for something to do
J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit - English/Russian/Russian/French
For all that Tolkien is a seminal, foundational fantasy author and his works hit all of the hallmarks of things that appeal to me, I managed to make it 23 years without reading any of his books. My first was The Hobbit, and in a turn of events that will surprise absolutely no one I found it an exceedingly good read.
What's more, Tolkien is well-loved by Russian readers, so there are multiple Russian translations freely available on the internet. I've pulled a French translation for this week's newsletter with which we'll do the normal kind of analysis, but also two Russian translations. We'll compare these and see if we can map any tonal shifts to the differences in language choice between the translations.
As an overview, we'll consider the general structure of the three translations first, then the French translation compared to the English, the two Russian translations compared to the English, and finally one Russian translation compared to the other.
Text and translation
English original:
Poor Mr. Baggins--it was a weary long time that he lived in that place all alone, and always in hiding, never daring to take off his ring, hardly daring to sleep, even tucked away in the darkest and remotest corners he could find. For something to do he took to wandering about the Elvenking's palace.
French translation, Francis Ledoux:
Le pauvre M. Baggins ! Ce fut pour lui un temps affreusement long que celui qu'il passa tout seul dans cet endroit, toujours en train de se cacher sans jamais se risquer à retirer son anneau, osant à peine dormir, même retiré dans les coins les plus sombres et les plus écartés qu'il pouvait trouver. Pour s'occuper, il se prit à errer dans le palais du Roi des Elfes.
[Semi-literal translation: The poor Mr. Baggins! That was for him a time terribly long, this one that he spent all alone in that place, always in the process of hiding himself without ever risking to remove his ring, hardly daring to sleep, even hidden in the corners most dark and most discarded that he could find. To occupy himself, he took to wandering in the palace of the King of Elves.]
Russian translation, V. Bakanov and E. Dobrohotova-Maykova:
Бедный мистер Бэггинс — как же долго он обитал во дворце один-одинешенек, вечно прячась, не смея и на мгновение снять кольцо, почти не решаясь спать, все время хоронясь по самым дальним и темным углам. Чтобы как-то скоротать время, он бродил по королевскому дворцу.
[Semi-literal: Poor Mister Baggins - how long he lived in the palace all by his lonesome, always hiding, not daring even for a moment to take off his ring, almost not resolving to sleep, all the time hiding in the most far and dark corners. To somehow kill time, he wandered about the King's palace.]
https://e-libra.ru/read/551006-hobbit-ili-tuda-i-obratno.html
Russian translation, N. Rakhmanova:
Бедный мистер Бэггинс! Как уныло тянулось время, пока он жил здесь совсем один, прячась, не смея ни на минуту снять кольцо, почти не смыкая глаз, даже когда удавалось забиться в самый дальний, темный уголок. От нечего делать он принялся бродить по королевскому дворцу.
[Semi-literal: Poor Mr. Baggins! How boringly stretched the time, while he lived here all alone, hiding, not daring even for a moment to take off his ring, almost not closing his eyes, even when he was able to be forgotten in the most far, dark corner. From nothing to do he took to wandering about the King's palace.]
General structure
One of the things I found most compelling in Tolkien's English Hobbit was the way in which the function of storytelling dictated the form. The book read like the kind of story told by the Storyteller in Delaney's Ireland, which purports to chronicle the last of the great generation of fireside oral historians. Tolkien's sentences don't feel like they're crafted to be read in the same way that other books are read. The story is baked into the words at such a foundational level that it removes the barrier between the words and their meaning, and moreover between the word-meanings and the collective meaning. Tolkien writes real stories in the same way that John O'Hara notes Fitzgerald as writing real people. Rather than reading a paragraph, you're essentially hearing an idea, like how Fitzgerald's characters have attributes and personalities assigned to them but mostly come to life based on the details that you fill in subconsciously, removing the barrier between character and person-concept and using your personal supply of social information to tell a story.
All of this is to say that the structure of Tolkien's sentences forms an integral part of their meaning, even more so than for other authors we've covered. Thus it makes sense that the French and both of the Russian translations keep the vast majority of Tolkien's sentence structure, with exceptions mostly in punctuation. Of the excerpt, the last words are the most loosely translated across the board, which makes sense given how idiomatic the translations are. This perhaps provides again that barrier breakdown between word and concept, but we'll explore that thought later.
French
Ledoux stays close to Tolkien's wording, giving us a paltry three things to talk about: affreusement, en train de, and osant à peine. However, one of these is probably in my top ten French constructions, so you're unlikely to get off easy with this one in terms of overanalysis.
"Affreusement" is interesting to me in its strength. For Ledoux, Bilbo's time in the Elvenking's palace isn't just wearily long, it's terribly long, dreadfully long. The word choice implies that, tonally, French readers would find a calmer word not representative enough of the true tone of the source material. "Weary," Ledoux effectively posits, is a more radical word in English than is its direct French translation in French.
We'll leave "en train de" for last, since it is the aforementioned favorite construction. Looking at "osant à peine," we see literally 'daring to the pain'. But obviously that isn't the meaning we're after. Idiomatically, "à peine" means 'barely' or 'hardly', and while it's the most direct translation for those words that I can come up with, the positioning and construction is so idiomatic that it makes the sentence characteristically French. It's placed after the 'daring', unlike in the English and Russian, and at least to a non-native French speaker feels like enough of a radical shift in placement to draw special attention to the construction.
"En train de" is a French phrase. Not in the sense of it being a phrase available to be communicated in French, but in the sense of its intrinsically idiomatic nature. It means 'in the process of', but essentially combines with the infinitive of a verb to transform it into the equivalent of the English verb ending "-ing." In providing an easy translation that ommits the 'in the process of' wording, "en train de" is often a silent phrase.
An example from my favorite contextual translation engine, Linguee: in a translation of a European parliamentary debate, "cette attitude est en train de changer" is translated to 'that attitude is changing'. "En train de" is a helper phrase, one that flavors the sentence and makes it idiomatic without actually changing the meaning, one that can be dropped from the sentence using the correct English verb ending. It's genuinely one of my favorite constructions, I am always happy to be able to include it when writing in French.
This StackExchange question https://french.stackexchange.com/questions/13222/what-does-en-train-mean is a good place to start reading if you'd like more (or more academic) information about "en train de."
Russian re: English
And now we get to the meat of the analysis (the potatoes will come in the next section). Let's tackle additions first, then idiomatic expressions, then uncertainty in ring attribution.
The addition in Bakanov and Dobrohotova-Maykova's translation (which I will refer to as the BDM translation) is "и на мгновение," which means 'even for a moment'. While Tolkien gets most of the way there with "never," "и на мгновение" is notably more extreme. If I had the choice of being told "don't you ever dare think about it" or "don't you dare think about it even for one moment," I would certainly be likely to choose the former, as the specificity makes the sentiment stronger. This transfers to Russian, as well.
Making up the bulk of this section, we have the following idiomatic or etymologically interesting words: как жe, один-одинешенек, and смыкая глаз.
In the same way as "en traine de" was a translationally-silent phrase, the "жe" in "как жe" is functionally silent. Meaning 'how', the "как" provides the entirety of the literal meaning between the two words. However, the inclusion of "жe" makes a significant difference tonally, as it positions the phrase in an incredulous light. Bilbo's time is no longer just 'wearily long', it's surpisingly, shockingly long. Or at least the length is highlighted as a point of interest. Which is interesting because the use of "как жe" eliminates the adjective, so the construction of the "how" itself is being used to modify the tone of the length of time. That's pretty cool.
The next one will take some setup. Diminutives are exceedingly common in Russian, used to soften but also to prescribe deeper feeling. Using a diminutive, you can transform your little sister Саша (Sasha) into Сашенька (Sashen'ka) or even Сашуля (Sashulya), with each iteration being progressively more telling of how endearing you find her. But while they're often used for people, diminutives can affect a larger swath of words. You might go into the woods by yourself on a treasure hunt where the gold is buried under a pine tree, a ёлка (yolka). But if you went with your little sister Саша to find a pine tree to take home for New Year's, you would be looking for a ёлочка (yolochka). And while these are some of the diminutive suffixes you might attach to these words, there are a fair few others to choose from, especially for given names.
All of this to say that "один-одинешенек" would translate to something like 'one-alone', but that 'alone' has a sizeable diminutive on the end. If the translators had previously set up the idea that this diminutive could be used sarcastically, it could have a derisive tone, like overdoing a baby voice. But here I believe it just serves to intensify the emotional impact of the loneliness. Bilbo's all by his lonesome, with no friends around him, what a sad young lad.
"Смыкая глаз" follows the tone of the English "getting some shut-eye," being literally 'closing [his] eyes'. I'm interested in it as a replacement for Tolkien's "sleep" - "смыкая глаз" is more vivid, more in line with Tolkien's overall tone. However, like the BDM translation, Rakhmanova's "смыкая глаз" works because not all of the expressions are that idiomatic, not all the material that convoluted. Were Rakhmanova to have included "один-одинешенек," the sentence could have easily become muddled. Restraint brought the translation farther. But we'll discuss that further when we compare the translations.
My last topic of interest in this section is "кольцо." Not the word itself, which means 'ring', but the fact that in a highly uncharacteristic display of ambiguity it is impossible to discern whether it refers to his ring or the ring.
This is because "the" does not really exist in Russian.
Both translations could have included the word for 'his', breaking the ambiguity, but the fact is that Russian does not have the same capacity to imbibe meaning in this word than does French or English. This fascinates me because it is uncommon for Russian to be the least option-rich language. And even if the difference between "his ring" and "the ring" in this particular context is relatively small, it's still a difference that can't be one-to-one replicated in Russian. Sure, you can ommit the “his” and imply a “the,” but that's not the same as actively specifying a “the.”
Russian re: Russian
Ah, time for the potatoes.
I count six substantive differences in word choice between the two Russian translations, so we'll do a speed round through the salient meanings and then look at overall changes in tone based on these choices. The first of these is the inclusion of time-stretching into Rakhmanova's translation. When she writes "тянулось время," she's prescribing more action to the time (время) than does Tolkien or the BDM translation. Rakhmanova has the time perform an action (stretching) at the same time as Bilbo performs an action (living). The BDM translation simply has Bilbo live, with the modifier that he lived for oh so long a time.
Bakanov and Dobrohotova-Maykova get their own back when they include "вечно" ('always') as a modifier for hiding. Rakhmanova's Bilbo simply 'hides', where the BDM Bilbo 'always hides' and Tolkien's Bilbo is "always in hiding."
A very nitpicky comment, the "и" in "и на мгновение" versus the "ни" in "ни на минуту" perform the same function from opposite directions, "и" being additive and "ни" subtractive. Think 'glass half full' in terms of the distinction here.
"Не решаясь спать" ('not resolving to sleep') versus "не смыкая глаз" ('not closing his eyes') is a big one. The former, from the BDM, has the action occurring around the concept of daring or choosing, where the latter centers the action on the closing of eyes (which is a common euphemism for sleep in Russian).
The same kind of action-shifting happens in "даже когда удавалось забиться" ('even when he was able to be forgotten') and its analogue "все время хоронясь" ('all the time hiding'). Rakhmanova's "даже когда ..." is less immediate and intentional than the BDM "хоронясь," in which Bilbo actively seeks to hide himself and the focus is on the action of hiding rather than on the non-action of being successfully lost.
And finally, Rakhmanova starts her last sentence with "от нечего делать," 'out of nothing to do', which brings the same kind of passivity to Bilbo's situation when compared to the BDM "чтобы как-то скоротать время," 'to somehow kill time'.
Overall, the BDM translation poses Bilbo's time roaming the Elvenking's palace as adventurous and active, whereas Rakhmanova's Bilbo is passive, tenuous, perhaps even moody. Bilbo performs the same actions, functionally the translations match the concept of the source and are in themselves robust and idiomatic pieces of literature. However, the subtle changes in word choice compound to influence even this small excerpt in a fairly substantial way.
I'm certainly not here to judge whether one translation is more 'faithful,' as my disclaimer often goes. I'm trying to celebrate the way in which language is so powerful. Even getting the same concepts across, one translator can weave a tone demonstrably different than another. Language is so much more than just an equation - or at the very least it is an exceedingly complicated equation that uses three alphabets because there's not enough letters otherwise to uniquely identify all of the variables. It distresses me sometimes, the idea that no matter how hard I try there will always be subtleties about my understanding of a language that I will be unable to get across to someone without the same reference points that I have. But that's also why it's fun to look at these things, especially two translations into the same language. There is so much to be said about so little source text, and maybe saying it will help me say other things, too.
Three translations for the price of two
To recap this week's newsletter: Ledoux's admirable effort incited discussion about some fun French idiomatic expressions. Both Russian translations flew similarly close to the original, but the differences between them highlighted how slight word choice changes can bring about large tonal shifts while imparting basically the same plot information.
If you'd like to talk to me about any of this, j'attends avec impatience votre courriel. Thank you for reading, have a lovely rest of your weekend.