hatred, hostility, and loathing
Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita • Russian, French, (3x) English
Today we're taking another look at Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. I'm still working my way through the original Russian and still enjoying the typically Russian idiomatic prose, so since I was able to source another English translation I felt a return was probably relevant.
I also thought it might be interesting this time if I wrote my own translation of a passage before reading the English translations. Not only would it be putting my money where my mouth is, it would provide a good jumping-off point for finding ways in which the translations differ substantially. Most of the excerpt turned out largely the same across the translations, bringing out the points where editorial reasoning was most valuable. I'm only translating into English, because I have yet to read enough literary French to feel justified making translation decisions into it.
Master and Margarita follows the events that occur after the Devil visits Moscow, and is set in the Soviet era. Not really meant to see the light of day, it's wonderfully unrestricted as a Soviet-era work.
We'll examine just one reasonably-sized sentence from the fifth chapter, describing a dance party at Griboedov, a publishing house in Moscow.
Text and translations
Russian original, Mikhail Bulgakov:
Оплывая потом, официанты несли над головами запотевшие кружки с пивом, хрпипло и с ненавистью кричали: «Виноват, гражданин!»
[Semi-literal: Swimming in sweat, waiters carried over heads sweaty mugs with beer, hoarsely and with hatred yelled: "I'm to blame, citizen!"]
French translation, Françoise Flamant:
Dégoulinant de sueur, les garçons portaient par-dessus les têtes des chopes de bière embuées, en criant d’une voix enrouée et haineuse : « Pardon ! Pardon, citoyen ! »
[Semi-literal: Dripping in sweat, the waiters carried above the heads mugs of beer, fogged, in crying with a voice hoarse and hateful : "Pardon! Pardon me, citizen!"]
English translation, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky:
Streaming with sweat, waiters carried sweating mugs of beer over their heads, shouting hoarsely and with hatred: 'Excuse me, citizen!'
English translation, John Dougherty:
Dripping with sweat, waiters carried frosty mugs of beer over the heads, shouting gruffly and hostilely: "Excuse me, citizen!"
English translation, mine:
Swimming in sweat, the waiters carried fogged-over mugs of beer above their heads, yelling hoarsely and with loathing, "Pardon me, sir!"
Beer comes first
Most of my analysis this week will be of word choice among the translations, mostly in the same specific locations. However, there's one localisation tactic that I wanted to touch on because it makes so much sense.
Françoise Flamant's French translation keeps the sentence ordering in "waiters carried [overhead] [mugs of beer]," which makes sense in French as a well-flowing sentence. However, all three English translations switch that order to "carried [mugs of beer] [overhead]."
We'll assume all of these translations are independent - I did not reference the others while writing mine, and would be surprised had the other two referenced each other. Since we all changed that one construction in the same way, it speaks to a specific propensity in English for this type of action to be framed in this way. It's not that it wouldn't make any sense to say "they carried over the heads the mugs," it's just that it's clearly rigid and not common, unlike in Russian where the positioning before the description of the beers makes perfect tonal and logical sense.
Sweat-mired waiters
In these four translations we have three and a half different words for the way in which sweat is affecting the waiters. I say three and a half because "dégouliant" maps relatively precisely to "dripping" but is still a separate word, because of how words work.
Flamant and Dougherty agree that the waiters are dripping with sweat, Pevear and Volokhonsky believe them to be streaming with it, and I think it's rather closer to swimming. I'll justify my translation first, since it's the least interesting thing to do. Swimming is etymologically similar to "оплывая," which has as its root "плыть," 'to swim'. Most commonly referencing sailing around something or over a great distance, visually I believe it to be most similar to swimming in this use.
However, Dougherty or Pevear and Volokhonsky might well be more correct in preserving the tonal meaning instead of the literal visual, in that the action of swimming in sweat is less common and more farcical in English. While I would argue that Bulgakov is attempting to have this moment be farcical, I find it more an interesting comparison than a point over which to argue. Whichever of these words is used, it still conjures up a very robust mental image.
Which waiters?
Another two-two split is between characterising the waiters as "the waiters" or just as "waiters," and again I would place Flamant's French translation into a "yes but not really" camp. It would be strange in French to introduce them just as "garçons" with no article, but it is there in any case so falls into that camp.
The distinction I see in English is the presentation of "the" waiters as more of a specific group. If you were in a schoolyard and you were approached by "the bullies," you'd likely be much more scared than if you were approached by "bullies." It would be reasonable to feel trepidation at the approach of bullies, but when they're "the" bullies it becomes clear this is a specific, segregated pack that must be treated separately. In many cases, I would argue adding the article gives a personal depth to the attached noun, but in either case there's a change in the treatment of the group.
Mainly my interest is in the complete interchangability of the options, grammatically. "The" waiters is no more correct or idiomatic, it's genuinely just a difference in the framing of the people. I believed the waiters to be referenced earlier in the text and as a group to whom certain attitutes and behaviours had been prescribed, therefore a group to single out as continuing an earlier train of thought. Dougherty, Pevear, and Volokhonsky seem to have felt that the waiters were woven in at a more background level, where they contribute to the setting of the scene more than they are characters in their own right. Reading it now, I would be inclined to agree with the English translators, but as a thought experiment or a spot for contemplation I think it's worth spending some time on.
Whose heads?
In much the same vein, waiters carry mugs of beer either over "the" heads or over "their" heads. The disparity is in whose heads the mugs are passing, the dancers' or the waiters'. However, the difficulty here is in ascribing either group to either word.
English presents the least issue on the "the" end - carrying mugs over "the" heads would be a silly way to refer to carrying a glass above one's own head, so we can say "the" belongs to the dancers in English. "Their" is less clear, since the last paragraph of text before this excerpt described the dancers in great detail and could therefore be a reference to either the dancers' heads or those of the waiters.
That same ambiguity exists in French, where "les" places the mugs fairly firmly above the heads of the dancers and "leurs" would be moderately ambiguous. This leads to some speculation about the meaning in all four translations. Where the translator has used "the," we can almost certainly ascribe a specific meaning. Where they've used "their," it is unclear. So the distinction is not between whether a translator meant the waiters or the dancers, it is in whether a translator excluded from consideration the waiters.
Flamant and Dougherty have taken the dancer course. Both of their sets of waiters carry beer over specifically the heads of the dancers, weaving their way through the jazz-induced movement and heaving the mugs high to avoid contact with noggins.
It is at this point that I should mention Bulgakov's phrasing is as ambiguous as "their." Whether it is the job of a translator to preserve this uncertainty is not my place to speculate, nor is it very interesting to me. In Dougherty's English translation, though, the certainty has been inserted. There in particular it strikes me as unusually non-idiomatic - I'm not sure what the stumbling-block is for me, perhaps it is the symbolic reduction of the dancers to just their heads. Were the dancers referred to immediately beforehand as "heads," perhaps I would be less jostled by this, but as it stands it almost feels like the sentence now lacks something in becoming more concrete. "Over the heads of the dancers" is perhaps the construction I'm looking for in my head as I read it, whether in those exact words or not.
Anyway, it's fun to imagine either scenario playing out. Waiters rushing around with both hands full of beer hovering over their own heads, trying to squeeze past dancers while keeping their arms stable. Dancers briefly feeling the ominous presense of a full jug of beer careening over their heads as they frantically moved to the boisterous mid-century jazz. That beer inevitably spilling a little, in either scenario. Beer-covered waiters and dancers, drenched in litres of sweat in the summer midnight hour.
Sweltering beer
The characterisation of the beer-mugs in Bulgakov's writing is one of the mugs sweating. However, that word, "запотевшие," is the word you use when condensation forms on the sides of mugs of cold liquid when it's hot outside. The mugs aren't necessarily sweating in the way that you'd picture people would sweat, but that's where the word comes from.
Pevear and Volokhonsky keep the "sweating" etymology of Bulgakov's "запотевшие," while I went for the less direct "fogged-over." I see good reason for either; what is actually surprising is Dougherty's "frosty." Frosty to me indicates the condition of being cold enough that ice clings to the outside of the glass. A frosty winter's day is one that is cold and harsh, not one that is beginning to melt in the heat. True, the visual effect of condensation is much the same as of frost, but one is a reaction to the heat and the other is a condition of being cold. I think "frosty" here ultimately negates Bulgakov's depiction of the scene as broiling, inserting this element of uninterrupted coolness. Sure, for the mugs to be condensating or sweating, the liquid inside needs to have been cool to begin with, but it is actively becoming not cool, in a way that "frosty," to me, doesn't represent.
Hatred, hostility, and loathing
Hoarse, enrouée, and gruff are all close enough that discussing them is not going to be relevant for our purposes. Hatred, loathing, hostility, and hatefulness, however, are very much worth speaking about.
Hенависть is a harsh word, one that means a strong, often categorical hatred. It's the kind of hatred that is inspired by a truly bad experience which then marrs a relationship forever. Its root comes from the word видеть, which means "to see." I'm not going to posit any further etymology, since I don't have a definitive source for it, but that's certainly a starting point.
I would say hatred is a somewhat soft term in comparison with ненависть, but not eggregiously so. Loathing is perhaps too strong, and in the wrong direction. Loathing implies a personal nature, to some extent - loathing starts from within. Hенависть is internal, too, but it manifests itself toward something external. I associate loathing a bit more with doing particular household chores or interacting with particular kinds of businesspeople. Hенависть feels like it's directed toward the existence of something, like the existence of chores or businesspeople. It's a flimsy distinction, but I think it's there.
Flamant's "haineuse," 'hateful', is apt in the same way as is Pevear and Volkhonsky's. "Hostilely" is confusing to me. I see that the construction of "gruffly" finds a parallel in "hostilely," but hostilely is first of all a convoluted word that takes the reader out of the story, and second of all not the form that Bulgakov takes. Were it to add to the flow of the sentence in English, I would be very much okay with the construction of "hostilely." But it doesn't. On the bright side, hostility is an interesting representation of ненависть, one that I think falls reasonably close to the Russian concept.
Beg your Excuse?
"Виноват" is such a lovely turn of phrase. While it's clearly along the lines of 'pardon me' or 'excuse me', it literally translates to 'I'm at fault' or 'it's my fault'. This type of formality is not uncommon in Russian, and it finds compatriots in French "formules de politesse" for writing letters and emails as well as formal English valedictions. It does speak to a certain tongue-in-cheek sarcasm, though. As the waiters weave through the crowd, they are bumped into and yet they acknowledge themselves as the bumpers. In function it's similar to having someone run into you and saying "Sorry!" to them, but in form it's a lot more, if you will, formal.
That was my reasoning for translating it as "Pardon me," but perhaps that falls into the category of trying to prove you know a language's nuances to the detriment of cohesive and localised translation. I don't find fault in "Excuse me," and I don't think there's a word that captures the polite-yet-actively-hostile nature of "Виноват!"
Allons enfants de la patrie
The last word I wanted to talk about is "citizen" (a sentence that could also be stylised as "the last word, I wanted to talk about"). All of the professional translations listed have used "citizen" as a translation of "гражданин." This is, perhaps, because "гражданин" translates to 'citizen'. But I think there's more meaning to explore here.
In this context, "гражданин" is being used as a general word to describe a person. The waiters aren't commenting on the person's state of citizenship, and they're not even applying the kind of "comrade" reasoning of gender neutrality. The word гражданин is not gender neutral, and connotes some form of respect, or at the very least formality. Next to the "my fault" phrasing, it becomes another layer of the sarcastic "just let me get through" imagery. Dougherty's, Flamant's, and Pevear and Volokhonsky's translations shift the excessive formality to the 'citizen' end where mine shifts it to the 'pardon' end, both in sum capturing what they can of the essence of the text.
Sweat and loathing in Los Angeles
Thoughts, assembled but not related: I fall more in love with Bulgakov's prose the more I examine it. In only a sentence there's so much to talk about. This whole newsletter was looser than usual, I let myself have a little more fun writing it. The self-translation seemed to be a good exercise. Please tell me if you'd rather I didn't repeat source texts.
Thank you for reading, please share your thoughts with me if you feel inclined to do so.