artistically balanced between structure and style in a way that some of the later works are not.

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