Translation and Interpretation

I’ve continued to think about the question of translation in relation to Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog.” The choices that translators make are bound to make a difference in any case, but particularly so with a writer like Chekhov to whom every word meant a great deal. Remember that one of his six principles of good story writing was “extreme brevity.” It was his practice to revise so as to cut away any extraneous detail. Dana Gioia explains:

Early in his career Chekhov had to write according to strict space limits (only one hundred lines of newsprint), and he learned by constant practice to eliminate all unnecessary elements from a story. What Chekhov offered instead was the luminous detail, a few significant particulars that summon up a character or scene.

Virginia Llewellyn Smith offers a glimpse of this revision process at work:

Chekhov originally wrote in the conclusion of ‘The Lady with the Dog’ that the love of Gurov and Anna Sergeevna had ‘made them both better’. He altered this subsequently to ‘changed them both for the better’; but still dissatisfied, finally he altered this once more to ‘had changed them both’, and thus avoided any overt suggestion of pointing a moral.

So what are we to make of it when Chekhov has revised and revised so as to arrive at the one telling detail that gets to the essence of things, then three different translators render that detail in three different ways?

I thought it would be interesting to put different translations of a couple of passages from the story side by side and consider the effect of the differences on readers’ perceptions. Because much of our discussion so far has focussed on Gurov and his feelings toward and relationships with women, the two passages I selected for this exercise are 1) the initial description of his wife; and, 2) his recollection of his past conquests.

Gurov’s Wife

From Ivy Litvinov’s translation:

He was not yet forty but had a twelve-year-old daughter and two sons in high school. He had been talked into marrying in his third year at college, and his wife now looked nearly twice as old as he did. She was a tall woman with dark eyebrows, erect, dignified, imposing, and, as she said of herself, a "thinker." She was a great reader, omitted the "hard sign" at the end of words in her letters, and called her husband "Dimitry" instead of Dmitry; and though he secretly considered her shallow, narrow-minded, and dowdy, he stood in awe of her, and disliked being at home. He had first begun deceiving her long ago and he was now constantly unfaithful to her, and this was no doubt why he spoke slightingly of women, to whom he referred as the lower race.

From Constance Garnett’s translation:

He was under forty, but he had a daughter already twelve years old, and two sons at school. He had been married young, when he was a student in his second year, and by now his wife seemed half as old again as he. She was a tall, erect woman with dark eyebrows, staid and dignified, and, as she said of herself, intellectual. She read a great deal, used phonetic spelling, called her husband, not Dmitri, but Dimitri, and he secretly considered her unintelligent, narrow, inelegant, was afraid of her, and did not like to be at home. He had begun being unfaithful to her long ago -- had been unfaithful to her often, and, probably on that account, almost always spoke ill of women, and when they were talked about in his presence, used to call them "the lower race."

From Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation:

He was not yet forty, but he had a twelve-year-old daughter and two sons in school. He had married young, while still a second-year student, and now his wife seemed half again his age. She was a tall woman with dark eyebrows, erect, imposing, dignified, and a thinking person, as she called herself. She read a great deal, used the new orthography, called her husband not Dmitri but Dimitri, but he secretly considered her none too bright, narrow-minded, graceless, was afraid of her, and disliked being at home. He had begun to be unfaithful to her long ago, was unfaithful often, and, probably for that reason, almost always spoke ill of women, and when they were discussed in his presence, he would say of them: “An inferior race!”

Gurov’s Prior Conquests

From Ivy Litvinov’s translation:

Her room was stuffy and smelt of some scent she had bought in the Japanese shop. Gurov looked at her, thinking to himself: "How full of strange encounters life is!" He could remember carefree, good-natured women who were exhilarated by love-making and grateful to him for the happiness he gave them, however short-lived; and there had been others--his wife among them--whose caresses were insincere, affected, hysterical, mixed up with a great deal of quite unnecessary talk, and whose expression seemed to say that all this was not just lovemaking or passion, but something much more significant; then there had been two or three beautiful, cold women, over whose features flitted a predatory expression, betraying a determination to wring from life more than it could give, women no longer in their first youth, capricious, irrational, despotic, brainless, and when Gurov had cooled to these, their beauty aroused in him nothing but repulsion, and the lace trimming on their underclothes reminded him of fish-scales.

From Constance Garnett’s translation:

The room was close and smelt of the scent she had bought at the Japanese shop. Gurov looked at her and thought: "What different people one meets in the world!" From the past he preserved memories of careless, good-natured women, who loved cheerfully and were grateful to him for the happiness he gave them, however brief it might be; and of women like his wife who loved without any genuine feeling, with superfluous phrases, affectedly, hysterically, with an expression that suggested that it was not love nor passion, but something more significant; and of two or three others, very beautiful, cold women, on whose faces he had caught a glimpse of a rapacious expression -- an obstinate desire to snatch from life more than it could give, and these were capricious, unreflecting, domineering, unintelligent women not in their first youth, and when Gurov grew cold to them their beauty excited his hatred, and the lace on their linen seemed to him like scales.

From Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation:

Her hotel room was stuffy and smelled of the perfumes she had bought in a Japanese shop. Gurov, looking at her now, thought: “What meetings there are in life!” From the past he had kept the memory of carefree, good-natured women, cheerful with love, grateful to him for their happiness, however brief; and of women—his wife, for example—who loved without sincerity, with superfluous talk, affectedly, with hysteria, with an expression as if it were not love, not passion, but something more significant; and of those two or three very beautiful, cold ones, in whose faces a predatory expression would suddenly flash, a stubborn wish to take, to snatch from life more than it could give, and these were women not in their first youth, capricious, unreasonable, domineering, unintelligent, and when Gurov cooled towards them, their beauty aroused hatred in him, and the lace of their underwear seemed to him like scales.

Do the variations from one translation to another make any difference to your perception of Gurov, or do you experience the effect of each version as much the same?

For more discussion on Chekhov’s “The Lady with the Dog,” click over to A Curious Singularity.

John Cheever on Anton Chekhov

John Cheever on Anton Chekhov:

Readers, upon first being introduced to Chekhov, often say: But nothing happens in the story, nothing real happens and it’s all terribly sad. We mean, of course, that nothing happens in our limited Western sense: that no one is murdered, that the plans for the nuclear submarine have not been stolen, that war has not been declared.

But one does not ask of a short story does something happen? One asks is it interesting? Chekhov is always interesting and one can’t do better.

From John Cheever, “The Melancholy of Distance” in James McConkey, ed., Chekhov and Our Age: Responses to Chekhov by American Writers and Scholars (1984).

More Questions than Answers

Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) has been credited with “inventing a new kind of story” and ascribed the status of “the father of the modern short story.” Written in 1899, “The Lady With the Dog” is one of his mature stories, and has been deemed by many to be his best. Vladimir Nabokov pronounced it "one of the greatest stories ever written."

When I reread the story to prepare for our discussion, I wanted to experience it as a story that stands on its own. But I also wanted to think about it in connection with Chekhov’s role in the evolution of the short story form. In what way did it, at the time of writing, constitute “a new kind of story”? What does it have in common with contemporary short stories?

I remember that one of the things about this story in particular, and about Chekhov’s work in general, that struck me upon first reading was how modern it seemed. This quality makes Chekhov’s stories very accessible to contemporary readers but I think it also makes it easy to underestimate his contribution to the form. Without knowing what went before, it’s hard to appreciate how original his stories were when they were first written and published.

I confess that my own short story reading hasn’t extended much further back than Chekhov, so I’m shamelessly borrowing from Richard Pevear’s introduction to Anton Chekhov’s Stories in articulating here what was so novel about Chekhov’s approach. Pevear notes that in his own time Chekhov’s writing technique was compared to impressionist painting. He elaborates: “The most ordinary events, a few trivial details, a few words spoken, no plot, a focus on single gestures, minor features, the creation of a mood that is both precise and somehow elusive—such is Chekhov’s impressionism.” Chekhov’s writerly stance was that of a detached observer who presented characters and situations without moralising or judging. His subject matter was “the common stuff of humanity” rather than “monumental personalities dramatically portrayed.” He offered no clear conclusions. All of these factors are at play in “The Lady With the Dog” and, to my mind, these are the factors that make the story seem so modern. No doubt due to Chekhov’s influence, the contemporary reader of short stories is well accustomed to stories which offer up no clear morals, no neat conclusions.

In a letter to his publisher dated October 27, 1888, Chekhov wrote:

Anyone who says the artist’s field is all answers and no questions has never done any writing or had any dealings with imagery. The artist observes, selects, guesses, and synthesizes… You are right to demand that an author take conscious stock of what he is doing, but you are confusing two concepts: answering the questions and formulating them correctly. Only the latter is required of an author.

In that spirit, rather than attempting a definitive analysis of “The Lady With the Dog,” I will put forward for discussion a number of questions that occurred to me while reading it:

1. Close to the end of the story, the following passage appears: “They had forgiven one another the things they were ashamed of in the past, they forgave everything in the present, and they felt that this love of theirs had changed them both.” I don’t have a strong enough sense of who Anna Sergeevna was at the beginning of the story to venture an opinion as to whether the love affair changes her. But what of Gurov? Dana Gioia writes that “Gurov undergoes a strange and winding course of emotional and moral growth that few readers would expect” and sees this transformation as central to the tale. I have my doubts. Certainly his feelings about Anna Sergeevna change over the course of the story, but has he changed by the end?

2. What is Gurov’s appeal for Anna Sergeevna or for any of his previous conquests? It’s difficult to tell from inside his head. He expresses a fair bit of hostility toward women, particularly the ones he’s close to, but he doesn’t seem very keen on himself either. Why are women drawn to him?

3. Virginia Llewellyn Smith, who wrote a whole book about “The Lady With the Dog,” described the story as “a summary of the entire topic" of "Chekhov's attitude to women and to love." I haven’t read her book and I’m not sure what to make of this quotation in isolation. Certainly we learn a great deal about Gurov’s attitude to women and to love, but is there a grander message here outside of Gurov’s point of view that can be ascribed to Chekhov? If so, what might that message be?

4. Yalta is a resort town where people go for fun and frolic. But it’s also a place where people go for their health. Chekhov himself moved there after a lung haemorrhage caused by tuberculosis. In the story, Anna Sergeevna came to Yalta after telling her husband that she was ill. We don’t know about Gurov, but surely he wouldn’t be there for weeks on end without his family unless he too had used ill health as a pretext. Stefanie’s recent post on illness in literature prompts me to ask whether that spectre of illness, however subtle, is important in this story.

5. Did anybody else read multiple translations of the story? If so, did it make any difference to your perception of it? I read two different translations and I think that I preferred that of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky to that of Ivy Litvinov. The language of the former seemed more direct and pared down. But subjective preference apart, I did wonder which translation was closest to Chekhov’s intentions. In my own stories, I can spend months just changing one word back and forth, so the difference that a translator’s choices can make to the meaning and effect of a story strikes me as a very substantial variable to consider.

I’d love to hear others’ views on these questions.

Click over to A Curious Singularity to read more posts on “The Lady With the Dog” and to join in the discussion flowing from them.

A Reminder Regarding the Short Story Discussion Group

We begin our discussion tomorrow with Anton Chekhov’s “The Lady With the Dog”. I’ve started a group blog to serve as the site for that discussion and sent invitations to join it to all those who expressed an interest in participating. If you ought to have received an invitation but didn’t, please contact me via e-mail and I’ll make sure that you get one. If you would like to participate in the discussion without joining the group blog, you are of course welcome to do so by commenting on others’ posts.

Please click over to A Curious Singularity to join in the discussion. Posts on Chekhov’s story will begin appearing there tomorrow.

Gender and Reading Habits

In an article in today’s Globe and Mail, Kate Taylor examines at some length the question of why women read more fiction than men.

First, the figures. A recent survey of the reading habits of Canadians conducted by the federal Department of Canadian Heritage found the following:

Women accounted for 60 per cent of the daily readers and 70 per cent of the heavy readers who had read 50 or more books in the last 12 months. Women also outnumbered men two to one as regular readers of both classic and contemporary novels.

I’ve seen statistical evidence of the gender gap in reading, particularly of fiction, trotted out elsewhere with some frequency, so these numbers don’t make for a surprising revelation. Indeed, to the extent that there is a surprise here, it’s that the numbers aren’t quite as lopsided as I’d been led to believe. Nevertheless, the question of why women read more fiction than men remains.

Taylor interviews a number of authors, critics, and publishers for their views on the issue. She sums up author and critic George Fetherling’s response as follows:

Fetherling complains that men only read those novels in which they can directly identify with the protagonist, while women will read about people different than themselves. That’s the most common explanation of the phenomenon: Reading fiction involves empathizing with the characters, and thus draws on women’s traditional emotional strengths. Men, on the other hand, turn to non-fiction to learn about the world around them.

Author Russell Smith and Doubleday editorial director Martha Kanya-Forstner offer up this explanation:

Both Smith and Kanya-Forstner argue that men are drawn to books about ideas, and both think publishers have failed to recognize that in their marketing schemes for fiction. “Guys look for ideas,” says Smith. “Very intelligent men I talk to, none of them read fiction. It’s girl stuff: hundreds and hundreds of pages of feelings. To think that no one perceives fiction as being about ideas is depressing.”

The inclusion of the word “perceives” in Smith’s final sentence suggests that the problem is not that these novels of ideas that would appeal to men aren’t out there, but rather that men aren’t aware of their existence. However, earlier in the article, Taylor describes Smith as “concerned that the success of these ‘women’s novels’ is limiting the kind of fiction that gets published” in Canada. (‘Women’s novels’ are here defined as “earnest” tales that “appeal to women with a story of family, memory, and loss.” Men, Smith says, “are bored with the earnestness of contemporary fiction.”) So perhaps in his view the problem is in fact that insufficient numbers of novels of ideas that would appeal to men are available.

I don’t find these explanations satisfying. The assumptions embedded within them are shot through with gender stereotypes that I find offensive in the abstract and flatly unconvincing in this context. They don’t reflect the breadth of fiction that I read and the reasons why I read it; nor do they reflect the habits of the many avid readers of fiction, male and female, with whom I am acquainted. For example, despite my chromosomal make-up, I’m quite partial to humour and ideas in my novels. And how exactly does one so deftly separate feelings and ideas anyway? Surely most good novels are bound to contain both thoroughly intertwined?

That said, I don’t have an alternate explanation to offer. I remain puzzled by the gender gap in fiction reading. I need to think about it more deeply. In the meantime, I appeal to you for your ideas on this question. Why do you think women read more fiction than men?

A Literary Cocktail Party

By tea-time, Wilfred was behaving so tiresomely that Harriet put him away in a rage and sallied out to attend a literary cocktail party. The room in which it was held was exceedingly hot and crowded, and all the assembled authors were discussing (a) publishers (b) agents, (c) their own sales (d) other people’s sales, and (e) the extraordinary behaviour of the Book of the Moment selectors in awarding their ephemeral crown to Tasker Hepplewater’s Mock Turtle. ‘I finished this book,’ one distinguished adjudicator had said, ‘with tears running down my face.’ The author of Serpent’s Fang confided to Harriet over a petite saucisse and a glass of sherry that they must have been tears of pure boredom; but the author of Dust and Shiver said, No—they were probably tears of merriment, called forth by the unintentional humour of the book; had she ever met Hepplewater? A very angry young woman, whose book had been passed over, declared that the whole thing was a notorious farce. The Book of the Moment was selected from each publisher’s list in turn, so that her own Ariadne Adams was automatically excluded from benefit, owing to the mere fact that her publisher’s imprint had been honoured the previous January. She had, however, received private assurance that the critic of the Morning Star had sobbed like a child over the last hundred pages of Ariadne, and would probably make it his Book of the Fortnight, if only the publisher could be persuaded to take advertising space in the paper. The author of The Squeezed Lemon agreed that advertising was at the bottom of it: had they heard how the Daily Flashlight had tried to blackmail Henry Quint into advertising with them? And how, on his refusal, they had said darkly, ‘Well, you know what will happen, Mr. Quint?’ And how no single Quint book had received so much as a review from the Flashlight ever since? And how Quint had advertised that fact in the Morning Star and sent up his net sales 50 per cent in consequence? Well, by some fantastic figure anyhow. But the author of Primrose Dalliance said that with the Book of the Moment crowd, what counted was Personal Pull—surely they remembered that Hepplewater had married Walton Strawberry’s latest wife’s sister. The author of Jocund Day agreed about the Pull, but thought that in this instance it was political, because there was some powerful anti-Fascist propaganda in Mock Turtle and it was well known that you could always get old Sneep Fortescue with a good smack at the Blackshirts.

From Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night (1935).

Saving Us the Trouble of Reading the Books

‘Well, I wouldn’t have the muck in the house,’ said the Captain, firmly. ‘I caught Hilda with it, and I said, “Now you send that book straight back to the library.” I don’t interfere, but one must draw the line somewhere.’

‘How did you know what it was like?’ asked Wimsey, innocently.

‘Why James Douglas’s article in the Express was good enough for me,’ said Captain Bates. ‘The paragraphs he quoted were filthy—positively filthy.’

‘Well, it’s a good thing we’ve all read them,’ said Wimsey. ‘Forewarned is forearmed.’

‘We owe a great debt of gratitude to the Press,’ said the Dowager Duchess; ‘so kind of them to pick out all the plums for us and save us the trouble of reading the books, don’t you think, and such a joy for the poor dear people who can’t afford seven and sixpence, or even a library subscription.’

From Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison (1930).

Writing Exercises

My friend Jennifer is collecting writing exercises at wayward armadillo blog. If you’ve got one that works that you’d like to share, head on over to her blog and post it in the comments section. I anticipate that the compendium of exercises that she’s compiling will prove most useful.

Unlikely Reads

Over at Box of Books, Ella posted recently about the process of paring down her library in preparation for a move from California to Dubai. She’s only got room to take twenty-four books with her, and she’s not sure how readily available English-language books will be when she arrives at her destination. Contemplating her situation got me thinking back to past occasions when necessity propelled me toward some rather unlikely reading material.

I’m thinking in particular of the month that I spent in Paris the summer I turned seventeen. I know now that there’s no shortage of English-language bookstores in Paris. But at seventeen, on my first visit to a place where I didn’t speak the language—indeed, on my first visit to a big city—I didn’t have the wherewithal to find them. I settled for scouring the bookstalls along the Seine looking for something, anything, in English to read. In this way, I cobbled together a small library of just three books: Nicholas and Alexandra, Robert Massie’s popular account of the lives of Russia’s last csar and his family; Center Door Fancy, Joan Blondell’s roman à clef about her life in Hollywood; and last (and certainly least), the novelization of the movie Fame. I read very quickly and so read each of these books several times over the course of my four-week stay.

I didn’t walk the streets of Paris in the company of Jean-Paul Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir or Colette or Albert Camus, nor of Ernest Hemingway or James Joyce or Gertrude Stein or Kay Boyle or Djuna Barnes. It wasn’t until a few years later that I developed a fascination with literary Paris in the 1920s. Instead my first impressions of Paris were absurdly intertwined with visions of the Romanovs and Rasputin, of Blondell’s vaudeville stars and Hollywood starlets, and, alas, of the precocious, talented kids from Fame.

On subsequent trips, I shopped at Shakespeare and Company and sipped drinks at Les Deux Magots with a proper appreciation for the history of the place. But that weird literary entourage of my seventeenth summer still inhabits at least a corner of my memories of Paris.

What are some of your most unlikely reads and what circumstances led you to them?

Books, Books, and more Books

I had an unusual experience at the library today. I went in to pick up the stack of books that was awaiting me on the hold shelf. The woman in front of me in the check out line eyed up my selections, noted the four Dorothy Sayers novels (which Danielle inspired me to seek out) and also the Laura Lippman novel (the latest instalment in the Tess Monaghan series which I have been eagerly anticipating), and correctly surmised that I’m a mystery fan. So is she, and it so happens that the trunk of her car was full of paperback mysteries that she was about to drop off at the Goodwill. She said that she’d feel much better passing them directly on to a keen mystery reader than dropping them into the Goodwill donation box where they might well languish unread. I was persuaded to take ten books by an array of authors whose work I’d been meaning to try but hadn’t got round to yet. I’ve been known to claim that it’s more a matter of books finding me than of me finding books. This experience would seem to prove the point! Is it any wonder that my bookshelves are overflowing?