What Happened to the New Translation of Dr. Zhivago?

This is was going to be a short post, because of limited time, but I wanted to register something literary and poetry-related I noticed during break that I said I'd blog about.  I had been jonesing for the Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation of Russian poet Boris Pasternak (1890-1960)'s extraordinary and lone novel, Dr. Zhivago (1956), for which, along with his poetry, he was awarded the 1959 Nobel Prize in Literature, which pressure from the Soviet authorities fored him to decline. The novel itself was not published in Russia until 1988, in the pages of Novy Mir, a major Soviet literary journal, but it did appear internationally in 1957 because Pasternak had given a copy to Italian publishing magnate Giangiacomo Feltrinelli to smuggle out of Russia, which he did, and then promptly had the novel published in Italian, as Il Dottor Zhivago.

Since I'm trying to be concise, I will not delve into all the particulars of the novel, which covers the period from before World War I through the Russian Revolution to the subsequent Civil War there. The Russian authorities despised it (they thought it critical of Stalin, the Soviet State and its ideology, Marxism, counterrevolutionary, too formally experimental, etc.). It is not a conventional novel except in girth; it has a confusing plot, it cares little about fluid transitions between scenes, its mode of characterization can be jarring, and so forth. At the end of it Pasternak appends poems "by Yuri Zhivago," that you should read to fully appreciate the character's poetic gifts, but which mainly underline Pasternak's greatness as a poet. A novelist and poet I admire told me many years ago over coffee that he found Dr. Zhivago "tedious," and then, finally confessed that he hated it.  I was surprised, but with a bit of distance, I can understand why he did and why Dr. Zhivago isn't to everyone's taste. (David Lean's 1965 movie, starring Omar Sharif and Julie Christie was a popular success and a critical bomb, and only partially captures the novel's depth and grandeur.)

Yet, Dr. Zhivago repeatedly presents, at least from the impression I formed from the initial, 1958 English translation of the book, a powerful demonstration of Pasternak's poetic skill; again and again, his descriptions of the landscape, of people, of politics, all of it, come alive through metaphor, simile, synecdoche, metonymy, and other figurative means such that the world of the novel, the background and foreground, almost seem to bristle with life. I should note that the name of the protagonist Yuri Zhivago, points to this, as zhiv- in Russia is the root meaning "life," and Pasternak earlier had published a book of poems entitled My Sister, Life (1921), which had a tectonic effect on Russian poetry. After Stalin began his clampdown, Pasternak turned to prose, and published two books that are among my favorites for their lyrical strangeness and intensity, the short memoir Safe Conduct, and the stories, including the haunting "Aerial Ways" (I have probably read this story 10 times), which were part of A Childhood in Luvers.  Around the time of the shorter prose works he began writing portions of the long novel, and there are continuities of style. Again, the striking use of metaphors, which sometimes personify the landscape, are here, as are the idiosyncratic explorations of time and history, and so much else that flowers in the novel. And in the memoir-with-stories edition that New Directions published many years ago, the poet Babette Deutsch (1895-1982) translates with a flourish many (all?) of his poems included in that collection. Pasternak himself translated works from English and other languages, and Russians loved his translations of William Shakespeare's plays, even critics criticized for being too much Pasternak and too little Shakespeare.

I've already gone on too long. Okay, So let me get to it: Pevear and Volokhonsky are broadly acknowledged as among the most important and best translators from the Russian. Their version of Mikhail Bulgakov's (1891-1940) The Master and Margarita (1967) is so entrancing that I did not want to put it down, and it lodged in my brain for months.  They also famously rendered as whole as is humanly possible Leo Tolstoy's (1828-1910) War and Peace (1869), including leaving in the rivers of French (which was the social language of the Russian aristocracy of the novel's epoch) that fill the book, and they restored Tolstoy's peculiar uses of repetition, which the previous best-known English translation had shorn away. So it was with real eagerness that I grabbed the copy of Dr. Zhivago I saw on sale at one of the moribund Borders (RIP) here in Chicago; I was sure, given their proved skill, and the glowing reviews I'd read, that it would improve the earlier version by many bounds.

But, here's the thing: Pasternak is a poet. And as I began to read the new translation, I kept wondering, where are those poetic passages from the earlier, allegedly "flawed" 1958 version, by Max Hayward and Manya Harari, that I even underlined and noted years before? I don't read Russian, unfortunately for me, but I could see that a laxity, vaguenesses, the concision of Pasternak's imagery, appeared off compared to the earlier book. Again and again I found myself searching the text for those moments from Hayward's and Harari's version and finally realized that, for all their skill, Pevear and Volokhonsky appear to have blown this one a bit. Though likely more literal, the prose has become, well, "tedious" to me, though I haven't given it up yet, since I know the story and still do enjoy it. If you don't believe me, I've done you the favor of having already (not tonight, a week ago) typed up the earlier and their versions of some of the passages that caught my eye the first go-round. Which, I ask you, is more poetic? Is more compelling? Even as fiction? Now, I also wonder, were the critics who praised this new version even aware of this? If not, why not? How closely did they read the novel, and did they recall any of the earlier prose, which, as you'll see below, almost brands itself into your memory. I'll stop there because this has gone on far longer than I intended, but what do you think?

***

Dr. Zhivago, by Boris Pasternak (1890-1960), originally published in Italian translation from the Russian, in 1957.

English translation 1958, translated from Russian by Max Hayward and Manya Harari, "The Poems of Yuri Zhivago" by Bernard Guilbert Guerney, Wm. Collins Sons & Co., Ltd., London, with authorized revisions to the English, Pantheon Books Inc., New York, NY.

English translation 2010, translated from Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky, with an introduction by Richard Pevear, Pantheon Books Inc., New York, NY

Hayward & Harari (HH): Turning over and over in the sky, length after length of whiteness unwound over the earth and shrouded it. p. 4

Pevear & Volokhonsky (PV): From the sky endless skeins of of white cloth, turn after turn, fell on the earth, covering it in a winding sheet. p. 4

HH: Crows settled on the heavy branches of firs, scattering the hoarfrost; their cawing echoed and re-echoed like crackling wood. p. 5

PV: Crows landed on the hanging fir branches, shaking down hoarfrost. The cawing carried, loud as the cracking of a tree limb.

HH: The half-reaped fields under the glaring sun looked like the half-shorn heads of convicts. p. 6

PV: The sun scorched the partly reaped strips like the half-shaven napes of prisoners. p. 5

HH: Neat sheaves rose above the stubble in the distance; if you stared at them long enough they seemed to move, walking along on the horizon like land surveyors taking notes. p. 6

PV: Its ears drooping, the wheat drew itself up straight in the total stillness or stood in shocks far off the road, where, if you started long enough, it acquired the look of moving figures, as if land surveyors were walking along the edge of the horizon and taking notes. p. 5

HH: Gregariousness is always the refuge of mediocrities, whether they swear by Soloviëv or Kant or Marx. p. 9

PV: Every herd is a refuge for giftlessness, whether it's a faith in Soloviev, or Kant, or Marx. p. 8

HH: It was hard to keep one's eyes on the shimmering river, which, like a sheet of corrugated iron, reflected the glare of the sun. Suddenly its surface parted in waves. p. 10

PV: It was painful to look at the river. It gleamed in the sun, curving in and out like a sheet of iron. Suddenly it wrinkled up. p. 10

HH: Orioles kept making their clear three-note calls, stopping each tie just long enough to let the countryside suck in the most fluting sounds down to the last vibration. p. 10

PV: At every moment you could hear the pure, three-note whistling of orioles, with intervals of waiting, so that the moist, drawn-out, flutelike sound could fully saturate the surroundings. p. 10

HH: A heavy fragrance, motionless, as though having lost its way in the air, was fixed by the heat above the flower beds. p. 11

PV: The stagnant scent of flowers wandering in the air was nailed down motionless to the flowerbeds to the heat. p. 10

HH: Russia, with its fields, steppes, villages, and towns, bleached lime-white by the sun, flew past them wrapped in hot clouds of dust. p. 12

PV: Past them in clouds of hot dust, bleached as with lime by the sun, flew Russia, fields and steppes, towns and villages. p. 11

HH: The rising sun had cast the long dewy shadows of trees in loops over the park grounds. The shadow as not black but dark gray like wet felt. The heady fragrance of the morning seemed to come from this damp shadow on the ground, with strips of light in it like girl's fingers. p. 17

PV: The sun was rising, and the ground in the park was covered with the long, dewy, openwork shade of trees. The shade was not black, but of a dark gray color, like wet felt. The stupefying fragrance of morning seemed to come precisely from the damp shade on the ground, with its elongated light spots like a young girl's fingers. p. 15

HH: ...and the boat was dragged in to shore as if by a boathook. There the stems were shorter and more tangled; the white flowers, with their glowing centers looking like bloodspecked egg yolks, sank and emerged dripping with water. p. 19

PV: The boat was drawn to the bank as if by a hook. The stems beecame entangled and shortened: the white flowers with centers bright as egg yolk and blood sank underwater, then emerged with water streaming from them. pp. 16-17.

HH: Purple shadows reached into the room from the garden. The trees, laden with hoarfrost, their branches like smoky streaks of candle wax, look in as if they wished to rest their burden on the floor of the study. p. 39

PV: Violet shadows reached from the garden into the study. Trees peered into the room, looking as if they wanted to strew the floor with their branches covered with heavy hoarfrost, which resembled the lilac streams of congealed stearine. p. 35

HH: In winter the street frowned with a forbidding surliness. p. 44

PV: In winter the place frowned with gloomy haughtiness. p. 39

HH: The weather was unseasonable. Plop-plop-plop went the water drops on the metal of the drainpipes and the cornices, roof tapping messages to roof as if it were spring. It was thawing. p. 44

PV: The weather was trying to get better. "Drip, drip, drip" the drops drummed on the iron gutters and cornice. Roof tapped out to roof, as in springtime. It was a thaw. p. 39

Encyclopedia Out + Jean Wyllys, Brazilian Congressman + Revolt Hits Egypt

A while back I mentioned that the journal Encyclopedia's second volume, F-K, would soon be out, and it is now on bookstands and available for order ($25).  I've flipped through a copy of this newest volume and am delighted to say that like the first one, it is a beautifully designed and produced journal, but it's also an inventive, intellectually provocative anthology and a substantial (and hefty, in terms of size and weight) book.

I'm also very pleased that my translations of two of Brazilian writer Jean Wyllys's microstories from his collection Aflitos (Fundação Casa Jorge Amado; Editora Globo, 2001), which won his native Bahia's Prêmio Copene de Cultura e Arte in 2001, appear in this volume. I began translating them in the middle of last decade, and about a year and a half ago completed a translation of the entire volume. I haven't yet found a publisher, but the experience of translating his very condensed, lyrical prose pieces, some of them closer to poetry than fiction, others nearer to horror in the brutal realities they depict, and all of which offer a fresh perspective on Brazilian and Bahian life, was instructive and creatively energizing.

I'm also glad to have undertaken this project translating Jean's work. As I've noted before, he was the first person to come out as gay on a Brazilian reality TV show--Big Brother 5, which he won in 2005--and after moving to Rio de Janeiro and returning to his roots as a journalist and professor for a few years, he recently ran on the Party of Socialism and Liberty (PSOL) ticket, representing a district in Rio, was elected in October and is now the first openly gay federal deputy (equivalent to a US Representative) to be seated in Brazil's lower house of Congress, the Chamber of Deputies.

I imagine he'll be a bit too busy to write more fiction anytime soon, but I hope he continues to do so, and I also hope his legislative and proposed political goals and career succeed, for him, his constituents and the Brazilian people.

---

Not long ago I blogged about the revolt in Tunisia, which continues as I type this entry, and it was clear to me that if it could even partially succeed--and it has--its spirit would spread throughout other parts of the Middle East. And it has. The largest popular revolution appears to be unfolding in Egypt, where protesters comprising a sizable cross-section of that country's urban populace have staged sustained public protests against the unresponsive, dictatorial government of nonagenarian president-for-life Hosni Mubarak.  Economic stagnation, an authoritarian political systm and violent repression of dissidents have long created a volatile situation that has finally exploded, sparked in part by Tunisia's example, and it's unclear that Mubarak and the security forces will be able to turn back the clock.

In response to the revolt Egypt's government last night shut down Internet, wireless cellular phone, SMS/texting, and satellite phone services, and its secret police and over the last few days its security forces have fired live and non-live ammunition on protesters, killing and badly wounding numerous people in Cairo, Suez, and other cities. The government's communications blackout continued today, in order to shut down Friday afternoon post-prayer demonstrations, though several news reports I've read say that protesters nevertheless gathered at 6 different sites around Cairo, and began marching on government buildings. Anti-nuclear weapon activist and Nobel Laureate Mohamed ElBaradei, an acknowledged leader of the opposition, returned to Egypt yesterday to rally the opposition and today the security forces purportedly turned water cannons on him and numerous supporters, besieging them in a Cairo mosque.  The New York Times is now reporting that Mubarak has now called the military to quell protests that the police forces cannot and has declared a curfew, but demonstrators remain on the streets, a ruling party building is in flames, and Al Jazeera has footage of a torched police car being pushed off a bridge. One thing that remains unclear to me is how widespread the uprisings are. I have heard about demonstrations and attacks on protesters in Suez, but what about other sizable Egyptian cities like Alexandria, Giza and Port Said? What about in the mid-sized cities and in rural areas? What about in southern Egypt? Also, if the protests do succeed in toppling Mubarak, as happened in Tunisia with Ben Ali, who are the likely leading candidates to replace him, and what sort of democratic, republican government might emerge?

Symbolic and public protests have also begun in Algeria, Yemen and Syria, which also suspended its Internet service. In the current New York Review of Books in an article entitled "Uprisings: From Cairo to Tunis," William Pfaff discusses the ferment bubbling across the Arab world, and notes how many of the strongmen under threat have been close allies, sometimes protegés and agents, of US power. This was the case with Tunisia's Ben Ali, who even studied in the US; Mubarak has for years collected billions of dollars annually to prop up his regime. Across the region, US-allied leaders have been stalwarts in the nebulous "War on Terror" at the same time as they have grown increasingly ineffectual in addressing the social, political and economic problems in their own countries. Among the many fine points Pfaff makes, one is key: reform in and of itself hasn't always worked out either. Ben Ali's educational and social reforms in part enabled his downfall, by helping to create a more educated population, a working and middle class with a mind of its own unwilling to continue to take the degraded and diminishing opportunities his regime offered. Enlightenment in this case unleashed forces to ensure its fuller realization. Egypt is several orders larger than Tunisia, with an enraged and engaged young populace, politicized secular and religious opposition parties, and perhaps a majority with no desire to go backwards. As I noted with Tunisia, it's unclear what the final outcome of this current Egyptian revolt will be, but what is likely is that whatever results, Mubarak's hold on power will be fatally damaged, even if he manages to retain it.

Google's Poetry Translation Software

The more my workload increases, the more I find myself dreaming of books, writing, reading, blogging, immersing myself in works of imaginative writing. But there simply is not enough time. Such is the irony of my life these days, but one result is the scarcity of posts here. I don't want to quit blogging, but sometimes I fear it's too difficult to keep it up. Ah well--it's a new year, so I'll keep trying.

***

Desparapluies, one of my brilliant former undergraduate students, works at Google (I think she's still there!), and I was thinking of her and her honors project, and of the countless works of undergraduate and graduate works I've read, as well as of the vast body of literature out there, including my own modest contributions, that would pose challenges to Google's new Poetry Translation software. Poetry, even the seemingly simplest of it, gives many readers a mental workout, so you need not extrapolate too wildly to consider how difficult it remains for artificial intelligence.

But why? Poetic language in almost every language has traditionally involved prosody, figuration, rhetorical devices, rhyme and other sonic devices, allusions and symbolic registers rooted in the language and culture in which it was produced, and the overall and often intricate interplay between all of these elements, in part because it arose out of orality, for which all of these aspects of poetry are required, and while computers have been increasingly able to perform extraordinary complex intellectual tasks, including readable, often idiomatic translation of prose, poetry and poetic language entails many more potentially insurmountable hurdles.  Even the idea of paraphrasing poetry, whether in translation or not, can present difficulties; what, for example, is the paraphrase--or, to put it another way, a précis or simple meaning rendered in prose--of Stéphane Mallarmé's famous poem, "Ses purs ongles très haut....," a sonnet most likely remembered for its dazzling use of the teleuton "-yx"?

Google software engineer Dmitriy Genzel and his team presented a paper at the Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) conference at MIT this past October, in which they focused on the "purely technical challenges around generating translations with fixed rhyme and meter schemes."  Part of the team's debate has centered on the importance of preserving form and meter in translating poetry, and in his blog post Genzel cites Vladimir Nabokov arguments about the impossibility of maintaining such features, while approvingly noting computer scientist Douglas Hofstadter's arguments on behalf of trying to do so.  As anyone who has read my many poetry translations on here or elsewhere knows, I agree wholeheartedly with Hofstadter.

Genzel continues in his Google post:

A Statistical Machine Translation system, like Google Translate, typically performs translations by searching through a multitude of possible translations, guided by a statistical model of accuracy. However, to translate poetry, we not only considered translation accuracy, but meter and rhyming schemes as well. In our paper we describe in more detail how we altered our translation model, but in general we chose to sacrifice a little of the translation’s accuracy to get the poetic form right.

One interesting thing to consider here is their belief in a baseline fidelity in terms of the "translation's accuracy"; one thing most translators of poetry in particular recognize, following in the wake of theorists like Walter Benjamin, is that the possiblity of perfect accuracy is an impossibility, that we can never completely capture all the nuances of the source language or recapture an Ursprache in which both languages would be equal. Something is always lost and something else is gained in the process of carrying something across. For poetic language, this raises a host of questions and issues which to which some eminent scholars and translators like Lawrence Venuti, for example, or my colleague Reg Gibbons, have devoted careers, but I will just say that in the case of some poems "translation accuracy," which is to say, semantic accuracy and fidelity, may in some cases be less important that other elements of the poem, such as rhythm, feeling, figuration, and so forth.

That said, I think this Google project is incredibly important, particularly because of its potential effect on translation software in general.  As I heard NPR Science Consultant Robert Krulwich noting today on All Things Considered, since so much online material is now no longer just in English, accurate translation software, especially of the kind that can minutely and subtly parse a range of languages, will open up even more material to readers all over the world, and that includes we (primary) Anglophones.  It will probably not eliminate the need for those devoted to the translation of literature, however; I can think of a host of works of literary fiction off the top of my head, not all of them formally experimental, that would give the best translation software out today a run for its money.  But in the future, who knows?

One last point about the Google poetry translator that will prove a useful tool, I imagine, for poets and others interested in digital and electronic poetries and natural language processing:

As a pleasant side-effect, the system is also able to translate anything into poetry, allowing us to specify the genre (say, limericks or haikus), or letting the system pick the one it thinks fits best.

This entire blog entry could thus become a poem, and in Urdu or Chinese, with the click of a few buttons. In a year or two, that is.

Myopic Books Reading & Translations: Ana Cristina Cesar & Paulo Leminski

On Saturday evening, as part of the great Myopic Books reading series that Larry Sawyer organizes and runs, I participated in a reading to honor two new books, both translations by wonderful writers: Daniel Borzutzky's new translation of Chilean poet Raúl Zurita's Song for his Disappeared Love (Action Books, 2010), and Kristin Dykstra's translation of Cuban poet Omar Pérez’s Did You Hear About the Fighting Cat (Shearsman Books, 2010).


Paul Martínez Pompa


The audience after the reading


Organizer Larry Sawyer


Kristin Dykstra, Paul Martínez Pompa, Daniel Borzutzky, and I, after the reading (taken by Gabriel Gudding)

Paul Martínez Pompa and I also read, and because the event was celebrating translation, I read translations of two poets I've been translating over the last few months, Brazilian writers Ana Cristina Cesar (1952-1983) and Paul Leminski (1944-1989), both of whom were contemporaries of Zurita (Pérez was born in 1964), and are highly regarded in contemporary Brazilian and South American letters.  Both also have been linked as part of the loosely affiliated "marginal poets," an affiliation based in part on their novel and somewhat experimental, though differing approaches to poetic style and address.

Cesar was a queer São Paulo-born poet who studied and spent time in London, before later living in Brasília, and her poetry often unfolds like conversation, or dialogues, the intimacy enhanced and mitigated by her wide range of references, allusions and irony.  Her fame has steadily grown since her death, by suicide, at the age of 31. Leminski, whose ancestry included African and Polish roots, often played with rhyme and rhythms, while also incorporating poetic forms such as haikai and haibun, drawings and calligraphy, and other languages, such as English.  I find myself drawn back again and again to the work of both, and was delighted to have an opportunity to read some of these publicly. I am posting one translation by each below.  Enjoy!

ANA CRISTINA CESAR

GRAMAS

O coração tem pouca ironia de tardinha
Segredos carnais à flor da pele
poemas descarnados aguardando

A vida recusa transportar-se para outeiros
buracos cavados por doninhas
ervas que florescem

O coração tem pouquíssimo fôlego na piscina
Nos quintais dispara úmido
Nas salas fechadas cuida das buzinas

A vida se encarrega das janelas
mas acaba descendo em correria
Não cabe Não suporta Não tem peso


GRAMS

The heart has little irony in the late afternoon
Carnal secrets on the surface of the skin
skinny poems, just waiting

Life refuses to carry itself off to the hills
holes dug by weasels
grass flowering

In the pool the heart has almost no breath left
In the yards it fires wet
In closed rooms it avoids car horns

Life is put in charge of the windows
But it ends up plummeting in a rush
It does not fit Gives no support Is weightless

Copyright © Ana Cristina Cesar, from Antigos e soltos: poemas e prosas da pasta rosa. Organized by Viviana Bosi. Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Moreira Salles, 2008. Translation © by John Keene, 2010. All rights reserved.

PAULO LEMINSKI

É e é

    Dura o diamante
Dentro da pedra pura.
    De agora em diante
Só o durante dura.


It is and it is

    The diamond endures
Within the pure stone.
    From now going forward
Only the meantime holds on.

Copyright © Paulo Leminski, from From Leminskiana: antología variada. Selection, chronology and prologue by Mario Cámara. Critical texs by Maria Esther Maciel, Célia Pedrosa and André Dick. Testimonies by Augusto de Campos, Décio Pignatari, Haroldo de Campos, Waly Salomão, and Jorge Mautner. Poems by Régis Bonvicino. Bueos Aires: Corregidor, 2005. Translation © John Keene, 2010. All rights reserved.