In the Translator’s Workshop: Featuring Boris Drayluk on “Adam” by Julia Nemirovskaya
- Amit Majmudar, Boris Drayluk
- 19h
- 6 min read
Amit Majmudar, George Steiner Editor for Poetry and Criticism
George Steiner wrote one of the most perceptive books we have on translation and based its title on one of our most profound parables on ambition and communication: After Babel. As a sometime translator myself, I know first hand the Babel-like misunderstandings that bedevil all those who would dismantle and rebuild a tower of words.
I am aware, accordingly, of the poet-translator’s background sense of the endeavor’s futility, one that writers have lamented for hundreds of years. In Don Quixote (quoted here in John Rutherford’s translation), the priest who helps burn Quixote’s books of chivalry remarks, “...He [the translator] left behind much of what was best in it, which is what happens to all those who try to translate poetry: however much care they take and skill they display, they can never recreate it in the full perfection of its original birth.”
As Cervantes notes, a translator’s problems compound specifically with poetry, so deeply dependent on nuances and idiosyncrasies in the language of its composition. Readers rarely learn about the “inside baseball” behind a translator’s choices and sacrifices, about dilemmas of etymology and connotation, about the slippages between counterpart, counterfeit words. In poetry translation, when it’s done correctly, no detail is too pedantic, no feature of syntax or diction is irrelevant, and no choice is trivial.
I reached out to poets who translate from languages or cultures far afield from English: Norse, Russian, Ki’che’ Maya (Castilian), Chinese, Sanskrit. I asked the poet-translators to focus on a line or stanza and share the nitty-gritty of moving poetry between the original and English. This series features the translators' mini-essays, showing us how much thought and hard work go into what poetry translators do.
Amit Majmudar
Boris Drayluk on “Adam” by Julia Nemirovskaya
Listen to Boris Drayluk read "Adam" in Russian and English.
I have been translating poetry from Russian into English for more than half my life. Whenever I was asked, around midway through my journey as a translator, to offer examples of particular challenges I had faced, of battles won against the apparently untranslatable, the temptation was to cite discrete solutions to discrete problems. One such problem, for instance, came up when I was rendering my late friend Oleg Woolf’s gently surreal cycle of short stories set in Moldova, Bessarabian Stamps.
In one story, his characters find themselves in the invented month of Khotyabr’, a portmanteau of the Russian phrase khotya by (“if only”) and oktyabr’, the Russian form of October. I remember waking up with the solution on my lips: Oughtober. My mind had been working on the words as I slept, in the background. Another pun popped up in a poem by the Jewish-Ukrainian poet Lev Ozerov. In recalling his encounters with one of the Soviet Union’s finest, most inventive writers of children’s verse, Korney Chukovsky, Ozerov calls his hero “the sovereign of childhood’s domain”—a domain he dubs Voobraziliya, mashing together the start of the Russian verb voobrazit’ (“to imagine”) with Braziliya, the Russian form of Brazil. Once again, the solution sprang from my subconscious fully formed: Mind’s Eyeland.
The longer I worked, however, the less I came to value such examples. After all, I wasn’t slogging my way through texts problem by problem, wrestling pun after pun into submission. The truth was that some puns proved unpinnable. Many discrete strokes of verbal genius in the original were, in fact, lost in translation. I began to think of every text as a single challenge in itself, rather than as a track with many hurdles. My goal was to meet the text whole, to find a fitting tone of voice, to make up for inevitable losses with gains available only in English. I decided there and then that, were I ever asked about a translational challenge again, I would offer whole poems in response—more specifically, the lyrics of Julia Nemirovskaya, my favorite living Russophone poet, who immigrated to Oregon from the USSR in 1990. And that is precisely what I have done at Asymptote Journal, Plume, and Poetry Daily.
One of Julia’s poems happened to leap into my head when I heard Christian Nationalist Pastor, Doug Wilson declare, in response to a question put to him by a woman journalist on CNN, that “women are the kind of people that people come out of.” His ideology and his very tone of voice seemed to echo those of Julia’s first man:
Adam
The name of this tree is tree; water’s water.
If you want to leave, leave: go nowhere.
Here, nowhere—that’s all. He made them.
Choose: either no-one—or me, Adam.
You are woman: that is your name.
Raw material, like grass or clay.
I am Adam: I give names to all.
You’re my wife: you come when I call.
Don’t want to? Don’t. Enough bellyaching.
I’ll ask our Maker for Lilith—He’ll make her.
The original reads:
Адам
Имя дереву – дерево, вода воде:
Уходи, если хочешь, иди в нигде.
Только где и нигде, вот что Он нам дал.
Выбирай: есть никто и есть я, Адам.
Ты же женщина: это имя твое.
Ты трава или глина, ты так, сырье.
Я Адам и всему даю имена
И тебя обнимаю, раз ты жена.
А не хочешь – не надо, я слезами сыт.
Попрошу, и Он сотворит Лилит.
I could speak about individual effects in the original that I managed to reproduce, like Julia’s inventive rhymes, which might call to mind Tsvetaeva for Russophone readers and Emily Dickinson for Anglophones: her vodé / nigdé turns, with serendipitous semantic accuracy, into my water / nowhere, while her dal (“gave”) / Adám finds a match in my them / Adam. I could speak about my attempts to compensate for certain lost internal rhymes by introducing new ones dense with meaning, like “Maker” and “make her” in the last line, or about my decision to replace slezámi syt (“sated with tears”) with the idiomatic “bellyaching,” which I felt matched the disdainful tone of the original while hinting at a man’s unwillingness to comprehend the actual labor and pain involved in labor—“the kind of people that people come out of” indeed.
The translation works (or so I think) thanks to all of these minor factors, to which I might add the reproduction, mutatis mutandis, of the original’s strong, irregularly spaced beats. But none of these elements is worth dwelling on long. If I have met the challenge, the poem stands as a whole and speaks for itself—and what it has to say is, alas, as relevant as ever.
Boris Dralyuk is the author of My Hollywood and Other Poems (2022), editor of 1917: Stories and Poems from the Russian Revolution (2016), co-editor of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (2015), and translator of volumes by Isaac Babel, Andrey Kurkov, Leo Tolstoy, and other authors. His poems have appeared in The New York Review of Books, The Hudson Review, Raritan Quarterly, The Spectator, Best American Poems 2023, and elsewhere, and his criticism and translations have appeared in the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review of Books, Granta, and The New Yorker, among other venues. He is the recipient of a 2024 Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2022 Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize from the National Book Critics Circle, and the 2020 Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing from the Washington Monthly. Formerly editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles Review of Books, he is currently a Tulsa Artist Fellow and teaches in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Tulsa.
Amit Majmudar is Marginalia's George Steiner Editor for Poetry and Criticism, a poet, novelist, essayist, translator, and the former first Poet Laureate of Ohio. He works as a diagnostic and nuclear radiologist and lives in Westerville, Ohio, with his wife and three children. Majmudar’s essays have appeared in The Best American Essays 2018, the New York Times, and the Times of India, among several other publications. His most recent collection of essays, focusing on Indian religious philosophy, history, and mythology, is Black Avatar and Other Essays (Acre Books, 2023). He is most recently the author of The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024) Later Adventures of Hanuman (India Penguin, 2024), The Book of Vows: The Mahabharata Trilogy Volume 1 (Penguin India , 2023), and The Book of Discoveries: The Mahabharata Trilogy Volume 2 (Penguin India , 2024). The Book of Killings: The Mahabharata Trilogy Volume 3 is forthcoming from Penguin India. Learn more at www.amitmajmudar.com. X@AmitMajmudar
