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23Russian Readers' Responses to Beryl Bainbridge's Novels
Olga G. Sidorova
Ural Federal University, Professor
620002, Russia, Ekaterinburg, Mirstr., 19; [email protected]
Literary translation has always been considered to be a literary pursuit in its own right. A translated work of literature can make a powerful impact on the target literature and culture - examples of this sort are numerous in any national literature. No doubt, reception of an outstanding author's books in a foreign culture is not necessarily limited to his/her works translated variants, but the role of translation in this process can't be overestimated.
There is absolutely no need to explain to the British reading public who Beryl Bainbridge was and what place in English literature she occupied. A mere reference to her Wikipedia page can clearly illustrate this point: "Dame Beryl Margaret Bainbridge, DBE (21 November 1932 - 2 July 2010) was an English author from Liverpool. She was primarily known for her psychological novels, often set amongst the English working classes. Bainbridge won the Whitbread Awards prize for best novel in 1977 and 1996; she was nominated five times for the Booker Prize. She was described in 2007 as "a national treasure.” In 2008, The Times newspaper named Bainbridge among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945”. Beryl Bainbridge wrote 20 novels, as well as books of other genres, so the English readers are well-acquainted with her fiction.
The Russian readers were not so privileged: the first novels by B. Bainbridge translated into Russian by L. Bespalova and E. Surits were Sweet William (1975) and Watson's Apology (1984). The two novels were published in 1994 in one volume, but the book didn't attract much attention, and the author remained virtually unknown for the Russian reading public till Master Georgie. The Russian translation appeared in Inostrannaya Literatura - Russian foreign literature monthly journal highly respected, among other things, for its high quality of translations. The novel was translated in 2000 by
® Olga Sidorova, 2012
Elena Surits (Елена Суриц), a renowned translator, who had earlier published her Russian variants of a number of English classical writers, Jonathan Swift, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Virginia Wolf and some other authors being among them. The next year this translation was published as a hardback edition by Inostranka Publishers. The Russian public reception was generally positive, though not wide - Bainbridge remained known only to a narrow circle of specialists in the field of English literature. In 2004 Грандиозное приключение (the Russian translation of An Awfully Big Adventure made by Elena Surits) was published in the hardback variant by Rosman Publishers in their series The Booker Prize selections. Both the front and the back covers of this edition bore the inscriptions that the novel was included into the Booker prize shortlist in 1990. The third - and the most recent - translation of the author's novels into Russian was again made by Elena Surits: According to Queeney appeared in issue 12 of Inostrannaya Literatura, 2004. The choice of the books for translation seems to be obscure - why these five out of twenty, some of them are definitely not less remarkable? - and can be plausibly explained, on the face of things, by the translators' choice and preferences. The Russian publishers' translation policy is often inexplicable, but this is a different problem.
Being an experienced translator, E. Surits managed to transmit Bainbridge's strange and peculiar voice, the tone of her narratives, her dark humour, understatements, hints and allusions. The following example serves a good illustration of the translator's art:
I didn't like the tiger; his jaws gaped open and unlike Mr Hardy it didn't have any lids to its eyes, which meant they glared. Mrs Hardy detested the rug as much as I did, though for different reasons. Mr Hardy swore he'd bagged the beast himself in the Madras Province, in the days when he'd been employed as an overseer of Irrigation Works. It was a boast Mrs Hardy had shaken to fragments on more than one agitated occasion; she spat he'd bought it cheap at Riley's auction rooms in Water Street and Carried it home over his shoulder (5)
Тигра этого я не терпела: челюсти раздвинуты, а, в отличие от мистера Харди, веку него не было, так что он вылупил глаза. Миссис Харди ненавидела ковер не меньше моего, но совсем по другой причине. Мистер Харди божился, что самолично уложил
зверя в Мадрасе в ту пору, когда там надзирал за оросительными работами. Но это была наглая ложь, и миссис Харди не раз под горячую руку вдребезги ее разбивала: шипела, что он купил эту пакость на аукционе и самолично приволок на закорках домой (стр. 11)
As I see it, the common problem is to what extent the Russian (or any other) public is ready to grasp the things inherently meant or hinted upon in a translated literary text. The public response, I believe, is often barred by the readers' ability/inability to comprehend, to evaluate, to grasp the subtlest meanings of a literary text. True, Bainbridge's novels are not easy to read: thus, An Awfully Big Adventure, consisting of 11 untitled, but numbered chapters, starts with chapter number "0” which is finished only after the whole book is read, i.e. after chapter 11 - so when a reader begins reading the novel he struggles through the starting chapter to fully understand its meaning at the closing page. What's more, Bainbridge's novels often rely upon cultural knowledge familiar to the English people but strange to the Russian ones. Let me illustrate this point by the following facts: Dr. Johnson, for example, is a personality known only to a number of scholars in Russia; secondly, Tennyson's The Charge of the Light Brigade is still not translated into Russian, but is alluded to in a very subtle way in Master Georgie. Karen Hewitt states that the British readers expect to learn about the Light Brigade in a novel partly devoted to the Crimean War, but it is only mentioned very obliquely when Potter points out that horses are cheap now since so many riders of the Light Brigade were killed. I also think the Light Brigade's glorious image comes to the British reader's mind when he/she is reading Plate 3 of the novel where a young man brilliantly attired in the uniform of Lord Cardigan's 11th Hussars take a certain (quite unexpected, absolutely non-heroic and funny) role. This is quite disconcerting for the British reader, Karen Hewitt suggests - the famous image is hinted at, but the reader's expectations are not fulfilled. But my point is as follows: the British reader's popular image of the Crimean war is formed and constructed through literature, just like the Russian reader's image of the same war. The Russians have a different image of the Crimean war, though? Because it was formed through different literary means.
One may argue that every literary work in translation is characterized by this novelty quality (after all, we read translated works of literature to find some new impressions and facts about yet unknown worlds), but in this particular case, in the case of Bainbridge's books in translation, it is added to the inherent complications - strange narratives, multiple voices, non-linear composition, to name but a few. Thus, we can state that the process of Beryl Bainbridge's reception in Russia has only started - and it should be stressed that the Perm-Oxford seminar has played a significant role in it. By distributing Master Georgie copies among the universities, by discussions during its annual meetings, by compiling the Commentary and publishing several articles on the novel in Footpath journal the seminar organizers introduced this novel to a great number of Russian teachers and students. The range of the novel estimation is vast - this is just the first step to deeper understanding of Bainbridge's works in Russia. Though, as it has been pointed out above, the English and the Russians have different images of the Crimean war, both of them are formed to a great extent by texts of fiction. The most widely-known book in the Russian literature devoted to this historic event is unquestionably Leo Tolstoy's Sebastopol Sketches (1856). Tolstoy was among the first to de-romanticize war in literature - there is much hard work, blood and sufferings side by side with courage and non-demonstrative heroism in his Sebastopol Sketches. One can't avoid feeling inherent Tolstovian influence in Master Georgie in this respect. Besides, both authors tend not to write about the enemies their characters struggle against; their main topic of analyses lies in depicting the characters under different, often dramatic circumstances. An extremely interesting and convincing article entitled The Crimean War as seen by Leo Tolstoy and Beryl Bainbridge (Крымская война глазами Льва Толстого и 81ерилл Бейнбридж) by Darya Volchek was published in Perm University Messenger in 2011, where the author correlates the two books and contextualizes the historic event described in both of them.
My personal choice list of as yet untranslated novels by Bainbridge which would be presumably highly interesting for the Russian readers starts with The Birthday Boys (1991), an account of Captain Robert Scott's 1910-1913 dramatic expedition to the South Pole.
Heavily based on true history, the novel blurs borders between history and fiction in the most peculiar way, giving voices to all five members of the expedition, thus creating a unique narrative polyglossia. The probability that it will find numerous Russian readers is high not only because the novel is very good and quite Bainbridgian, but also because the Russian readers seem to be well-prepared to appreciate it. What I mean is the fact that a well-known Russian novel Two Captains (1938 - 1944) by a Soviet writer Veniamin Kaverin is also devoted to a fictitious Russian Polar expedition (to the North Pole in this case) - but many details of the real Captain Scott's odyssey are included into the text, as well as a Tennyson's quotation "To strive, to seek, to find and not to yield” («Бороться и искать, найти и не сдаваться») that is made the leading motto for the novel's protagonist.
The deeper academic response was started by a young Russian scholar from Krasnoyarsk Tatyana Poluektova who published a number of interesting articles in Russian journals both in Russian and in English and defended her thesis devoted to the genre characteristics in Bainbridge novels in November, 2011. Though her analysis was primarily based on two novels, namely, Master Georgie and According to Queeney, and focused on correlations of fact and fiction in these two books, it is full of deep observations.
To sum everything up, books written by Beryl Bainbridge have just started on their way to Russian readers and scholars. I honestly believe that the more we read and discuss them the more interesting they seem to become - true, this is an inherent quality of every good book, but here Bainbridge stands apart from many other authors. Her novels are not an easy and immediate reading, though their plots are full of events and actions. Their depths are dark and obscure, but this particular quality makes them not less attractive for a thoughtful reader. Hopefully, there is still much to be translated from Bainbridge into Russian, and there are many good translators in this county and many readers to appreciate their work.
Романы Б.Бейбридж в восприятии русских читателей
Ольга Григорьевна Сидорова
Уральский Федеральный университет, профессор 620002, Россия, Екатеринбург, ул. Мира, 19; [email protected]
В статье рассматриваются проблемы перевода и рецепции творчества Берилл Бейнбридж в России. Анализируются основные тенденции внимания переводчиков и литературоведов к творчеству знаменитой английской писательницы.
Ключевые слова: Берилл Бейнбридж, роман, перевод, рецепция, русскоязычные читатели
*
УДК 821.161.1:81’255.2(=111)
О новом переводе «Преступления и наказания»
на английский
Оливер Реди
Оксфордский университет, Колледж Св. Антония Woodstock Road, Oxford, United Kingdom, 0X2 6JF; [email protected]
В статье, впервые представленной на международном конгрессе переводчиков в Москве в 2012 г., автор размышляет об опыте перевода романа Достоевского. Он размышляет о необходимых стратегиях перевода текста великого романа с учетом как содержательных, так и собственно стилевых особенностей произведения. Перевод О. Реди вскоре будет опубликован издательством «Penguin Classics».
В России, как известно, ценят и продолжают использовать хорошие, уже полюбившиеся переводы классики. В Англии, дело обстоит иначе. У нас уже давно идет непрерывное и, как многим кажется, избыточное обновление переводов (особенно с русского). Главной причиной тому, как ни грустно, являются коммерческие интересы издателей.
Поэтому, когда четыре года назад ко мне поступило предложение перевести заново «Преступление и наказание», я, как и герой Достоевского, находился «как бы в нерешимости». Лежал у себя в каморке на турецком (ну хорошо - английском!) диване и терзался вопросами - нужен ли новый перевод (девятый, десятый или двадцатый) этого шедевра мировой
® Оливер Реди, 2012
