A Hero of Our Time - Mikhail IUr'evich Lermontov [9]
Translating Lermontov requires a linguistic zoom lens—while working closely one must regularly pull back to see a larger picture of words. The beauty of his work lies at the level of the sentence and the paragraph. Lermontov is not a writer whose words are so carefully chosen that the translator must agonize to get each syllable pitch-perfect. But faced with the task of translating A Hero of Our Time, I did so anyway, out of a sense of fidelity. I followed his every clause carefully, keen to avoid assumptions that can be so easily made in working with writing of a Romantic bent. But most of all, this close reading makes for magic in a translation—in focusing on the building blocks of a text, piling words on top of each other just so, something emerges, an essence that the translator hasn’t forced. As Maurice Baring wrote in 1914: “[W]hen you read Pushkin, you think: ‘How perfectly and how simply that is said! How in the world did he do it?’ You admire the ‘magic hand of chance.’ In reading Lermontov at his simplest and best, you do not think about the style at all, you simply respond to what is said, and the style escapes notice in its absolute appropriateness.”
Lermontov wasn’t a master stylist, he was a master story-teller. That’s not to say that the quality of the prose is lacking but that his writing is very fluent—not meant to be paused over for any great length of time. A reader needn’t look for surprising combinations of words. Lermontov’s language is constantly moving—a motion that becomes clear to a translator only upon achieving enough pace to feel the momentum of his writing. As Eikhenbaum wrote: “A Hero of Our Time looks like the first ‘light’ book; a book in which formal problems are concealed beneath careful motivation and which, therefore, was able to create the illusion of ‘naturalness’ and to arouse an interest in pure reading.”9 The naturalness to which he refers is a very true characterization of Lermontov’s writing—the author strived to avoid archaic turns of phrase, and easily captures the voices of the various personages. This is the translator’s challenge here: to preserve his nineteenth-century idiom but to avoid anything that seems obsolete to a contemporary reader; to capture the various voices in the novel without too many cultural contortions; to match his rhythms, from paragraph to paragraph; and, above all, to disappear so that the reader may swiftly move through the book and its mountain story. Yes, he tends to repeat words and phrases in this book, and yes, he seems to have a very simplistic palette when it comes to describing colors, and yes, the sun appears from behind cold, snowy, or dark-blue peaks many times over the course of the novel. But his is a feat of narrative, a romping story about a dislikable man who captures your whole attention with his manifold contradictions.
NATASHA RANDALL
NOTES
1 Belinsky, V. G. Notes of the Fatherland (St. Peterburg: 1841), vol. XIV, pp. 45-46.
2 Eikhenbaum, B. M. Lermontov: A Study in Literary-Historical Evaluation (Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1981), p. 171.
3 Garrard, John. “Old Wine in New Bottles: The Legacy of Lermontov” in Poetica Slavica: Studies in Honour of Zbigniew Folejewski, edited by J. Douglas Clayton and Gunter Schaarschmidt (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 1981), pp. 41-52.
4 Belinsky, V. G., and M. Yurievich Lermontov. Pro et Contra (St. Petersburg: Izdatel’stvo Russkogo Khristianskogo Gumanitrnogo Instituta, 2002), p. 75.
5 Barthes, Roland. S/Z, trans. Richard Miller (London: Jonathan Cape, 1975).
6 As translated by Laurence Kelly in Kelly, Laurence. Lermontov: Tragedy in the Caucasus (London: Constable, 1977), p. 100.
7 Vasilchikov, Prince Alexander. As translated and mentioned by Richard Freeborn in Freeborn, Richard. “A