For one thing I don’t speak or read Russian, I know very little about its culture and for another Gogol’s novel was first published in 1842, just seventeen years short of two centuries ago and its era has long, long passed.
It is regarded as a ‘masterful’ satire, but I doubt whether even many Russians of today will know a great deal about
I suggest that some acquaintance, even if at worst only superficial acquaintance, of the object of a satire must be necessary for a work to make much sense.
Furthermore, as I don’t speak or read Russian, I’m also in no position, frankly, even to evaluate Hapgood’s translation.
To date (according to Wikipedia) eleven English translations of Dead Souls, including Hapgood’s and whether in comparison it is good, bad or mediocre I have no idea.
Then there is also the problem of it being ‘a translation’.
I was born of a German mother and English father, and when my father’s job took his family to what was then West Berlin in the early 1960s, I attended German schools for four years.
Because my mother had always spoken to myself and my older brother in German when we were growing up as young lads and raised us on German children’s books (Max Und Moritz and Stuwwelpeter among others), I learned to understand the language as I learned to understand English.
Thus at no point in my life was German ever ‘a foreign language’. French, Italian, Swedish and so one were, but not German. If someone was speaking German or English, they were just speaking’. If they were speaking in any other language, they were speaking in a foreign language.
Once in West Berlin, first at a German Grundschule, then at a Gymnasium (not the same as an English gymnasium), I quickly learned to speak German (and did so partly by reading, on my own initiative, stories about the kiddie’s favourite, Kasperle, a kind of Pulcinella or Punch figure, always getting up to no good).
For those four years I was a young German lad, becoming imbued in German culture, and to this day although I speak English with an impeccable English accent, I know that in some ways – in outlook and attitude – I am as much German as English, though sadly and ironically neither completely either.
I first realised just how sketchy and unsatisfactory a translation can be when I read Der Untertan by Heinrich Mann, the older brother of the, possibly better-known, novelist Thomas Mann.
Der Untertan is a satire on Wilhelmine Germany, hard-hitting, insparing and very funny. It is not a comedy by any means, but it is often laugh-out-loud funny. The crucial point I want to make is that its satire depends heavily on knowing German culture, German pretensions, the German values of the time and so on.
I have posted about the novel before (here and here) and have written about how not only does the humour in the novel not translate into English at all, but that a great deal of its subtlety does not either. In short, since then I have become very wary of translations. ‘What,’ I ask myself ‘might I be missing?’
The question when reading a translation is ‘how much did or does a ‘foreign writer’, in this case one ‘not writing in English’, rely on puns, verbal playfulness and other wordplay in her or his art? In translation we don’t know. How much does she or he allude to cultural understanding, a knowledge of the country and its history to make a point. In translation we don’t know.
Some might argue that ‘a good translation’ can do the trick. Well, I wholly disagree. Yes, a good translator can make a good fist of it, perhaps, for example choosing an idiom in her or his own language to convey what is intended by an idiom in the original work.
A few years ago, a friend wrote a two-volume biography of the German violinist, conductor and composer Adolf Busch and enlisted my help to translate various documents from German to English. Many – letters, reminiscences and business and legal documents – were comparatively easy to translate, especially and ironically the formal documents.
But I had immense trouble with concert reviews: all too many of them were so full of vacuous. mellifluois and pretentiously ‘arty’ phrases, observations and metaphors that a translation was often impossible without in English writing outrageous and incomprehensible outright gobbledegook.
Yet in the original German they were, though equally vacuous, perfectly comprehensible. Some might even, as is the nature of these matters (and taste do changed regularly), for many pass as ‘fine writing’, although as a rule of thumb any writing which comes across as ‘fine writing’ is most certainly nothing of the kind.
So from the outset while reading my copy of Gogol’s novel Dead Souls and being often baffled by its rambling, inconsequential nature, I wondered just how much I was missing which was present in the original Russian but which it has proved impossible to convey in English.
Subsequent translators might well have fared better and made a better fist of it all than Hapgood, but if they did I shall not be finding out because I shall not be reading any further translations and somehow I doubt they did.
Many might be familiar, even if vaguely, with the name Nikolai Gogol as they are familiar with the names of fellow Russian novelists, poets and playwrights – Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Nabokov and (to conclude those I can name off the top of my head) Solzhenitsyn. There are, of course, many more.
I had heard talk of Gogol’s work and knew some of it by name – The Overcoat, The Government Inspector. I had also heard that Gogol was ‘a ruthless and very funny satirist’, but I shall have to take that last on trust. None of it came across in Hapgood’s translation. Or am I am simply a humourless git to dense for the finer stuff in life. Who knows? Answers, please, on the usual postcard which, once written, you can stick up your jacksy.
I understand that Gogol intended Dead Souls to be a three-book work, his take on Dante’s Divine Comedy, but apart from repeating that nugget of information, I can comment no further as I have not read any of Dante’s work.
Gogol completed the first book, but is said to have burned the manuscript for the second book before he died (and no explanation is suggested). The mooted third book was never written. The parts of second book contained in my copy of Dead Souls are said to have been reconstructed (by someone or other) from Gogol’s notebooks.
He described his novel as a ‘poem in prose’, but, in brief, it is a picaresque tale of one Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, a failed middle-aged former civil servant who hopes to make his fortune by trickery. All the estates of Russian landowners at the time included ownership of the serfs who worked their land, and taxes were payable on each.
The number of serfs, known colloquially as ‘souls’, on each estate was recorded in an annual census for those tax purposes, but inevitably some serfs died between each census or simply took off. Chichikov’s ruse was to travel around buying ownership of those ‘dead souls’, serfs who were no longer living or had disappeared.
As each estate owner was obliged to pay taxes on his ‘souls’ until they were removed from the record, Chichikov reasoned that the estate owners would be willing to sell him their ‘dead souls’ for a song as once the sale was recorded legally, the souls could be removed from the record long before the census.
He, in return, would eventually have quite a number of serf/souls to his name which, though dead, would still ‘be alive’ on paper and thus add to his ‘wealth’ and useful as collateral in obtaining loans from the banks.
On his travels, Chichikov encounters any number of different Russian ‘types’ – dissolute estate owners going to pot, wealthy estate owners, noble good-for-nothings, self-important and smug estate owners, various authority figures and officials and their families and so on.
These are the people Gogol is – or more honestly from my point of view is said to be – satirising and who are themselves ‘dead souls’ in their pomposity, greed, corruption, pretensions, vices and other foibles.
That’s the theory. The practice was more than a slog. Large passages, no doubt intended in the original Russian to be ‘lyrical’, pastoral and descriptive in English can be dull beyond measure, meandering, wordy and seemingly pointless and baffling. I only carried on because I have hardly ever given up on a book, however dull.
So there you have it: my review of Hapgood’s translation, but not really of Gogol’s novel. Am I the fool in all this? Who knows?
To date (according to Wikipedia) eleven English translations of Dead Souls, including Hapgood’s and whether in comparison it is good, bad or mediocre I have no idea.
Then there is also the problem of it being ‘a translation’.
I was born of a German mother and English father, and when my father’s job took his family to what was then West Berlin in the early 1960s, I attended German schools for four years.
Because my mother had always spoken to myself and my older brother in German when we were growing up as young lads and raised us on German children’s books (Max Und Moritz and Stuwwelpeter among others), I learned to understand the language as I learned to understand English.
Thus at no point in my life was German ever ‘a foreign language’. French, Italian, Swedish and so one were, but not German. If someone was speaking German or English, they were just speaking’. If they were speaking in any other language, they were speaking in a foreign language.
Once in West Berlin, first at a German Grundschule, then at a Gymnasium (not the same as an English gymnasium), I quickly learned to speak German (and did so partly by reading, on my own initiative, stories about the kiddie’s favourite, Kasperle, a kind of Pulcinella or Punch figure, always getting up to no good).
For those four years I was a young German lad, becoming imbued in German culture, and to this day although I speak English with an impeccable English accent, I know that in some ways – in outlook and attitude – I am as much German as English, though sadly and ironically neither completely either.
I first realised just how sketchy and unsatisfactory a translation can be when I read Der Untertan by Heinrich Mann, the older brother of the, possibly better-known, novelist Thomas Mann.
Der Untertan is a satire on Wilhelmine Germany, hard-hitting, insparing and very funny. It is not a comedy by any means, but it is often laugh-out-loud funny. The crucial point I want to make is that its satire depends heavily on knowing German culture, German pretensions, the German values of the time and so on.
I have posted about the novel before (here and here) and have written about how not only does the humour in the novel not translate into English at all, but that a great deal of its subtlety does not either. In short, since then I have become very wary of translations. ‘What,’ I ask myself ‘might I be missing?’
The question when reading a translation is ‘how much did or does a ‘foreign writer’, in this case one ‘not writing in English’, rely on puns, verbal playfulness and other wordplay in her or his art? In translation we don’t know. How much does she or he allude to cultural understanding, a knowledge of the country and its history to make a point. In translation we don’t know.
Some might argue that ‘a good translation’ can do the trick. Well, I wholly disagree. Yes, a good translator can make a good fist of it, perhaps, for example choosing an idiom in her or his own language to convey what is intended by an idiom in the original work.
A few years ago, a friend wrote a two-volume biography of the German violinist, conductor and composer Adolf Busch and enlisted my help to translate various documents from German to English. Many – letters, reminiscences and business and legal documents – were comparatively easy to translate, especially and ironically the formal documents.
But I had immense trouble with concert reviews: all too many of them were so full of vacuous. mellifluois and pretentiously ‘arty’ phrases, observations and metaphors that a translation was often impossible without in English writing outrageous and incomprehensible outright gobbledegook.
Yet in the original German they were, though equally vacuous, perfectly comprehensible. Some might even, as is the nature of these matters (and taste do changed regularly), for many pass as ‘fine writing’, although as a rule of thumb any writing which comes across as ‘fine writing’ is most certainly nothing of the kind.
So from the outset while reading my copy of Gogol’s novel Dead Souls and being often baffled by its rambling, inconsequential nature, I wondered just how much I was missing which was present in the original Russian but which it has proved impossible to convey in English.
Subsequent translators might well have fared better and made a better fist of it all than Hapgood, but if they did I shall not be finding out because I shall not be reading any further translations and somehow I doubt they did.
Many might be familiar, even if vaguely, with the name Nikolai Gogol as they are familiar with the names of fellow Russian novelists, poets and playwrights – Pushkin, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Nabokov and (to conclude those I can name off the top of my head) Solzhenitsyn. There are, of course, many more.
I had heard talk of Gogol’s work and knew some of it by name – The Overcoat, The Government Inspector. I had also heard that Gogol was ‘a ruthless and very funny satirist’, but I shall have to take that last on trust. None of it came across in Hapgood’s translation. Or am I am simply a humourless git to dense for the finer stuff in life. Who knows? Answers, please, on the usual postcard which, once written, you can stick up your jacksy.
I understand that Gogol intended Dead Souls to be a three-book work, his take on Dante’s Divine Comedy, but apart from repeating that nugget of information, I can comment no further as I have not read any of Dante’s work.
Gogol completed the first book, but is said to have burned the manuscript for the second book before he died (and no explanation is suggested). The mooted third book was never written. The parts of second book contained in my copy of Dead Souls are said to have been reconstructed (by someone or other) from Gogol’s notebooks.
He described his novel as a ‘poem in prose’, but, in brief, it is a picaresque tale of one Pavel Ivanovich Chichikov, a failed middle-aged former civil servant who hopes to make his fortune by trickery. All the estates of Russian landowners at the time included ownership of the serfs who worked their land, and taxes were payable on each.
The number of serfs, known colloquially as ‘souls’, on each estate was recorded in an annual census for those tax purposes, but inevitably some serfs died between each census or simply took off. Chichikov’s ruse was to travel around buying ownership of those ‘dead souls’, serfs who were no longer living or had disappeared.
As each estate owner was obliged to pay taxes on his ‘souls’ until they were removed from the record, Chichikov reasoned that the estate owners would be willing to sell him their ‘dead souls’ for a song as once the sale was recorded legally, the souls could be removed from the record long before the census.
He, in return, would eventually have quite a number of serf/souls to his name which, though dead, would still ‘be alive’ on paper and thus add to his ‘wealth’ and useful as collateral in obtaining loans from the banks.
On his travels, Chichikov encounters any number of different Russian ‘types’ – dissolute estate owners going to pot, wealthy estate owners, noble good-for-nothings, self-important and smug estate owners, various authority figures and officials and their families and so on.
These are the people Gogol is – or more honestly from my point of view is said to be – satirising and who are themselves ‘dead souls’ in their pomposity, greed, corruption, pretensions, vices and other foibles.
That’s the theory. The practice was more than a slog. Large passages, no doubt intended in the original Russian to be ‘lyrical’, pastoral and descriptive in English can be dull beyond measure, meandering, wordy and seemingly pointless and baffling. I only carried on because I have hardly ever given up on a book, however dull.
So there you have it: my review of Hapgood’s translation, but not really of Gogol’s novel. Am I the fool in all this? Who knows?
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