Made Under Pressure

Literary Translation in the Soviet Union, 1960-1991

Natalia Kamovnikova

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781613765814
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

During the Cold War, determined translators and publishers based in the Soviet Union worked together to increase the number of foreign literary texts available in Russian, despite fluctuating government restrictions. Based on extensive interviews with literary translators, Made Under Pressure offers an insider's look at Soviet censorship and the role translators played in promoting foreign authors—including figures like John Fowles, George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, Gabriel García Márquez, and William Faulkner.Natalia Kamovnikova chronicles the literary translation process from the selection of foreign literary works to their translation, censorship, final approval, and publication. Interviews with Soviet translators of this era provide insight into how the creative work of translating and the practical work of publishing were undertaken within a politically restricted environment, and recall the bonds of community and collaboration that they developed.

Chapter 1

The Closed Society and Its Literary Translation Practices

Literature has been an integral part of the stereotypical image of Russia for more than a century. The traditional literary associations with Russia, however, are the classical Russian works of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. With Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov universally known to the international reader, most Russian literature of the twentieth century often remains obscure. Revolutionary changes in Russian society deeply affected the political situation and social geography of the world, but their domestic effect was equally strong. Changes in the form of state rule and social order had their impact on all spheres of the public life, including literature, creative writing, and translation. The Russian literature of the Soviet period enjoyed less world popularity due to the cultural situation in Soviet Russia, its strained relations with the West, and the political inability of Soviet writers and poets to publish abroad. Of the twentieth-century Soviet writers who are well familiar to the general international reader, one can mention three Nobel Prize winners—Boris Pasternak, Aleksandr Solzh-enitsyn, and Joseph Brodsky—all of whom were politically persecuted in their home country. Two of them—Pasternak and Brodsky—actively engaged in the translation of foreign literature, as they were unable to publish their original works in their home country.

The massive influx of talented and well-educated specialists into literary translation was a distinctive feature of the Soviet period in Russia. Literary translation was often looked upon as a last resort and a steady source of income for people of letters. Generations of Soviet schoolchildren, including the author of this book, were repeatedly admonished by their frightened teachers of Russian literature that Pasternak was not a writer or a poet, but “only” a translator. World literature—from ancient literary texts to contemporary works—arrived throughout the century in translations made by the best writers and poets: Valerii Briu-sov, Konstantin Bal’mont, Kornei Chukovskii, Marina Tsvetaeva, Anna Akhmatova, Boris Pasternak, Georgii Shengeli, and Mikhail Zenkevich. This literary translation heritage set high standards for new generations of Soviet literary translators, who invariably looked up to the achievements of their distinguished older colleagues.

Whereas the nineteenth century is known to the world as the golden age of Russian literature, the twentieth century in Soviet Russia may well be called the golden age of literary translation. The rapid development of translation coincided, strikingly, not with a time of freedom and the creative opportunities that it might offer, but with years of oppression and fear. And the stronger the fear for one’s life and future, the more acute was the desire for self-expression and the longing for difference, for an alternative reality that was often depicted in the works of foreign poets and writers. The literature and translation situation in the Soviet Union falls in line with Maria Tymoczko’s observation that “translations are subject to somewhat different rules and expectations from indigenous works of the native literature, being potentially exempt from some of the (oppressive) rules and norms that govern most elements of the literary system.”1 Translation as a source of income and a means of artistic survival became one of the main occupations of the people of letters in the Soviet Union. The tremendous demand for translated literature sustained a well-developed literary translation industry, which set extremely high requirements for translations.

Translation practices in the Soviet Union will therefore be studied here in the context of the political and social situation and the beliefs, fears, and prejudices of Soviet society. And despite the temptation to resort to the term ideology at this point, I shall abstain from using it in this context. Quite the contrary, I shall devote some time here to showing that the overuse of this term can divert the attention of researchers and their readers from their goals. I am convinced that closer boundaries must be set for the term ideology in order to limit the contexts of its employment. In this terminological revision, I am solely guided by the intention to make the results of my research useful for further application in classification, comparative analysis, and statistics.

The term ideology has been given a variety of definitions, which at times contradict each other. In his comprehensive study on ideology, Teun A. Van Dijk attributes the definition of ideology as “a system of wrong, false, distorted or otherwise misguided beliefs” to Marxist legacy. Van Dijk also draws attention to semantic exclusion contained in the term ideology: “Ours is the Truth, Theirs is the Ideology.”2 The opposition of likeness and otherness, local and foreign often links the term ideology with politics. The political slant of the term is also pointed out by María Calzada-Pérez, who ascribes it to Marxist tradition and the connection of ideology with political domination.3 Yet Calzada-Pérez also defines ideology as “a vehicle to promote or legitimate interests of a particular social group (rather than a means to destroy contenders),” as “a set of ideas which organize our lives and help us understand the relationship to our environment,” and, eventually “the set of ideas, values and beliefs that govern a community by virtue of being regarded as the norm.”4 It is notable that these three vectors defined by Calzada-Pérez are socio-oriented, as she describes ideology as a system of ideas, values, and beliefs shared by a social group. Van Dijk also actively points out the social aspect of ideologies, considering them the basis of social representations shared by members of a group, identifying them as social belief systems, and applying a multidisciplinary approach to the studies of ideology in terms of social cognition, society, and discourse.5

Such social and sociolinguistic definitions of ideology make it possible to achieve greater objectivity in translation research. The abovementioned occasional political slant of the term ideology, however, seems extremely undesirable for its ability to create unnecessary connotations that deprive the word of its terminological quality. This is why in this book, political definitions of ideology, which might involve pejorative connotations, will give way to social and sociolinguistic approaches. By ideology I mean the tacit assumptions, beliefs, and value systems that are shared collectively by a social group and that are relevant to the maintenance of power structures within a given language community.6 Within the field of ideology, translation might be not purely the manipulation of the text, but rather the manipulation of the reader and public opinion. The ideology within which translation is performed determines the translator’s approach to the text and the decisions he/she makes in rendering the contents and style of the translated work. But whatever nature the governing ideology might have, no translation, like no exchange of culture, can be free: “there are always economic and ideological interests at play in decisions about what cultural elements are worthy of translation.”7

This determination of “worthiness” does not solely target manipulation of the reader and the public opinion; choosing texts for translation implies deciding upon the structure of the cultural capital and, ultimately, upon the target culture structure.8 As Gideon Toury noted, translation starts with “the observation that something is ‘missing’ in the target culture which should have been there and which, luckily, already exists elsewhere.”9 Therefore the decision regarding worthiness of the original depends on the readiness of the receiving language community to embrace the difference the translation might offer. In case the difference offered by the original endangers the accepted ideology, its chances of being determined worthy of translation and thus joining the realm of cultural capital are considerably lower. This confrontation of the receiving culture with another, different way of looking at life and society was described by André Lefevere as “potentially threatening.”10 The way the receiving culture perceives and reacts to the potential threat is determined by the sociopolitical openness of the receiving language community.

Actively used in modern literary and translation studies and well defined by sociologists and political scientists, the term ideology evokes yet a different set of associations with the representatives of different cultures. Initially applied to history, the term ideology has expanded so much in scale that Daniel Bell was prompted to observe, in his seminal book The End of Ideology, that it is so vast one can hardly “make one’s way through this bramble bush.”11 In the Russian language, seventy years of communist rule also made their contribution to the change of the semantic structure of the word ideology. The difference becomes clear in a comparison of Russian dictionaries and encyclopedias published at different times. The Slovar’ sovremennogo russkogo literaturnogo iazyka (Dictionary of the modern Russian literary language) published in 1956 (that is, three years after the death of Stalin) defines ideology as “a system of viewpoints, ideas, opinions that characterize a particular society, a particular class, or a political party.”12 The examples given in the entry are taken from the biography of Vladimir Lenin, and they illustrate the usage of such phrases as socialist ideology and bourgeois ideology. The Bol’shaia sovetskaia entsiklopediia (Big Soviet encyclopedia) of 1972 points out the juxtaposition of Marxist-Leninist and bourgeois ideologies and their “deadly feud,” which lies in the basis of Marxism-Leninism. The encyclopedia defines ideology as the “theoretical basis of the communist movement,”13 which directly links the term ideology with the semantic fields communism and socialism. Enhanced throughout the decades by active use of the term ideology in the Soviet context, the association became fixed in the minds of Russian language speakers. The Bol’shoi rossiiskii entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ (Big Russian encyclopedic dictionary) of 2005 indicates, for instance, that “the term ideology is often used for defining a false, delusive, detached from reality type of consciousness.”14

This historical distortion of the semantic structure of an initially neutral term not only makes the usage of the word ideology difficult for a set of contexts, it also creates difficulties in the cross-cultural communication of researchers. Whereas Western researchers mainly employ the word ideology terminologically, Eastern European researchers may feel unreasonably targeted, reacting to the term ideology as to a marker of their historic and cultural past and a negative experience associated with the society they are representing. This antiterminological emotiveness of the word traditionally used as a term was pointed out by Bell as early as the beginning of the 1960s, when he described ideology as “not simply a weltanschauung, a cultural worldview, or a mask for interests, but a historically located belief system that fused ideas with passion, sought to convert ideas into social levers, and in transforming ideas transformed people as well. When it becomes a striking force, ideology looks at the world with eyes wide shut, a closed system which prefabricates answers to any questions that might be asked.”15 In this regard, the active use of the word ideology within a field other than history and politics is able to create uneasiness among the researchers of different cultural backgrounds. World science will barely benefit if the researchers whose countries faced totalitarianism and oppression of any sort in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries felt, in Bell’s terminology, recently “transformed” from above. The discreetness I am calling for is especially important for all types of linguistic research, where every word is able to function both as an object of research and a powerful tool.

I foresee objections to my call: indeed, research papers usually indicate quite clearly the type and orientation of ideologies described. For example, some researchers use the term communist ideology; others employ such formulas as translation under the communist/totalitarian/Nazi/etc. regime.16 Lawrence Venuti regularly uses the term ideology in his seminal book The Translator’s Invisibility—and almost invariably with adjectives: nationalist ideology, bourgeois ideology, racial ideology, patriarchal ideology, feminist, assimilationist ideology.17 The use of these formulas is usually well grounded and contextually motivated; nonetheless, the variety of meanings the word ideology acquires once used with an adjective threatens to deprive it of its terminological quality. As one can see from the examples, the majority of connotations generated by adjectives are negative, which implies the antithesis of viewpoints and brings us back to Van Dijk’s formula, which defines ideology as an alien feature.18

Another question that arises in this regard is the degree of generalization provided by such formulas as communist ideology, totalitarian ideology, Soviet ideology, and so on. Indeed, each of the above-listed designations is able to define notions that can at times prove controversial or even contradict each other. For example, the word combination communist ideology will effectuate different semantic components when applied in relation to Russia and to China; totalitarian ideology of the Third Reich and in the Soviet Union under Stalin, although possessing obvious similarities, had distinctive features and at times quite different manifestations. If we consider the history of the Soviet Union, do we apply the term totalitarian ideology to all the years of its existence, or do we use the term totalitarian ideology only until the death of Stalin, in 1953, and use the term Soviet ideology for a wider historic period? Even the term Soviet ideology is far from being definite, because within the USSR, Soviet ideology took different shapes in different socialist republics in each given time span; the difference between Soviet ideologies proves even stronger if we take a closer look at their manifestations in the Warsaw Pact countries. Therefore, additional adjectival specification of the term ideology, in my view, leads to blurring of the term, rather than the desired clarification. Adjectival specifications are quite appropriate in describing particular contexts and discourses, as in the quoted works, but they may be misleading in attempts to draw general conclusions.

This necessity to generalize the collected data makes us reconsider the ways the same ideology and regime can be described. Even though different branches of research and science can come very close together, the use of traditional historical terms in linguistic research can prove a distraction from the research objectives. The aim of a translation scholar consists in researching translation trends, policies, and strategies, as well as the activity of translators under different social conditions. The definition of the type of regime by far remains a peripheral task; however, the application of such fuzzy terms as communist, Soviet, and totalitarian forces researchers to engage in drawing political conclusions. And, therefore, since the studies of social conditions that motivated translation strategies and activities are an integral part of research, the preferred terminology should o...