People, I’m still plugging away at my translation of Notes from Underground. Earlier I wrote about the word choices regarding zloi and zlost’, which lead off the book and present translators with a global interpretive question: is the U-Man spiteful? Or is he bad, evil, wicked? How about angry? These have all been tried, and I like each of them for different reasons.
I haven’t found any uses of vile, but that’s also a possible choice, as is mean (e.g., a “mean dog”). Foul, unpleasant, obnoxious, horrid, horrible, offensive, atrocious, and odious could all work too, depending on the circumstances. I’m rather fond of nasty these days, even if it’s almost been co-opted by one or another contemporary political figure, whose voice it can be hard to get out of one’s head sometimes. The U-Man’s voice has been around much longer, however, and will far outlast any current politician’s (have faith, people), so I’m seriously considering nasty. In any case, as those first words of the text get lots of variations, translators probably need to show their range: one English word won’t be enough.
For example, ekhidstvo (see all those synonyms above but with greater acidity) and to do something s ekhidstva (out of… see all those synonyms above). In places you might end up with someone committing a vile or nasty act out of vileness, nastiness, or some similar tautology. Then there are the variations through verbs: zliatsia (they get wicked, they become vile, mean, etc.) And, one of my favorites, they can be pakostno-zlye, which definitely tilts the “evil” or “spitefulness” or whatever towards nastiness: these folks are nasty bad.
And then there are the folks themselves, the people he keeps talking to — it’s a verbal performance, so “talking” seems correct to me. He uses gospoda consistently for this, and sets it off with commas to make it clear he’s addressing someone. Mostly this has been rendered as “gentleman,” and some interpreters have suggested that, as the text is in conversation with Chernyshevsky and his compatriots, those are the people the U-man is addressing. That’s possible, though it blurs the distinction between author and character a bit. I mean, Dostoevsky might be addressing them, but the U-Man is a literary character who may or may not know who those real people are.
Another possibility is that those people, the gospoda, are a more undifferentiated audience, a bit like the “public” that appears in the windows of the Governor’s ball room, when Goliadkin, Sr., from Dostoevsky’s Double, is trying to hide behind a wood pile in the courtyard beneath what he believes is the window of Klara Olsuv’evna. He’s gone there for a private meeting; it turns out to be public — exposed, embarrassed, vulnerable. The crowd that appears at the windows is not comprised of any particular “gentlemen,” it’s “people.”
If something like that is the case here, then the addresses are more like “you people,” as in “you people probably think I’m trying to be funny.” Or, if the translator wants to keep the direct address, then put some commas around the people: “You, people, probably think….” Or, if he’s being a bit more folksy familiar in one address or another (and he does have a tendency to dance rhetorically across the page), then: “Folks, you probably think I’m trying to be funny.”
As I’ve emphasized in many of the essays I’ve written about translation, translators invariably have an audience in mind, and those potential readers and listeners are helping me to make my decisions. I imagine them all the time, a bit like the U-Man is imagining his audience. Only mine are not entirely imaginary. They’re the students in my classes, past and, especially, present and future. What will ring in their ears, I wonder?
To answer this question, while I start with the source, my focus very quickly moves to them, their affinities, their turns of phrase and vocabulary (e.g., “idiot,” not “scoundrel”), their knowledge, which can always be supplemented by a teacher or by the end notes. And if the text’s language does not speak to them such that they don’t feel like reading, they just won’t.
Look, people, I want to say. Listen, people.
###
Russell Scott Valentino 