On My Small Issue with George Saunders

and A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

It’s the words of course, and their implications.

We find them in this paragraph from page 4 of A Swim in a Pond in the Rain —

The stories were, of course, written in Russian. I offer the English translations that I’ve responded to most strongly or, in some cases, the versions I first found years ago and have been teaching from since. I don’t read or speak Russian, so I can’t vouch for their faithfulness to the original (although we’ll do some thinking about that as we go). I propose that we approach the stories as if they were originally written in English, knowing that we’re losing the music of the Russian and the nuance they would have for a Russian reader. Even in English, shorn of those delights, they have worlds to teach us.

And they do.

Which is why this is I’ve adopted this as a core textbook at BA and MA Creative Writing level.

But this paragraph is the biggest mention that the translators — who made all the specific word choices we’re about to experience and unpick — are granted in the whole book. (Though they are also thanked in the acknowledgments.)

This seems a deliberate omission. Perhaps George Saunders, or his editor, were hoping to keep things clean and simple.

Each of the seven stories gets a full title page —

IN THE CART

                                                               Anton Chekhov

                                                                     (1897)

I don’t understand why the translator/s for each story weren’t credited here.

That’s all it would take for their existence — not only mediating but manifesting — to be recognised. To be a thing.

For us to discover their names, we have to head to the Texts and Credits sections in the endmatter.

Here we find that we are reading Avrahm Yarmolinsky’s version of Chekov’s ‘In the Cart’ (and also his ‘Gooseberries,’ and ‘The Darling’.

And that it’s Louise Maude and Aylmer Maude’s ‘Master and Man’ by Leo Tolstoy, Clarence Brown’s ‘Alyosha the Pot’, David Magarshack’s ‘The Singers’ by Ivan Turgenev, and Mary Struve’s ‘The Nose’ by Gogol we are getting to know.

(Note: Mary Struve doesn’t yet seem to have a wikipedia entry.)

I wouldn’t be so disappointed with the book if each translator or translating team were listed on those title pages.

And also that there was, within the discussion of each story, a mention of the dates of their translations.

Louise and Aylmer Maude’s ‘Master and Man’ is attributed to the 1967 edition of Great Short Works of Leo Tolstoy, but Aylmer died in 1938 and Louise in 1939.

I’m struggling to find out when their version of Tolstoy’s 1895 story was first published.

That first of course leads to this —

I propose that we approach the stories as if they were originally written in English, knowing that we’re losing the music of the Russian and the nuance they would have for a Russian reader. Even in English, shorn of those delights, they have worlds to teach us.

Which is a strange thing for a writer as brilliantly subtle as George Saunders to say.

Words don’t simply have music and nuance because they belong to a certain language and culture.

They have etymological roots going back thousands of years. They have associations they picked up in recent centuries and decades. And they have starkly contemporary resonances.

..shorn of those delights…

The phrasing here is weird.

You don’t ever, as far as I’m aware, shear music as you would a sheep.

Raw or grease wool is anything but a delight.

The appalling mixedness of this metaphor (sorry, George) is some measure of the turbulent complexities beneath the surface that are being glossed over.

I realise that this book couldn’t exist in the friendly and accessible form it does were issues of etymology, specificity and untranslatability to be insisted upon.

But they are there, all the way through every word.

George Saunders doesn’t write in an of course American English.

How could he?

Photo credit: Jonathan Sprague