The same applies to jokes. Chekhov often imbeds jeux de mots and facetious phrasing as depth charges; the translator’s first task is to be aware of them, and then to find a way of making them detonate properly. At the beginning of Ivanov, Count Shabelsky complains that Anna has no more musical ear than a farshirovannaya ryba. This is invariably rendered as “stuffed pike” or “stuffed trout,” which misses the point. Shabelsky is always teasing Anna about her Jewish origin; the fish in question is therefore not a piece of taxidermy but gefilte fish.
These particularities of Chekhov come in addition to the usual problems experienced in translating from Russian: the passive constructions, such as Tyazhelo mne (literally, “it is heavy to me”); the distinction between verbs of imperfect and perfect action (the difference between strelilsya and zastrelilsya, Konstantins having shot himself and having shot himself for good); and onomatopoeic sounds that are overlooked or scanted. The last lines of Uncle Vanya, the repeated my otdokhnyom, consist of soft, aspirated sounds, easily drawn out and wafted into the air. “We shall rest” (or worse, “we will rest”), with its terminal dental sound, cannot be manipulated by an actress in the same way.
“The shock of the new” in Chekhov’s handling of dialogue contributed mightily to his reputation in his lifetime, but this aspect also tends to be lost or overlooked. As the Swedish scholar Nils Åke Nilsson pointed out, Chekhov is an unacknowledged precursor of the Futurists and their launching of a zaumny or transrational language. He cites as examples the phrase “You’ve Gavrila-ed it up enough” in Ivanov, the trom-tom-tom exchange in Three Sisters, and Gaev’s billiard jargon, calling this a “new dramatic syntax.”4
The American critic Stark Young, when he set out to translate The Seagull for the Lunts in 1938, singled out “those balances, repetitions for stage effect, repetitions for stage economy, theatrical combinations and devices, time-patterns, and so on, that are the fruits of much intention and technical craft, and that are almost totally absent from the translation.”5 Yet even he trembled before Chekhov’s linguistic audacity: “Chekhov’s dialogue is perhaps a trifle more colloquial than mine. Certainly it is more colloquial than I should ever dare to be; for in a translation any very marked colloquialism is always apt to hurt the economy of effect by raising questions as to what the original could have been to come out so patly as that” (p. xix).
Young took as an example Trigorin’s remark that when he gets a whiff of heliotrope skoree motayu na us, “quickly I wrap it around my moustache.” Any good Russian dictionary will tell you that this is a figure of speech meaning “I make a mental note of something.” Perhaps, as Stark Young feared, it is as wrong to translate it literally as it might be to translate “he got my goat” literally into Russian. Nevertheless, to translate it as he does, “Quickly I make note of it” is to substitute the bland for the colorful. My own solution, bearing in mind first Chekhov’s fascination with facial hair (every one of his major plays contains remarks about whiskers) and next that Trigorin is an avid fisherman, is “I instantly reel it in on my moustache.” Trigorin’s following phrase Lovlyu v sebya i vas na kazhdoy fraze Young renders awkwardly as “Every sentence, every word I say and you say, I lie in wait for it.” However, it ought to continue the piscatorial imagery, since Chekhov may have had in the mind the biblical idiom “to fish in troubled waters,” in Russian lovit’ rybu v mutnoy vode. It helps to know that from his long boyhood experience as a chorister under his father’s tutelage, Chekhov’s mind was well-stocked with scriptural commonplaces. My solution goes “I’m angling in myself and you for every phrase.”
Finally, I have not tried to pretend that Chekhov is anything other than Russian. Although I have converted weights and measures into Western equivalents, so that an audience can more easily gauge distances and density, I have left currency, beverages, and, in particular, names in their Russian forms. Modern readers and audiences rapidly adjust to patronymics, diminutives, and nicknames. If one is to turn Pavel into Paul and Yelena into Helen, then one must go the whole hog and refer to Uncle Jack instead of Uncle Vanya and, to be consistent, Ivanov as Mr. Johnson.
NOTES
1 Gregory Zilboorg, “A course in Russian drama,” The Drama (November 1920): 69.
2 Bernard Shaw’s Letters to Siegfried Trebitsch, ed. Samuel A. Weiss (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), p. 30 (December 26, 1902). The words translate as “sheep’s head,” “fool,” “muzzle,” “beast,” and “ass.”
3 Ibid., January 15, 1903, p. 36.
4 Nils Åke Nilsson, “Two Chekhovs: Mayakovskiy on Chekhov’s ‘futurism,’” in Jean-Pierre Barri-celli, ed., Chekhov’s Great Plays: A Critical Anthology (New York: New York University Press, 1981), pp. 251—261.
5 Stark Young, “Translating The Sea Gull,” in The Sea Gull, A Drama in Four Acts, translated from the Russian of Anton Chekhov by Stark Young (New York: Samuel French, 1950), pp. xii–xv.
GUIDE TO TRANSLITERATION AND PRONUNCIATION
When a Russian name is a Cyrillic transliteration of a European name, I have used the European form — for example, Mühlbach, Sonnenstein, Tusenbach, Charlotta, Maupassant, Buckle.
STRESSED SYLLABLES
OF THE NAMES IN THE PLAYS
Abrám
Abrámovich
Abrámovna
Abramsón
Afanásevich
Akáky
Aléko
Aleksándr
Aleksándrovich
Aleksándrovna
Alekséevich
Alekséevskoe
Alekséy
Aleútov
Altukhóv
Anastásy
Andréevich
Andréevna
Andréy
Andrúsha
Andrúshenka
Anfísa
Ánna
Ánya
Anyúta
Aplómbov
Arínushka
Arísha
Arkádina
Ástrov
Babakálkina
Babákina
Babelmandébsky
Baikál
Balabálkina
Basmánny
Bátyushkov
Berdíchev
Berezhítsky
Bóbik
Bolshóy
Borís
Bortsóv
Bortsóvka
Búdkin
Bugróv
Chádin
Charlótta
Chátsky
Chebutykin
Chekharmá
Cheprákov
Cheremshá
Chitá
Chubukóv
Dárya
Dásha
Dáshenka
Dávid
Denís
Derigánov
Dmítry
Dobrolyúbov
Dostoévsky
Dúdkin
Dunyásha
Dyádin
Dymba
Elizavetgrád
Fédenka
Fedótik
Fédya
Ferapónt
Fílka
Fínberg
Finíkov
Finíkova