where did the narrator go? towards a grammar of translation

American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages

Where Did the Narrator Go? Towards a Grammar of TranslationAuthor(s): Rachel MaySource: The Slavic and East European Journal, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Spring, 1994), pp. 33-46Published by: American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European LanguagesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/308545 .

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WHERE DID THE NARRATOR GO? TOWARDS A GRAMMAR OF TRANSLATION

Rachel May, Macalester College

To whom do the words of a literary text belong? There are the characters and narrators who speak them, the authorial persona implied by the text, the actual author, the holder of the copyright, the owner of the book, the reader, the culture at large-all seem to have some claim to ownership of the words. Different authors acknowledge the range of owners in different ways. Baxtin claimed that Dostoevskij, for one, was inclined to cede posses- sion of the words to his characters. Vladimir Nabokov was so determined to control the effect of his words that he frequently upbraided readers for failing to find all his meanings. The history of modern literature and literary criticism is a history of varied answers to this question of ownership, playing with their respective implications and taking each possibility in turn to its logical extreme.

A further complicating factor, and one which is receiving increasing attention from theorists, is translation. How does a translation shift the proprietary relationships within and around a text? How does it alter the text's relationship to its various owners? Who is the translator within the world of the text? Eberhard Pause writes, "This is the paradox of translation: In uttering his translation, the translator is a speaker, but in this very same situation he is not the speaker. His utterance is not really his utterance. It will be understood as the utterance of someone else, it has no original status" (391). Thus, the translator represents a separate owner- creator with respect to the text, forming a complex triad with the original author and the internal narrator.

As deconstruction has brought the very notion of "originality" into question, philosophers and literary theorists have turned to translation as a locus of some of the most interesting questions about interpretation and literary form. However, the practice and criticism of translation have been slow to set insecurities about ownership aside. In this essay I propose the hypothesis that translators, trapped in an ill-defined limbo between text and author, routinely skew the various claims on the words of a literary

SEEJ, Vol. 38, No. 1 (1994): p. 33-p. 46 33



34 Slavic and East European Journal

text, favoring the author, or implied author, at the expense of the internal voices, particularly that of the narrator. These shifts, in turn, alter the relative claims of the reader and the receiving culture on the text.

In the case of English versions of the language of Russian narration, especially in works from the period between Stalin and Gorbachev, a pattern of linguistic changes emerges that is so regular, pervasive, and even predictable that it amounts to a separate grammar of translation practice. Normalization of language leads to repeated and generalizable shifts in syntax which result in erasure of the subjective elements of narrative voice and, therefore, in regular alterations in literary style. I will demonstrate this shift using examples taken primarily from Soviet literature of the 1960's and 1970's. At this time officially-published authors rarely challenged the most fundamental tenets of realism-spatial and temporal representation and motivated action. Their innovations lay in treating certain issues and character types which had been neglected or misrepresented in Stalinist literature, particularly peasant women and urban youth, and in depicting them not from some omniscient height but from a more personal perspective. Often the narrators of their works, though unnamed and lacking a first-person voice, betray a local viewpoint, a sympathy with the humble characters, or an unmistakable involvement in the story. Probably for rea- sons of censorship and cultural trauma, these themes and narrative strategies are repeated in works by many different authors. The fact that they are also translated by various people makes them an ideal source of material about generalized, possibly unconscious transformations of narrative voice that occur in translation.

L The Narrator Vanishes Russian authors have at their disposal several linguistic mechanisms for

creating a storytelling voice within a written work. The literature on skaz and monologic narration describes some of these mechanisms well for first- person narration.' If the first-person narrator is missing, however, it is still possible to create the illusion of oral speech in an omniscient narrator. Russian is particularly rich in impersonal and subjectless constructions which allow a high degree of ambiguity as to who is speaking. Consider such phrases as <<cnaTb xoqeTcr>>, or <<oi KaK 60JIHT roJOBa!>>, both per- fectly acceptable in first or third-person "quasi-direct" narration. While these cause difficulty for the translator who must include personal pro- nouns (who must stipulate who is sleepy or whose head aches), most other indicators of the narrator's personal involvement in a story are readily translatable. These include the use of markedly colloquial language, deictic expressions (such as here, now, or this) that locate the narrator in time and space, and vvodnye slova (parentheticals or interjections) that call atten-



WHERE DID THE NARRATOR GO? 35

tion to the telling or express value judgments. The overwhelming evidence of published translations, however, shows that translators rarely incorpo- rate such indicators in their translations.

A. Colloquial language and the folk narrator Kornej i(ukovskij lamented the loss of vernacular speech in translations

of Sol'enicyn's Odin den' Ivana Denisovica: "As you see, it's a pattern. It turns out that not only Ralph Parker but all, positively all the translators flatly refused to translate prostorecie. And their Italian colleagues joined them in this" (394, my translation). What disturbs Cukovskij in these and many other translations is a flattening of the lexicon and stylistic texture of the work. In the repeated elimination of colloquial language there is another loss, that of the personal communicative force of the text. Solienicyn and village prose writers use colloquialisms not only in dialogue, but in third-person narration as well. As a result, instead of offering a seemingly transparent, neutral perspective on the events, their narrators seem to come from the milieu of the story and to share the locals' worldview. Especially when used for otherwise "omniscent" narration, colloquial language establishes a direct avenue of contact with the audience that is absent in so-called transparent or objective narration.

Signs of Russian colloquial speech pervade Valentin Rasputin's narrative style. His language tends to be thick with folk idioms and oral-type constructions, creating the impression of an omnisicent narrator with a peasant world view. In the opening pages of Proscanie s Materoj (1976), is this description: TOT nepBbIH My)KHK, KOTOpbII TpHCTa C JIHuIIHHM JIeT Ha3aRx HajyMaii noceJnTbCSI Ha OCTpOBe, 6bJI senosBeK 30pKHH' H BbIrarAJIHBbIi, BepHO paccyanjuHBUIH, ITO niyiUme aTO 3eMJIU eMy He

CbICKaTb (204).

Such terms as My)KHK and 6a6a, which have taken on derogatory connota- tions in the standard language but are still neutral in the villages, are used widely in village prose, signifying the narrator's identification with the local perspective. In addition, the vocabulary of this passage is strongly colloquial, even substandard (HaiyMan, sBbranuIBbIHt, CbICKaTb), and the syntax has the distinct ring of unconstrained, oral speech (TpHcTa c JIIImHIIM neT 'three hundred years and more;' 6bIn ieInoBeK 3OpKHI 'was a far-seeing man;' riyime . .. eMy He CblCKaTb 'he couldn't find a better'). Altogether, the use of markers of oral speech results in a sense that an actual person is telling the story, someone who is not a character but a sympathetic, omniscient narrator. The published translation is as follows: That first peasant who decided to settle on this island over three hundred years ago was a far- sighted and clever man, who had judged rightly that he would find no better land (Bouis a, 3).2




This version retains the deictic expressions "that" and "this" to suggest some storytelling presence, but it normalizes word order, syntax, and lexicon, leaving just the faintest hint of colloquialism.

Apart from colloquialisms per se, authors frequently use syntactic or "intonational" devices to approximate the quality of oral narration. T. G. Vinokur cites examples from Sol'enicyn's Odin den', in which the lexicon is entirely literary but "overlays ... a low-colloquial syntactic structure" (23). He cites as an example a passage about fish soup that ends, B ino6oi4 pbx6e

OH e1i Bce, XOTb x a6pbI, XOTb XBOCT, H rnIaSa en, KorjAa OHH Ha MeCTe nonaiaancb, a Koria BblBaJIHBaJIHCb H HJIaBaJIH B MHCKe oTjeJIIbHO--6oJIbuHe, pbI6bH rJa3a--He en (Solienicyn, 16).

He didn't leave anything-not even the gills or the tail. He ate the eyes too when they were still in place, but when they'd come off and were floating around in the bowl on their own he didn't eat them (Hayward and Hingley, 17).

He ate everything-the gills, the tail, the eyes when they were still in their sockets but not when they'd been boiled out and floated in the bowl separately-big fish eyes. Not then (Parker, 29).

The Russian sentence is broken several times in imitation of oral speech; the phrases in xoTb and the repetition of en create an intonational rhythm suggesting both the extraordinary and the mundane quality of this information. The interjection about "big fish-eyes" shows how close the narrator's perspective is to Ivan's own. Hayward and Hingley primarily use contrac- tions and one dash as their concessions to colloquialism. Parker is more bold with syntax and his added emphatic sentence Not then gives the narrator weight. The new translation by H. T. Willetts captures the narrator's presence with syntactic literalism, adding perhaps too much explanation but otherwise keeping the voice intact:

He ate every bit of every fish, gills, tails, even eyes if they were where they should be, but if they had boiled out of the head and were floating loose in the bowl-big fish eyes goggling at him-he wouldn't eat them (17-18).

Neutralization of colloquial language and conversational syntax occurs in a broad cross-section of translations, as the following brief examples demonstrate:

a) FIe-HH6yxb iaca TaK B ABaR nonoyfyHH

... (Suk'in, "Makar," 123). Sometime at two in the afternoon . . . (Mabson 153)

b) Ho jaBHo-jraBHO He BHJal neKam11HHCKHi 6eper TaKorO MHOTOJIO9bMI. Pe6ITHImKH, JAeBKH,

6a6bx, cTapHKH--Bce, KTO MOr, Bbl6eA)KaJI K peKe (Abramov, "Dve zimy," 209). But it had been a long time since the Pekashino riverfront had seen such a throng. Little children, girls, women, old folk-everyone who could was running down to the river (Ed- wards and Schneider, 3-4). Still, it had been a long time since so many people had been seen on the Pinyega riverbank.




Children, girls, women, old men, everyone who could had hurried down to the river (Powers and Powers, 3).

c) JIepeBHSr A 3TO TOF CTOHT Kya KaK ygo6Ho: xpe6eT 3secb HOnXO1HT nHO'TH BnHJOTHyIO K

AHrape, H MHHOBaTb RepeBHIO CTOpOHOH' HHKaK HeCIb3S, XOSeuCb He XOCeIlb, a HaRo BbIXOJH4Tb Ha iOpory (Rasputin,

,ivi i pomni, 11-12).

The village was situated very conveniently for that: a mountain ridge comes right up against the river here and you can't bypass the village; you have to take the road (Bouis b, 8-9).

The wordy estimate of time in (a) is strongly marked and might best be rendered " 'round about two in the afternoon." Example (b) has a thor- oughly colloquial lexicon (small fry, old-timers); and (c) is saturated with colloquial phrases that translate easily into English: as convenient as could be, there's no way, like it or not. Especially in (a) and (c), where the substandard elements have clear equivalents in English, their omission seems less an oversight than an active decision to standardize the language for the translation audience.

B. Deictics and interjections: the orienting narrator Wherever a personal narrator's presence is invoked, the existence of an

internal audience is also implied.3 Tynjanov writes of skaz that it

makes the word physiologically palpable: the entire story becomes a monologue, it is ad- dressed to each reader-and the reader enters into the story, begins to declaim, to gesticulate, to smile; he doesn't read the story, but plays it. Skaz introduces into prose not the hero but the reader (160).

One common narrative device to achieve this effect is the use of deixis, which orients the speaker in space and time with respect to the action and the audience, thereby highlighting the addresser-addressee relationship and collapsing into one (or an illusory none) the multiple frames which mediate the story.4 Person shifters (I and you) are not generally available to the third-person narrator, but deictics of space and time are. Such expressions as now, here, and many years ago suggest not only that the audience is within reach of the narrator but that it has a definite viewpoint with respect to the action. Although English has most of the same deictics as Russian, this is a feature of narrative language that often disappears or changes in translation. Rasputin, in Zivi i pomni (1974), completes his description of the remote village of Atamanovka by saying, )a)Ke o BOHHe 3jecb y3HaJIH TOJIbKO Ha apyrot AjeeH (11). They even heard about the war a day late (Bouis b, 8).

The Russian narrator is distinctly associated with the village itself, whereas the English suggests an external narrator, both by elimination of here and by the prominent use of they, which the Russian y3HaJIH only implies (with a little stretch of the imagination it could also mean we). An alternative




would be to omit the distancing they and include the word here: Even news of the war didn't get here until the next day.

Similarly, the translator of Jurij Kazakov's "Arlctur-goncij pes" makes the perspective much less personal and more external to the life of the town than in the original. Here, the unseen narrator describes the transience of gypsies:

Ho BOT yXOJISAT OHH H3 ropoAa, HCie3aIOT TaK ce BHe3anHO, KaK H noa1BHJIHCb, H yxe HHKOrJa He yBHAeTb HX 3Aecb (228). -then, just as suddenly as they came, they vanish, never to be seen again (Kazakov/Harari and Thomson, 270).

Note how the translation systematically eliminates the narrator's relation to the scene: HO BOT and yxe are weakened to "then," "[never] again," and the crucial deictic 31ecb disappears altogether in the English version.

The following passages from other works undergo similar changes:

a) Koria HJeT CHer--BOT TaKOI M.IrKIHI,

rnymIHCTbIHi, CJIOBHO rAe-TO TaM, HaBepxy, Tepe6sfT JHKOBHHHbIX CHeKHbIX nTHI,--He oqeHb-TO XOieTCSI HJATH J OMOI (Rasputin, "Rudol'fio," 98). When the snow is like this-soft and fluffy, as if somewhere above fantastic snowbirds were being plucked-it's hard to go inside (Heinemeier and Valova, 113).

b) ... IIHeH~CKH e Iofo30JIaoI

a cynecH BOT yx)e KOTOPbIdi ro norIKapMJnHBaIOT OTOIImaBRuIH ropoxl (Abramov, "Dye zimy," 209). ... for years now it had been the sandy, barren soils of the Pinega that had been feeding that withered city (E&S, 3-4). The sandy Pinyega loam had in fact been feeding the city-and for a number of years (P&P, 3).

These translators use some deictic expressions (like this, for years now) and other indicators of narrative presence (it's hard to go inside, -and for a number of years), but their versions are far tamer than the intrusive language of the original narrators.

Alongside deictics exists a set of linguistic features which lie beyond the syntax of the sentence per se and contribute greatly to the impression of a personal narrator. These include such signals of subjectivity as modal particles (including seji, yx, xe, -TO, a, H) and many vvodnye slova (such as Mo)KeT 6bITb, 3HaiHT, KCTaTH, OAHHM CJIOBOM, He6OCb, etc.). Usual defini- tions of this category stipulate that they modify whole utterances, as opposed to single words or phrases, and that they can be omitted without surface semantic loss. In the case of the unseen personal narrator, however, such terms do not just modify utterances but constitute an entire perspective, and the meaning of the work loses greatly by their omission. Vinogradov stresses their role in presenting subjective thought processes as opposed to logical sequences of ideas (Russkij jazyk, 605-06). More generally, as Walter Arndt points out, modal particles "express the objective relationship or subjective attitude of the speaker to the actuality . . . of the




phenomena and relationships in society and nature . . . with regard to their likelihood, possibility, inevitability, etc." (325).

English rarely has exact equivalents for modal particles and vvodnye slova, and it is common practice in translation simply to erase them, although they may be strongly marked as points of contact between the narrator and the addressee:

a) ... H3MoqaneHHbIe eJIKH H 6epe3bl-BnoBanKy,

KpecT-HaKpeCT, KaK, cKa)]H, noBep)KeHHbie B g6oo coiJiaTbI. (Abramov, "Olegina," 173) ... birches and firs, shredded and split into fibers, lying side-by-side and piled over one another, like soldiers fallen in battle (Gorgen, 129).

b) HHKaKOHI, noAH, pa3HHJbI, Korga ye3xarb ... (Rasputin, "ProSZanie," 246-47). It made no difference when they left ... (Bouis a, 57).

In both these examples there is a phrase set apart from the Russian sentence by commas which either calls attention to the process of the telling (as in the first case, with

cKaxH) or expresses some attitude toward the

content on the part of the speaker (as in the latter, with nona). In English, the personal and ironic metaphor of (a) comes to seem purely literary, while (b) becomes a simple statement of fact rather than a sigh of despair.

The use of qualifying interjections for ironic effect achieves particular force in Odin den'. The narrator moves in and out of a subjective role, but in his more involved moments he can betray a profound cynicism.5 In one passage he describes how the men spit fishbones on the table, and when the pile gets sufficiently large they brush it onto the floor. To illustrate the perverse camp morality he adds, A npHMO Ha noJI KOCTH nIieBaTb--CqHTaeTc a Bpoile 61I HeaKKypaTHO (Solienicyn, 13).

Solienicyn gives this comment in a separate paragraph, highlighting its absurdity. The qualifier Bpoxne 661 emphasizes the irony of the final word, so that the reader perceives not just the paradox of the situation but the narrator's sardonic attitude as well. The translations, however, simply re- port the illogical prejudice without driving home the narrator's role in its presentation: But it was considered bad manners to spit the fishbones straight out on the floor (Parker, 27).

Spitting the bones out on the floor was thought bad manners (H&H, 16).

Both versions leave out the ironic Bpoae 6b1 and neutralize the syntax. Again the genteel translator-narrator intervenes and keeps the reader from seeing through the eyes of this frustrated zek. Willetts achieves more irony, not by translating the qualifier but by compressing the sentence as far as possible, generalizing bones by eliminating the definite article and keeping the sentence in the present tense. In this form, and in a paragraph to itself, it acquires a scornful, curt intonation:




Spitting bones out on the floor is considered bad manners (16).

Especially the use of present tense enhances the "ambiguity between character and narrator" which Levenston and Sonnenschtein identify as an important locus of irony (55).6

II. A Grammar of Translation Baxtin's analysis of skaz narration holds that there are no words that

belong to no one (212). Russian writers have been especially eager to play with the question of who possesses the threads of the narrative, employing all the devices at their disposal to produce shifts and ambiguities in the narrating voice. As we have seen, translators regularly and routinely erase these signals in several ways. Language that reaches its tendrils outside the world of the story-to the folk milieu, to the narrator-addressee relationship, or into the narrator's prejudices-gets pruned into shape by translators who wish to present their readers with a well-ordered product.

In his introduction to the collection Rethinking Translation, Lawrence Venuti explains this and the more general phenomenon of smoothing language in translation as "fluent translation strategies" designed to appeal to editors, reviewers, and readers. Such strategies, he writes,

take a characteristic form: they pursue linear syntax, univocal meaning or controlled ambiguity, current usage, linguistic consistency, conversational rhythms; they eschew unidiomatic constructions, polysemy, archaism, jargon, abrupt shifts in tone or diction, pronounced rhyth- mic regularity or sound repetitions-any textual effect, any play of the signifier, which calls attention to the materiality of language, to words as words, their opacity, their resistance to empathic response and interpretive mastery. Fluency tries to check the drift of language away from the conceptual signified, away from communication and self-expression (4).

Venuti and the other contributors to his volume expand on these ideas, considering the power hierarchies that exist around translations and paying special attention to questions of cultural hegemony and gender dominance. What they do not address, and what interests me here, are the radical shifts in power structures within the text that these linguistic changes entail.

By constructing a local or individualized third-person narrator, the author effectively cedes some authority to that narrator, allowing the milieu or the events to speak for themselves. (This is especially the case among village prose writers, most of whom are themselves urban dwellers who feel some guilt about abandoning their rural roots.) When the characters speak, their dialogue is distanced from the reader by its formal identification as dialogue; we understand them to be speaking to one another. But when they speak through the narrator, or when elements of direct address perme- ate the narrator's discourse, then they seem to address the reader directly. Such interjections as noxn and cKaKHI are ossified imperative forms; although they no longer act as true imperatives, they still retain a conative




function. So do such emphatic expressions as BOT TaKOHi MqrKH4i or BOT ywe KOTOPEbX roil. The message itself becomes important here, not because we focus on the "materiality of language," as Venuti explains it, but because we experience the illusion of a direct communicative act.

Translation shifts a work's frame of reference. The author's "here" and "now" are not the translator's, as both author and translator belong to worlds outside the text. However, the narrator's "here" and "now" are defined within the work, wherever it is published-even if the narrator has no name or definite individuality. And although the translation addresses a different audience than the original does, it presumably need not adjust the text's conative functions because, as Tynjanov would argue, the personal narrator brings the reader into the story. Yet translators make deictic shifts all the time, superimposing their external frames of reference upon the narrator's internal one. Two different translations of Dead Souls, for example, have the narrator's y Hac as "in Russia."7 While this may have some explanatory value, it sacrifices a strong example of personal narration. Here, as in many of the previous examples, the translator appears not to trust the narrator-reader communication to work.8 Even in otherwise excel- lent translations of narrative voice-such as the Ward and Iliffe translations of Sukiin that capture the colloquial presence and abrupt cadence of his style-there is a temptation to skirt around the moments of direct address to the reader:

Boposan nHJI OH CO CKJIaAJOB? KaK BaM CKa3aTE ... (Suk'in, "Vybiraju," 367). The reader will be wondering whether he stole from his warehouse (Ward and Iliffe, 73).

Note how the translators have substituted a less personal term ("the reader") for the original you, and a standard statement for the original question-answer form: Did he steal from the warehouse? You see, it's like this ...

Thus, in many cases, the translator takes over the role of narrator and imbues it with greater omniscience than in the original. Peter Brooks writes that "the relation of teller to listener is inherently part of the structure and meaning of any narrative text" (55). The normalizing translator internalizes that relation and produces a new teller-listener relationship, much as the psychoanalyst does in Brooks' discussion of the analytic process: The analyst must treat the analysand's words and symbolic acts as an actual force, active in the present, while attempting to translate them back into the terms of the past. He must help the analysand construct a more coherent, connected and forceful narrative discourse, one whose syntax and rhetoric are more convincing, more adequate to give an interpretative account of the story of the past than those that are originally presented, in symptomatic form, by the analysand (57).

Lacking their own authority or their own "I" from which to speak, translators may lose the sense of the words as an "actual force, active in the




present." Thus, the space left open by the author for interpretation and transference, or for what Brooks calls "movement of reference," is now filled by the translator, who presents a new-and, usually, narrower-set of possibilities to the reader. All the original constitutive communicative possibilities are now enclosed in that new whole. The text loses its open- ended signifying qualities and becomes a signified, a completed communication between author/text and translator, which is then passed on whole to the reader. Jakobson describes most acts of translation as being equivalent to reported speech;9 more than that, however, the translator's reporting of the speech appears in practice to supercede the speech of the other unseen mediator, replacing that voice with a neutral translator-narrator. (One irony of this shift is that it enhances qualities of realism in a text: univocality, a single perspective, and referentiality. Village prose was in- triguing to Soviet readers partly because it stretched the boundaries of socialist realism, introducing non-omniscient narrators and the sense that the village itself was speaking.10 Thus, translations have emphasized its informational content [the hardships of peasant life, the breakdown of the rural family] at the expense of its aesthetic significance.)

Recent theory and-little by little-translation practice have begun to assert a new role for the translator. Building upon Walter Benjamin's argument for translation as "the latest and most abundant flowering" of literary texts, theorists have come to see translation as a locus for the celebration of difference."1 The translator, then, becomes a creative con- tributor to the larger cultural phenomenon of text plus translations, part of what Benjamin calls the "afterlife" of the work. Douglas Robinson's recent book is aptly named The Translator's Turn, to signify this new sense of translational authority. The favorite term of writers on the subject is "abusive translation," coined by Philip Lewis to identify ways in which the translator stretches and changes the target language. He calls for a new axiomatics of fidelity, one that requires attention to the chain of signifiers, to syntactic processes, to discursive structures, to the incidence of language mechanisms on thought and reality formation, and so forth (Lewis, 42).

In other words, to the kinds of narrative devices under discussion here. And there is evidence that translators are asserting just such prerogatives. Recent versions of works by Solienicyn (Willetts) and Dostoevskij (Pevear and Volokhonsky), Bouis' translation of Tolstaja's On the Golden Porch, and the compendium of short stories, Glasnost: An Anthology of Literature, edited by Goscilo and Lindsey, all testify to a new tolerance for narrative eccentricity.12 Curiously, while many of these translators freely bend English usage to allow the text's voices to speak, they still exhibit a tendency to take control of the discourse by adding explanatory material. Note, for example, the additional information in the Willetts




translation of One Day above: boiled out of the head; big fish eyes goggling at him. And the new Dostoevskij translations are almost absurdly saturated with footnotes.13

Benjamin advocates a pure syntactic literalism in translation that "com- pletely demolishes the theory of reproduction of meaning and is a direct threat to comprehensibility" (78). Since this would quickly put translators out of work, it hardly seems a reasonable prescription. Some degree of literalism does, however, prevent the wholesale elimination of the narrator, who often exists only in those peripheral devices of syntactic "intonation" or speech register. 14 Evidence from published translations shows that, at some unconscious level, a translator smooths and trims a work out of fear of being lost among the various voices in the text. But the beauty of abusive translation is that the translator gains a role rather than losing one: the stretches and distortions of the target language "belong" to the translator at least as much as to the author. By discarding the role of analyst or of narrator within the text and taking on a more authoritative role, one more external to the text-say, like that of an orchestra conductor-the translator can bring out the various voices in a work to best advantage. Perhaps in the future the translator's role will be to harmonize rather than stifle the multiple voices in literary conversation. Instead of disappearing into the fog of false objectivity, both narrator and translator can have their day in the sun.

NOTES

1 Two works stand out, among the many on skaz, as important contributions to the discussion of the linguistic mechanisms and devices that prevail in much skaz narration. These are B. Ejxenbaum, "Illjuzija skaza," in his Skvoz' literaturu (Leningrad: Akademija, 1924), 152-156; and V. V. Vinogradov, "Problema skaza v stilistike," in B. Kazanskij, et al., Poetika: Sbornik statej (1926; rpt. The Hague: Mouton, 1966), 24-40. See also Richard Luplow on "third-person skaz, " in "Narrative Style and Structure in 'One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,' " Russian Literature Triquarterly, 1 (1971): 399-412.

2 There is a danger to taking examples out of context, since translators may compensate elsewhere for omissions in one part of a text. In the works I have sampled here, virtually any narrative paragraph would serve to illustrate my argument. Some authors lend themselves to pithy examples of narrative intrusions better than others; if Rasputin and Solienicyn appear more often than others in the following pages, it is only for this reason and not because they or their translators are being singled out.

3 Luplow's discussion of third-person skaz disputes this point: "Third-person skaz narration does not necessarily proceed as if the narrator were directly speaking to the reader, but may instead . . . take the form of a written narrative which is oriented toward ... speech patterns characteristic of the environment being depicted in the work" (400-401). However, where colloquial language predominates as the signal of a personal narrator, the "environment being depicted" is one of direct address to a listener.




4 A thorough explanation of the phenomenon of deixis is given in Stephen C. Levinson, Pragmatics (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1983), ch. 2.

5 For a discussion of the shifts within Solienicyn's narrative voice, see Luplow, 400-405. 6 Still, even this sarcasm only implies a narrator, while the Russian Bpoie 6bI makes him

more palpable. An interjection in the English version, such as naturally or of course, or even you know, might achieve this effect.

7 In vol. 1, ch. 5, Gogol's narrator describes 4itikov's first impressions of SobakeviC's house:

... JOM Bpoje Tex, KaK y Hac CTPOAIT JIlg BoeHHbIX noceiJeHHii H4 HeMelAKH4X KOJIOHHCTOB (93).

In the Norton edition of the Reavey translation this appears as "the sort of house that is usually built in Russia for military settlers or German colonists" (95). Magarshack's version is very similar: "the sort of house that is built in Russia for military settlements or German colonists" (102). (I am grateful to Therese Malhame for this observation.)

8 The most graphic example of this phenomenon I have encountered is an Everyman's Library edition of Hugo's N6tre Dame. Although the work is nowhere identified as a translation, the anonymous translator intervenes explicitly in the story whenever the narration expresses strong irony. He describes a brutal crowd-dispersal technique, designed to cause maximum injuries,

occasioned by the thrust of some archer, or the horse of some one of the provost's sergeants prancing about to restore order-"which admirable expedient," observes our author, "the prevot? handed down to the connetablie, the connetablie to the marichaussee, and the marechauss e to our gendarmerie of Paris."

Notre-Dame de Paris, anonymous tr. (London: Dent, 1964), 5. The French original has neither dash, quotation marks, nor "our author." The translator apparently did not trust the reader to understand the irony or the referent of "our gendarmerie" without identify- ing them with a specific speaker. This is an extreme case of meddling by a translator, but more subtle instances are everywhere. Constance Garnett, for example, frequently put exclamations that appeared in Dostoevskij's narration into quotation marks. In The Double, for instance, she does not allow Goljadkin's paranoid musings to merge with the narrative voice, as Dostoevskij does:

He subsided into silence. He made up his mind that it was better to keep quiet, not to open his lips, and to show that he was "all right," that he was "like every one else," and that his position, as far as he could see, was quite a proper one.

The Short Novels of Dostoevsky, tr. Constance Garnett (New York: Dial Press, 1945), 506. (In the revised version of this text, Avrahm Yarmolinsky has quite properly elimi- nated the quotation marks. Three Short Novels of Dostoevsky, tr. Constance Garnett, rev. and ed. Avrahm Yarmolinsky [Garden City, NY: Anchor-Doubleday, 1960], 39.)

9 "Most frequently . . . translation from one language into another substitutes messages in one language not for separate code units but for entire messages in some other language. Such a translation is a reported speech: the translator recodes and transmits a message received from another source" (Jakobson, 430).

10 See, for example, Kathleen Parth6, Russian Village Prose: The Radiant Past (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992).

11 Benjamin, 72. See especially Graham (1985), which contains Derrida's famous essay, "Des Tours de Babel," and Venuti (1992).

12 "Petya went out on the porch. Uncle Borya wanted to dirty everything. He wanted to grill the silver girl-fish and crunch her up with his wolf teeth. It won't work, Uncle Borya." Tolstaya/Bouis, 127.

See also: Alexander Solzhenitsyn, August, 1914, H. T. Willetts, tr. (London: Bodley Head, 1989); Glasnost: An Anthology of Literature, Helena Goscilo and Byron Lindsey,




eds. (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1990); Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, tr. (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990).

13 In a recent review of new translations of Crime and Punishment, Richard Lourie cites the line, "This hat had been one of those tall, round affairs from Zimmerman's," to which David McDuff appends this note: "Zimmerman was a well-known St. Petersburg hat manufacturer in whose shop Dostoyevsky himself once bought a hat." "Raskolnikov Says the Darnedest Things," New York Times Book Review, April 26, 1992, 24.

14 A. N. Vasil'eva points out a peculiarity of colloquial style within the Russian literary language: whereas other styles are determined by their central, dominant or systematic elements (for example, scientific language is dense with specialized terminology and complex sentence structures), colloquial style depends upon occasional, peripheral elements, especially key words and phrases, grammatical deviations such as truncated sen- tences, and ellipsis. Kurs lekcij po stilistike russkogo jazyka (Moscow: Russkij jazyk, 1976), 86. Thus, the form of colloquial narration reflects the narrator's deviance or eccentricity, and attention to form in translation becomes doubly important.

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where did the narrator go? towards a grammar of translation

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