Pronoun Trouble

Okay, so...hello! I am writing a dreamwidth entry. In the year our lord 2026! Because I am tired of not being able to lock stuff down, and therefore not talking about anything at all, basically, and also most other social media sucks balls now. 

anyway, my first entry is going to be about my new passion project, which I started on April 2nd, and which has taken over my entire brain. That project is translating a series of books I have loved since I was a kid, that were never translated into English. I tried to do this in college, but I gave up on the very first page—I remember this vividly—because I had no idea how to translate "kolkhoz" and the internet wasn't what it is now, for better or for worse. (Worse, now, of course, but with more resources!) (Kolkhoz, btw, is a collective farm. It sounds stupid in English, but is SUCH a familiar and normal word in Russian.)

Anyway, WHAT, exactly, are these books?

They were written by a remarkable woman named Frida Vigdorova, who started her career as a teacher, then promptly switched to journalism, and then also wrote six books, all before dying of cancer in 1965, at the age of 50. FIFTY. I will never get over this. I'm about to turn 44. That's fucking crazy, man.

Anyway, she is actually most well-known for secretly (and sometimes, openly) recording the trial of Joseph Brodsky, a Soviet-era poet who was tried for "parasitism" and all sorts of Soviet censorial nonsense. The NYT even has an archival excerpt, which names Vigdorova! Very fucking cool.

Anyway, it was because she recorded the trial and sent it off to the West to be published by ex-pats, that it gained momentum, and the USSR was forced to simply exile this man, instead of throw him in the gulag, due to public pressure. So this is the sort of woman Frida Vigdorova was. Completely fearless. An honest to God hero of mine. (If you want to get a better idea of what she was like, this is a really lovely write-up from someone who used to know her, translated into English. She name-drops a TON of famous and important Soviet writers, and it's just very interesting to me that most of them are household names, but not Vigdorova, not really.)

ANYWAY. So! These books. There are five of them - a trilogy, and a duology. 

The trilogy is the one I read first, at the age of...I want to say...nine. But they're not exactly kids' books. The Soviet Union didn't coddle kids (as you can imagine) and expected them to read at very high levels, very early on, but if I had to guess the intended audience for the trilogy, I'd say...tweens and early adolescents? I think. Probably.

So what are they about?

They're a fictionalized account of a man named Semyon Karabanov, who was an actual person (real last name Kalabalin; look him up, he was a hottie). Anyway, why him. WELL. His (fictionalized) name first became famous after Anton Makarenko published his famous work on raising "besprezorniki" - homeless kids who've gone astray. There were so many of them, after the Russian Civil War, and he was basically tasked with starting an orphanage and reforming as many boys as he could. Which he did, to great success, many times over, and then wrote a very famous book about it. One of the "characters" introduced in that book was Semyon. And that's who Vigdorova met with, and wrote these books about. 

So, the trilogy is all about how this man continued the same work his teacher began, which he really did do until his death in 1972 (his wife lived until 1999, which is so weird to me! I was 17 at that point! How is that possible! Anyway). It's highly fictionalized, but OH BOY, is it COMPELLING. These books have some of my favorite characters ever (including my very first literary crush, which, upon rereading, is only more compounded) and when I reread them on a whim last year, I realized JUST how important these books were to me. It felt like these were the books that truly made me who I am, for many reasons, in many different ways. 

So, after I first read the trilogy, and couldn't stop talking about it, my mom informed me that there was a duology, as well, which she thought I was a bit too young for, and while it's mostly unrelated, there ARE two characters who show up in the second of those books that I would be happy about. And then she didn't let me read them until I was 11. I remember the day I read the first one - we had a snow day (first in my life; we never got snow days in Russia, for obvious reasons), and I spent the entire day completely absorbed by the first book. Then we had another snow day, and I read the second book, and the THRILL of finding out that my VERY FAVORITE LITERARY CHARACTER, MY WONDERFUL CRUSH, now appeared in it AS AN ADULT....you cannot imagine the joy. Truly. Mind-boggling to 11-year old me. (And, tbh, 44 year old me, as well.)

Anyway, that is my project - two book series, translated into English. Why am I doing this? Mostly, I want T to read them, tbh. I want to share with my friends. I want to be like, look, my heart! And have the ability to share them with people.  

And it's been a FASCINATING experience, translating them. I am obviously not a professional translator, and I'm probably doing a terrible job. But I AM a writer, and I DO have very good command of both languages. And I have a drive I never had before. T has begun to read along, as have a couple other people, and it's been such a joy for me. It's ALL I want to do. 

And it's making me appreciate Russian as a language more than ever. It's been kind of fascinating, as an experience. I've had thoughts before of "I wish English had this word or this word" (or, alternately, I wish Russian this word or this word), but I've never really sat with it in the same way. 

For instance, Semyon keeps referring to the kids of the orphanage (who are all boys in the first book): and he refers to them with all sorts of words: ребята, мальчики, мальчишки, мальчуганы, пацаны...but in English, that either be "guys" or "boys" - no other variation, really, AND, T and I had a very spirited discussion about whether or not I can really have him say "the guys did blah blah" or whatever, and she was insistent that it simply sounded too weird in English, and so I'm having to limit myself to..."boys." Which feels stifling and sad!! Because there's so much LIFE in those other words, and they fit different contexts and scenarios.

There also isn't really a word for what he and the other people working there DO, not really. There's a very common Russian word: "воспитатель", which comes from the word "воспитать" which essentially means to teach a person how to be a person. Kind of. But the best word I could use for it in my translation is "teacher" from "to teach." But it's not the same thing, and it's not the same job. The word "воспитатель" means someone who is raising kids, rearing kids, but not a parent. That's what they called the people who worked at kindergartens, for instance - they weren't teachers, because they weren't teaching anything, they were just...rearing, I guess, when the kids were with them. 

Those are just two of the MYRIAD examples of how limiting translating can be, because there's also the varied sentence structure of Russian that can create so MANY wonderful and hilarious and poignant moments that I'm having to completely rethink, because English sentence structure is very, very different. It's, well. Structured. I don't know if you guys have ever seen that graphic going around tumblr about how you can say the same thing differently in various languages, and there's very straight-forward arrows for many of the languages, until you get to Russian, and the arrows go all over the place because you can basically do whatever the hell you want in Russian, it will change the meaning, but there are basically no rules for what goes where. It's incredibly freeing and a lot of fun to play around with.

Basically, what I am saying is...did you know Russian is a fucking incredible language?? I really have been taking it for granted that I know it (and still speak it, thank goodness, after 33 years of living Not In Russia), but it's so cool. So my current plan is to read more Russian classics that I've eschewed so far. I'm going to go back to rereading War & Peace, gonna read Anna Karenina, I've already reread The Master & Margarita...on and on. Very exciting. I haven't read Chekhov since I was 13-14, and I remember loving him. I've never read Gogol...a stain upon my conscience. 

So that's where I'm at! I will probably continue to add more thoughts on translations, because it's really been such a fun, fascinating experience. Also something I've noticed in translating: despite having read these books multiple times, I'm getting a whole new appreciation for many characters I barely noticed before. I'm having to sit with them all in depth, thinking about how best to say what they're saying, and it's SO fun and cool. 

Oh, and since April 2nd, I've translated nearly 60k words. Which is crazy. The trilogy altogether is roughly 700 pages, and I'm on page 125. WILD. I really thought this would take me ten years, but I'm going at quite the clip. Having people reading along is really helping with that - I am LOVING sharing it. 

OKAY. BYE FOR NOW. I WILL MOST LIKELY BE BACK.