The strange, futuristic, experimental genius of Andrei Platonov will get its own blog post—and wow, experimental fiction geeks, gird yourselves, this book is bending my mind in all the good ways—but first, I’d like to address the New York Review of Books’ 2014 translation, by Robert Chandler & Olga Meerson, of Platonov’s 1930 classic, The Foundation Pit (Kotlovan, in Russian). I’m reading my English version simultaneously with an original Russian version, and have been amazed by seeing what the translators, and the NYRB, were up against. The Foundation Pit could be a case study in impossible translations, further complicated by the persecution of writers in the Soviet Union.
The NYRB had a difficult primary decision to make, in terms of which version of the book to use, since The Foundation Pit was published only in part in the 1930s, and then suppressed. The version of the manuscript most commonly used in Russia, (and the one I’m reading in Russian) is from the writer’s daughter’s archive. In an appendix to the NYRB edition, the translators explain that this commonly-used one “reflect[s] an earlier stage in the evolution of the text” and also contains additions and deletions by a third party that were supposed to make it more acceptable for publication. The “greatly superior” manuscript version Chandler & Meerson have chosen to work with, which was first published in Russia in 2000, reflects later changes made by Platonov, and restores some of the lost material, particularly the raunchy bits. I’m going to refer to these two versions as “daughter’s archive” and “NYRB/more recent” to help the reader keep it straight.
On paper it makes sense to use the NYRB/more-recent version, since we can presume it’s the one the writer intended. But reading both side-by-side, complications arise. There are continuity issues in the NYRB/more-recent version that it seems the writer would have fixed if he’d intended it to be published. Things like the character Chiklin appearing on page 12 without previous introduction, “The engineer told Chiklin…” a sentence begins. Who is Chiklin? Huh? In the daughter’s-archive version, Chiklin is identified earlier as an earth-worker. Another example is a spot on page 13 in the NYRB/more-recent edition where the line reads, “Annulling nature’s old order, Chiklin felt unable to understand it.” That’s an obscure line to begin with, and made more obscure by the fact that Platonov apparently cut material from the daughter’s-archive version where Chiklin asks questions about the earth he’s digging, giving us some explanation for what he doesn’t understand and deepening the joke.
I don’t know the back-story, but such issues make me wonder if the NYRB/more-recent revision was complete. The daughter’s-archive version is more polished. (It has line-reps and minor errors as well). This is probably unorthodox in the world of translation, but I wonder if these two versions couldn’t be reconciled, either using the NYRB/more-recent but fixing the obvious continuity issues, or annotating the daughter’s-archive version to include major missing scenes. It’s an interesting puzzle, and I’m not sure which I’d choose if it were up to me (which, ha ha, it is obviously not).
Another bizarre note: There are end-notes in the NYRB edition, but without corresponding numbers on the text. Did someone forget?
All of that about which manuscript to use, however, doesn’t get to the difficulties with the actual translation of the words. Let’s go back to,
“Annulling nature’s old order, Chiklin felt unable to understand it.”
In Russian it’s “Упраздняя старинное природное устройство, Чиклин не мог его понять”,
which could be more literally translated as “Abolishing the old natural construction, Chiklin could not understand it.”
No matter how you translate it that’s a weird sentence. Platonov has been described as a linguistic cubist. He was using words wrong in a systematic way to a variety of ends. You can’t abolish construction, so, the translator has the difficult job of choosing not just the right word, but a word that will be wrong in a similar way to how the word is wrong in Russian.
Reading the Russian and English translation side by side, it’s apparent to me how much is lost. Calling soil “the old natural construction” is humorous because Platonov is spoofing the Soviet lingo of his time, which applied mechanical and industrial terminology to all of life’s processes. Nature is just another worker. The translation loses that shade of meaning. But it also invents annul in place of the more literal abolish. Annul is stilted and legalistic and odd in just the way the spirit of Platonov’s prose is. Annul is a great choice.
Platonov was a devoted communist. Post-Revolution he’s like a cyborg using the Soviet Union’s new and unfamiliar jargon to examine his own human soul—a use for which the jargon was not meant. It’s amazing, brilliant and deeply sad, and much of the texture is created by the odd word choices and gappy syntax through which meaning falls like flung coins. The translators capture that, while doing a very good job of making the prose “read” smoothly. There are insertions and inventions, but if you look very carefully at the options, each one seems correctly weighed.
Here’s another example of how difficult the decisions must have been:
“‘We need more hands,’ said Chiklin to the engineer. ‘This job’s a killer. And time will eat up all the use.'”
And here’s the Russian “Мало рук, – сказал Чиклин инженеру, – это измор, а не работа, – время всю пользу съест” (p 26).
Literally translated, the Russian says: “Too few hands” said Chiklin to the engineer. “This is death-by-starvation, not a job. And time will eat up all the use.”
The translation is stilted and a little bit dorky (“a killer!”), but it renders the moment as smoothly as it reads in Russian, and preserves the best strange part, which is that bit about “time will eat up all the use.” The line barely makes sense in either language, but is an essential Foundation Pit construction. Platonov is using “use” as something like “useful force,” a concept you’d find in revolutionary social theory, but he maroons it in a bit of dialog where a worker is explaining how a utopian construction project is failing. It’s a great coinage and the most important part of the sentence. On the other side of the scale, the translators lost измор, which means “death by starvation,” (of course Russian has a word for that) and lost the echo between “death by starvation” and “time will eat up.” It must have been painful, but that literal translation clunks, and you can’t have too many of those.
(For more on how awful literal translations are, read this brilliant takedown of Pevear & Volkonsky in Commentary Magazine.)
I will eventually write a post about The Foundation Pit itself and blow everyone’s minds out their ear….. For now, I will leave it that Chandler & Meerson have done a wonderful job.
An Anthology of Clouds 
Couple of things: how long have you been studying Russian, and do you read a number of novels in Russian? Second, what made you decide to look at this particular author’s book? I’m so curious, Valerie! I feel like this is a side of you I did not know about! Finally, have you read any Zarina Zabrisky? She is a Russian woman now living in the U.S. who writes a lot about politics and art, connecting Russia and the states. Would you be interested in reviewing her new book? She sent me a copy, and I’m sure she’d love the review!
Hi Melanie, thanks! I’ll email you my contact info. I haven’t heard of her but it sounds like I’d be interested.
I don’t read much in Russian because I read very slowly, but maybe I read one or two Russian books a year. I have been studying Russian…. oh wow how time passes, for 18 years, on and off, of course. I started because I wanted to read Russian novels in the original! As, like, a stoned 22-year-old being like, that would be soooooo cooooool. I ended up living there for a while and am pretty fluent, if fluent means can discuss anything in a broken way with a lot of mistakes. I’ve reported culture stories in Russia where I’ve had to do original reporting in Russian, which is kind of a fun flying-without-a-net thing. This particular book happened to be lying on my coffee table, slightly mysteriously. It’s one of those great, great classics that everyone knows in Russia but is obscure here, and my husband, who is Russian but totally not a reader, must have brought it in. I didn’t pin him down, which is difficult under the best circumstances, but I suspect if I really got down to the brass tacks of “Did you READ this particular copy, of this book, just now?” the answer would be No. So why he bought it, if he bought it, idk. I kept looking at it and wondering what it was, and then eventually I picked it up and tried to read 25 pages without the English translation to see how much I could understand, which was hilarious because the deliberately deranged speculative language takes a sophisticated native speaker with a knowledge of 1930s lingo to untangle…..
But thank you for asking. It’s been a really interesting journey.
Hi, Valerie! I think you have mentioned to me before that your husband is Russian. What a fantastic adventure! That’s so great that you can read the books side by side. I never think of things like style of sentences being a problem. That is funny that there is a mystery book in your house! I hope you like Zarina Zabrisky’s books. She just came out with a new one and has a couple of others set in Russia.