Pheionstrasse

The author of the program Dmitry Volchek

Dmitry Volchek: guests of Radio Liberty - Berlin translators of Russian literature. Pheionstrasse 23 - the mansion of the Berlin Cultural Center - here last week the conference "City on the water" dedicated to the three hundredth anniversary of St. Petersburg was held. The organizers of the conference are people representing Russian literature to German readers. A documentary about translators is being prepared for the nearest Frankfurt Book Fair, and, ahead of the film crew, I spoke on the sidelines of the conference with its heroes - about which Russian books are used in Germany, what success is not used, but still published, about typical language problems that the translator from Russian to German and, finally, about personal literary literary addictions of my interlocutors. As for commerce, everything is simple here: popular in Germany (the scale, of course, completely different) the same authors and the same genres as in Russia. One of the leading translators of Russian criminal and female novels to German - Olga Kuvshinnikova:

Olga Kuvshinnikova: The first pebble was Marina. Then there was an interest in the Russian detective genre and now about 5-6 authors were published, including Polina Dashkova, Victoria Platova, Stepanova (unfortunately, I don’t know her name), Boris Akunin and, as far as I know, these books are read and interesting to the German public.

Dmitry Volchek: Explain to me why? It seems that there are so different realities of the judicial, police system, which is written, say, Marinin, the criminal world, which is necessary on each page special notes of the translator.

Olga Kuvshinnikova: You are absolutely right. Indeed, the realities are different, but, it seems to me, this exotic, which is inherent in our literature and for us is everyday life, is interesting to the German reader. I do not think that any footnotes are needed. Of course, we smooth out a lot. Let's say the name RUBOP, traffic police and so on, we are replaced by one name - "police".

Dmitry Volchek: Russian authors of detectives, do they come here and do they communicate with the German audience, do you communicate with them when you work on translations?

Olga Kuvshinnikova: Yes, we have some contacts with detective authors. Some of them, however, are hiding. You know that there is such a form of slaves, and I think that some of the authors use this directly. For example, we are familiar with Polina Dashkova, who often comes to Germany and also communicates with the German reader.

Dmitry Volchek: Olga Kuvshinnkova translates mainly commercial literature, and the experience of another participant in meetings in the Berlin Cultural Center - Olga Radetskaya - interested me that she, and in his own choice, translates writers, whose names, associated through a commas, sound very strange - the stories of the young and very popular Irina Monozhno (her lightning success, special, special, special, special success. A hard -explained phenomenon), theological works of the priest Pavel Florensky, the novel of the Paris surrealist of the first wave of emigration Boris Poplavsky, Apollo Bezobrazov.

Dmitry Volchek: In each area there is some kind of its own coriff, its own idol, its own leader. Who, in your opinion, leads the Russian translation school in Germany?

Olga Radadskaya: There is no one person. Here, firstly, there is no one school. Already due to the fact that there were two Germany, it cannot be like that. There are, of course, people who have invested a fairly important contribution, like Peter Urban, for example, who is quite important for me.

Dmitry Volchek: It is very interesting what you said about two schools. Until now, after the unification of Germany, are there any contradictions between East German former translators and West German translators with Russian?

Olga Radadskaya: I would not say that there were two schools. There were at least two. If at all, we can talk about schools, because, unlike Russia, the formation of a literary translator in Germany, as such, does not exist. There is a philological education, and there is such a technical translation education. And the school can be formed when there is, for example, some kind of seminar for literary translators. This is not in Germany, so it always spontaneously arises. Especially in the West spontaneously arose. These are some individual personalities. But I think that, of course, the Gdrovskaya and West German publishing practice were very different. The texts were much more edited in East Germany. There was a whole headquarters of editors.

Dmitry Volchek: Is there, in your opinion, some certain significant gaps in the translation of Russian texts to German? Say, some very important authors for Russian literature who have never been translated, were not translated enough or translated not accurately?

Olga Radetskaya: The same Pushkin. I would not say that this is by someone’s mistake. This is just a very difficult matter. And I think that it can be, if God gives, we will wait for Pushkin’s perfect translation.

Dmitry Volchek: And from the modern literature of the Russian, from the literature of the 20th century?

Olga Radetskaya: Of course, the problem with verses. Mandelstam was translated, but also the feeling that he was not always well translated. But this is also the problem of the essence, and not the problem of bad translations.

Dmitry Volchek: Do you feel that there is a certain similarity in the development trends of young literature in Russia (you are translating Pavel Lember, a rather young writer, not very famous in Russia), and in Germany? In Russia, for example, the young German author Christian Krakht is very popular. And many believe that young Russian literature will move in his direction, in accordance with the manifesto "Tristesse Royal", which he wrote with his friends. Do you feel this similarity of vectors?

Olga Radadskaya: It is difficult for me to judge this. I recently translated some stories by Irina Moneyzhkina, here the parallel is even more obvious, perhaps. She, too, all the time they ask whether she refers herself to the so-called pop literature. And it turns out that it does not take it, because such a concept simply does not exist. But, of course, if at a purely substantial level, it is clear that topics, especially youth literature, are closer. Because young people are no longer so much different, and here the thematic similarity is obvious. And besides the thematic, it seems to me that purely literary formal traditions are different.

Dmitry Volchek: The circle of readers of Russian literature in Germany is small. Is it possible to imagine purely theoretically that some Russian author will appear, which will be as popular as before in the Soviet Union there was Henry Belle or now Christian Krakht? Theoretically possible?

Olga Radetskaya: In principle, I think yes. It generally seems to me that this separation of Russian literature comes to naught from everyone else. The German reader is not so much perceiving this difference when he reads a translation from Italian or from English. For him, this is not some other literature. This is the same world literature. And for me, Russian literature, of course, is included in this whole world literature. And I think that over time, this alienness will also be erased.

Dmitry Volchek: Do you have some kind of favorite Russian word?

Olga Radadskaya: I love many Russian words. Especially those Russian words that are not used in German, such as "insanity", for example.

Dmitry Volchek: Among the most famous translators of Russian literature in Germany - Gabriela Leupold. For 20 years, she has been working with Russian prose, and recently poems.

Gabriela Leupold: first translated scientific literature. Then she began with Mandelstam, Bakhtin - interspersed literature, art history, literary criticism. She translated the prey, Dovlatov, Pasternak, Evgenia Kharitonov, Sorokin, Prigov, and, recently, Mamleev and Andrei Bely - the long version of "Petersburg", which was transferred to German only now.

Dmitry Volchek: Do you choose yourself, or is it an order?

Gabriela Leupold: differently. At first, I did not succeed, because I did not understand anything in the publishers, that they have a program and that this program should be taken seriously. And then I learned a little, and now I manage to, as a rule, find publishers. I always translated poems when they are interspersed into prose, which happens quite often in Russian texts. And now I began to translate poetry, just for the sake of the experiment, and I really like it. I'm tired of long texts, and I like the language more compressed.

Dmitry Volchek: One of the young authors, participants in the Berlin Conference, whose verses were translated by Gabriela Leupold - St. Petersburg poet Dmitry Golynko. Before his performance, he said that the work on the translation of his two poetic cycles lasted several months, and the process was very exciting, and for him and for the translator, he discovered a lot in verses. I asked Dmitry to tell about these discoveries.

Dmitry Golynko: I think that any detailed, painstaking, concentrated work of the poet with a translator significantly enriches both sides and, mainly, of course, in an existential plan, because this work allows the poet to think over or understand that invisible hidden foundation that provoked this text in the past. And, on the other hand, this work allows the translator to think over the hidden resources of his own language. But the second point, for me much more significant, if we are talking about the translation of the modern Russian language into English, German and so on, this is the moment of the extraordinary social dynamics of the modern Russian language, and this means that when the translator, if it is not directly included in the social context, addresses the dictionaries, explanatory dictionaries, very often he encounters, at least with the meaning of the word, which does not fully correspond modern use.

Dmitry Volchek: Could you give examples, say, on the example of your texts?

Dmitry Golynko: Using the example of my texts, this is such an idiom as "kissing a steam locomotive."

Dmitry Volchek: I myself do not know what it is. Tell us, please.

Dmitry Golynko: kissing a steam locomotive is a special way of smoking cigarettes with marijuana, when two lit the jambs and then connect the lit ends of the jambs and draw into each other. This idiom received wide walking in intellectual Russian somewhere in the mid-90s. In the second half, it has already become a stamp used not only for smoking grass, as well as a certain general idiom, which can indicate a certain degree of proximity.

Dmitry Volchek: That is, the Germans do nothing like that?

Dmitry Golynko: They do, but, apparently, they did not invent such a catchy and capacious expression for this. It is very difficult to find an analogue.

Dmitry Volchek: The circle of German readers Boris Akunin, Andrei Bely and even Irina Moneyzhina can still be imagined, but who reads modern Russian poetry, and poetry is quite marginal authors, and in Russia a few famous? Georg Witte, who transferred the works of Moscow conceptualists into the German corps, believes that as before, the most significant in modern Russian poetry are the texts of the authors of Samizdat of the 70-80s.

George Witte: All mythology of samizdat is very alien to me. In the sense that only a prohibited word is a valuable word, like Mandelstam said. This is wrong. But maybe some kind of inertia of the 80s, oddly enough, from a aesthetic point of view, as before, the most interesting literature is the so-called marginal literature. You just cannot compare with some Dashkova detectives or anyone. This is just another area, another addressee. I would not say that one is better than the other, it would be very funny.

Dmitry Volchek: You translated conceptualists and, obviously, Prigov. I can’t imagine how these social poems Prigov sound in German. It seems to me that it will be necessary for every poem to write a detailed comment with the explanation of what circumstances this poem is caused by life.

Georg Witte: Of course, not everything is atmospherically transmitted, what is given to the Russian reader. I have such a principle that I just do not try to appropriate poetry very much connected with this context in our culture, as if it were German poems. I translate them so that they just remain strangers. So that our reader understands that there is something, that for the Russian reader it means that for us who do not live in such a context should be hidden to some extent. This already begins with the word "policeman". Who was not in Russia does not know what sounds for a Russian person in this word. And there was a question at the very beginning - to transfer a policeman to a police officer. Of course, you can’t do that.

Dmitry Volchek: How do you translate?

George Witte: As a figure of someone else's context.

Dmitry Volchek: After all, then this ridiculous element is excluded, which is natural for a Russian person in the perception of these verses. How does the German listener perceive this?

Georg Witte: This is a very interesting experience when you read Russian poems in a row and then translations. When the Russian public laughs, and when German laughs: it is clear that the German audience does not react so. We have a certain tradition of "light poetry." This is such a popular poet Wilhelm Bush and even Henry Heine in his simplest verses. Rubinstein has a completely different matter. Because Rubinstein has each separate fragment for the Russian reader so crowded. "Mom soap Rama" - unfortunately, such a phrase cannot be conveyed.

Dmitry Volchek: How are you entering the situation?

George Witte: We did not want to kill someone else's text with all sorts of explanations. Maybe now there will be a new German book by Rubinstein. There, perhaps, we will make the so -called scientific apparatus. Let's see.

Dmitry Volchek: You mentioned Wilhelm Bush, and I remembered a fragment from the memoirs of Henri Volokhonsky, who said that he tried for four years to translate the two -hearted Bush, which in Russian sounds like this: "Orangutan has two pairs of hands. Oh! How can he masturbate!". Volokhonsky says that he fought over these lines for four years.

George Witte: Of course, the most difficult it was a “policeman”. The first thing I did, I took the rhyme dictionary and simply rewrote forty possible equivalents for the word policeman so that there was some kind of reserve.

Dmitry Volchek: Are you translating with a rhyme?

Georg Witte: I translated with the rhyme, and I will continue to continue with Prigov, but now I will move more and more to non -rhymic translations.

Dmitry Volchek: The guest of the Berlin conference was one of the most famous St. Petersburg poets of the older generation Arkady Dragmoshchenko. George Witte also transferred him to German.

Georg Witte: I personally, he really likes that in his very literal sense of long verses there is such a situation that based on such a metaphorical or tropical grain, nothing develops, and everything is scattered. He follows a metaphor for a metaphor, and not some organic metamorphosis. He has every new line for him to forget about the previous one. The whole poem is such an endless process of oblivion. A rather interesting, in my opinion, technique, and this is one of the reasons why I personally decided to translate.

Dmitry Volchek: In Berlin, Arkady Dragmoshchenko worked on the story "Rain". I asked Arkady to read a fragment of this text.

Arkady Dragomoshchenko: The fact is that Dima Kuzmin once sent an offer to everyone to write, such large writers, on an essay on the topic "Rain". Such a children's undertaking. I did not write. I meet Tolya Barzakh. He invited him to walk around the Mechnikovsky hospital on Sunday, when it is empty. They drank beer, talked, and he said that he wrote "rain". I asked: "How much?" He said: "16 pages." I came home and realized that I was embittered. I just envy. And he began to write the story "Rain". I wrote it for two days. Then I realized: why am I writing it? It is completely incomprehensible. And suddenly the idea came that the story would be about how a person comes in the vicinity of the castle of Kafka to kill everyone. With an optical sight, with good equipment. Everything is as it should. The last of the phrases of this story, regarding the fact that I am very sorry for Mr. K, while the traces of the Earth of the world are lost, but famous characters will no longer cause anyone anxiety. I WOULD Like to Clear My Check at the Manhattan Bank. But there is a poem at the end, which is discussed at the very beginning. It was written in Berlin.

No, not a dream at all, only the flowering of an invisible remainder

In the edge, where in the depths the pupil rises above the lake lake

Step behind the step to the polar star, moderating splash and transparency,

In which the world will not begin, continuing to be an insistence,

In participle turns not thinning - the sum of forms,

Through the limits of the thing,

Where "weather" is the only thing that time goes.

Padlines of the evening. The loops of foliage are adhesive, children's cries in the delta.

The story began unconditionally, with a hearing, a sink of a call in the fingers.

And blood, interspersed into stones, imprisoned in particles of quartz, -

again gives long greed to the root in this hilly area:

We look from afar: the trees are the same. Differ in the drawing of the sheet,

as well as the degree of death.

Names come later, like notebooks, lagoon, lamps, chalk.

Many later in the usual speech "now" it meets the word "now",

For which there is no answer in a single silence,

Ни в одном отголоске безоговорочной, призрачной и все же - истории,

Время которой стало погодой, расширеньем гортанным в предмете.

Впрочем, я пока не решил, где лучше глазами с тобою встречаться.

В зените? Там зияние твое вселяет надежду, совершенно-слепяще.

Либо в низинах: где ты и туман не отличны ни в чем,

и потом - стопу никогда здесь не тронет тропа бесшумного щебня.

Дмитрий Волчек: Аркадий Драгомощенко родился в 46-м году в Германии в семье советского офицера. Я спросил его, чувствует ли он, что вернулся на родину.

Аркадий Драгомощенко: Вот сейчас вы видите фотографии, и я хочу с ними сняться на Александерплац, где я буду держать фотографию, на которой я в возрасте 8 месяцев нахожусь на руках своего отца в белом в кителе. Это часть моего пребывания здесь в Берлине. Я родился в Потсдаме. Меня спрашивали на чтении, как давно я не был в Берлине. Я сказал: "56 лет". Город не изменился. Некоторые вещи исправились, некоторые стали похуже. Люди мне не особо интересны, поскольку город очевидно переживает какую-то рецессию, какой-то упадок, модные магазины плохие, люди плохо одеваются. Единственное, что радует, что люди продолжают понимать, что вино нужно пить с минеральной водой.

Дмитрий Волчек: Участник конференции в "Культурхаусе" петербургский поэт Владимир Кучерявкин написал в Берлине стихотворение, которое назвал "Фазаненштрассе".

Владимир Кучерявкин:

Вот эта дверь с дешевой позолотой,

Широкая, как родина, кровать,

Вот этот шкаф надутый цвета креозота,

Стакан вина - и спать, и спать, и спать.

И снятся улицы, по ней велосипеды

Зловещею, слепящей вереницей,

И я средь них, один из них, и еду,

И падает на плечи злая птица,

И плач, и хохот, ропот в коридоре,

И бодрый стук в накрашенную дверь,

И смотрят иудейские два Бори,

Один со скрипкой, а другой как зверь.

Дмитрий Волчек: Когда мы записывали этот текст в номере берлинского отеля, за окном тревожно кричала некая птица. Мы решили, что это и есть тот самый скрытый фазан, давший название улице, стихотворению Владимира Кучерявкина и этой передаче.