There are insidious ways of how and particularly why translations are made. Definitely, publishing a translation, especially of a book without a direct ´public appeal´, talking about a world that does not represent too much for the world outside the book, may be a risk in financial terms. But the world of letters may go a bit beyond some calculations, no matter how important they are. It has to do at a certain extent with the mission of the intellectual, which means to live in and for the world of ideas - spreading them, analysing them, creating them. What about translators who are doing their job of bringing to the public books whose only fault is that they were not approaching popular or easy topics, or maybe no topics at all, but nevertheless are extremely precious from the literary point of view.
Russian translations are not easy and the topics may be geographically contained, but the beauty of the Russian literature is stronger than this. If you had the chance to read Daniil Charms or Andrej Belyj, you know what I am talking about. What a blessing it is to have translators who brought to the non-Russian literary realm such jewels.
But translators comes in different shades and...obviously, languages. With the chairs of ´Slavic´ languages closing shortly at the end of the Cold War in America, there is a gap digged up in terms of linguisting language. There are always native speakers from the former Soviet Union still around, but still, soon there may not be enough.
Hopefully, there are Russian translators in Europe, who acquired their knowledge in different -sometimes Cold War - context, mostly Germany and France, but also in the former Eastern European communist countries like Hungary and less, in Romania. Knowing an extra one or two languages besides English may always help. I am not grateful enough for the chance of learning German in the last ten years - and counting - particularly for the access to a pool of translated works from very diverse languages, from Russian (again) to Azeri or Armenian and Georgian.
This is how I was able to read recently the massive debut - and only actually it was another novel published posthumously and there is a collection of short stories in Hebrew not yet translated anyway - novel by Alexander Goldstein Denk am Famagusta/Remember Famagusta translated into German by film and movie director and Moscow-educated translator Regine Kühn.
Instilled with personal encounters as a Soviet-born Jew from Tallinn to Baku and then to Tel Aviv this book epitomizes the multi-faceted destinies of the Soviet citizen, told in a story which mixes well Gogol with the humour of Bulgakov. But this is the first layer of understanding the inter-textuality and dense story of the novel. Finding more about it require intensive thinking and most probably first-hand knowledge of the context and histories the story is placed. This familiarity of the writer with his material may be impenetrable for the readers though, and so are the references of intimate cultural nature the characters, from a sufi wise man, to an underground Christian Orthodox, to an Armenian gladiator. The cast of characters is as dense as the story told wich all its confusing pathways and understanding keys spread all over the story.
If one needs - and should in fact - read this novel at least twice, it also for the references that are so much needed and the senses that definitely are lost for ever in translation. But as my Russian skills are more than basic, I have to check for other translations - if any - hoping that one day someone will have the biggest chutzpe to do a translation into English, no matter the ´financial´ risk of such an entreprise.
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