Clamouring to become visible...

This is adapted from an article that appeared on the Write Anything website on August 3, 2008. The original text can be found here. I did finally manage to finish The Brothers Karamazov a couple of months ago, and took a slight break from heavy literature, to read some Winnie the Pooh. Now ploughing my way through George Orwell...

What’s in a name... again...

Slowly, week by week and page by page, I am working my way through one of the classics of Russian literature, Dostoevsky's last great novel, The Brothers Karamazov. Or, to be less idiomatic, The Karamazov Brothers.

Stuart Jeffries, writing for the Guardian newspaper, points out that ever since the book first appeared in English, we have been using a title that is the literal translation of the original Russian, yet it is a phrase that we would not use in English, sounding clumsy to our Anglicised ears. As Ignat Avsey, translator for the Oxford University Press edition rightly points out, we would no more naturally talk of the "Brothers Karamazov" than we would the "Brothers Marx" or the "Brothers Warner".

That being said, whilst The Brother's Karamazov may not be strictly accurate in English, we have coped with The Brothers Grimm for longer, without complaining about the dissonance of the Germanic construction.

Avsey wonders that if we can't rely on the translator to get the title right, how can we rely on them to correctly translate the remainder of the book? I am reminded of the apocryphal story of the translation from English, to Russian, and back into English again, that resulted in a well-known phrase being rendered as "the vodka is tempting but the meat is rancid" (can you guess the original phrase? Answers at the end...)

Sometimes, as Jeffries points out, you have to do violence to the literal level in order to do justice to the spirit of a work.

For example, the Asterix comic books have characters who's names are humorous puns. But the puns are language specific, and would not work in the original French. So the names are changed to something humorous in the language the story is being translated into - the character called "Abraracourcix" in the original French, is known to the English speaking world as Vitalstatistix, for instance.

These changes are minor though, in relation to the totality of the work. A good story will have an essence, a spirit to it that is universal, that fine thread of commonality that all humanity recognises. That makes a classic, that is what gives a story its power. It is beyond character names, beyond the strict structures of the particular language of the source material - it is something known in the heart, not something that is known through a grammarian's lens.

If the essence of your story so wholly relies on the foibles and complexities of your own native tongue, then in many respects you have failed as a writer. Storytelling is beyond language, beyond borders. We are all people - as writers, ought we not be able to touch the souls of others?

Would your writing survive translation?

Oh, the well-known phrase? "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak"...