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As I mentioned last week, I’m posting here my translation of a Chingiz Aitmatov short story called ‘Soldatyonok”.
I’m putting it on my site not as a final version, but more as a draft to which I invite the comments and criticism of others who know Russian and English. Grab your red markers and feel free to rip into it as much as you feel necesary.
Rather than placing both the English and Russian texts here (that would take a lot of room, making the post an eyesore), I’ve decided to make it a seperate file with the parallel texts. The encoding is unicode and should display fine in most browsers.
Click here to open the page in another window.
You can either post comments right here or send them to me by email.
Responses to “Aitmatov Translation”
November 30th, 2003 at 7:56 am
tom,
hey! i wanted to just say hi and that i miss you! i hope all is going well, and that you are both being blessed, and being a blessing to the others with whom you are living. do you get to come back to the states for christmas? what is your mailing address there? sorry that this post is neither related to your entry’s topic, or in any way sounds coherent. just wanted to let you know i was thinking about you this holiday weekend! : ) ~erin
December 3rd, 2003 at 5:46 pm
Katie- I don’t know and I don’t know. Perhaps the recipe you are reading should have translated the amount as a ‘cup’ instead of a ‘glass’? Hmmm. . .
Also, I have never heard of ‘poor student cake’. I asked the Russians I live with about it and they also didn’t know.
Erin- Great to hear from you. I am indeed coming back to the States for Christmas, but I will only be in Utah, not in Florida. My mailing address is on the contact page of this site. You can get there by clicking the ‘contact’ link at the top of the page. Thanks for thinking of me.
December 7th, 2003 at 4:17 am
Hi everyone,
I am looking for a copy Of Aitmatov’s “my young poplar in red scarf”. Any idea where can I find it?
Thanks, filiz
December 9th, 2003 at 5:30 pm
[NOTE: Wes made posted this at a message board where I also asked for comments on the translation, but I have posted it here to put them all in one place]
Tom, I looked at it a little bit. Only two things I might have done differently:
In the opening Bit, I would have said “a little five year old” and then for “???? ????????” I would have made it singular “The movie is here.” I know that ???? may be plural singular in form, but the verb would be ???????? if it were “movies” and not “movie,” right? Please let me know if I’m wrong so I can learn why!
I hope all’s well. Good work, Tom.
December 9th, 2003 at 5:32 pm
[NOTE: Justin made posted this at a message board where I also asked for comments on the translation, but I have posted it here to put them all in one place]
Hm.. The opening paragraph is more or less fine the way it is, in my opinion. It’s probably good that you didn’t translate “malysh”, since it would make the sentence seem redundant and awkward in English (being “about five years old” automatically makes him a “malysh”). Translating the phrase as “a little five-year-old” would also be possible, but in using it you might be accused of straying too far from the spirit of the text when it’s not really necessary to do so. Again, it’s not indicated that he IS five years old–just a little boy who seems like he’d be around that age.
Another minor thing I noticed was the usage of a pair of dashes to offset a parenthetical statement that was immediately followed by a comma: “Even though her family wasn?t large ? it was just her and her son ?, it came down to the same thing:”… I’m not entirely sure, but I don’t think you can use a comma after a dash in English. If not, you could use parentheses instead of dashes, which would allow you to keep the comma.
As for “Êèíî ïðèåõàëî”, I’d go with Wes’s translation. Even though it seems that the child is referring to the “cinema” in general (i.e., the movies) rather than the one film that the cinema van brings, the phrase “the movies are here” seems a little strange in English when it’s not referring to multiple films, and it might (did) cause some confusion.
December 9th, 2003 at 6:18 pm
Filiz - Sorry, I don’t know where you can find a copy of that Aitmatov story.
Wes and Justin - Thanks for the comments. I hope you don’t mind me posting them here so that I could keep it all in one place.
Regarding the first paragraph, the text says:
?? ??? ??????? ??? ????
Putting ‘???’ in front of ‘????’ in Russian implies an approximation, in other words he was ‘about five years old’.
Regarding the ‘???? ????????’ exclamation that the boy makes, I see your point with keeping it in the singular in the English. I think that it’s clear (Justin also got the impression) that the boy is announcing that ‘the movies’, in the abstract sense, had come and not some movie in particular that they were expecting.
As for the translation, I guess it’s just a question of stylistics concerning what a 5 year old child would say. It didn’t strike me as an odd phrase for a 5 year old to utter (I can easily envision a youngster saying something like ‘let’s go to the movies‘ or something like that), so that is how I rendered the sentence.
Translating it as ‘the movie’s here’ would seem to me like this was a regularly occuring event, the movies coming to their little village. Right before that, he calls it an ‘extraordinary event’ so I get the impression this was not something they were all expecting. . . or at least the little boy. Would he not have then shouted, ‘????? ??????? !’.
Also, Wes, you can never say ‘???? ????????’. The word ‘????’ is collective (as well as indeclinable) in the sense that the ’singular’ form refers to the topic as a whole. It can refer to a single ‘movie theatre’ or ‘cinema’ in general.
And thanks for the tip on the dash/comma usage, Justin. You are probably right. I’ll try and look that up.
Keep the comments coming folks.
November 29th, 2003 at 9:31 pm
Tom,
What is the US equivalent of one “glass”?
Does “poor student” cake taste good?