My students and I are working on a large translation project. We want to explore Petr Vail and Alexander Genis's 1987 Russian Cuisine in Exile and try to bring it to an English-speaking audience.
This is harder than you might think. I've taught sections of the book and written about it before, but this time we are translating selected essays into English. The introduction already defies naming. Currently we are calling it "Expressions of the Soul," but the literal translation would be "Beautiful Gusts of the Soul." You see the problem. (Perhaps the title is playing on blagorodnye poryvy, noble impulses? Comments are welcome!)
The book is typically Russian, in that it has many layers and is built on literary and cultural allusions. For example, at one point the authors begin to reminisce about what were frankly impoverished culinary conditions -- the kinds of things they bought at their university cafeteria: "36 kopek studen' [a kind of aspic or jelly], jam-filled piroshki or pastries, meatless borscht." These food items are quite culturally conditioned if perhaps not very comprehensible. From there it gets worse, though. They move on to "bloody roast beef, Strasbourg pie," and declare: "but this is not nostalgia anymore, now it's the classics."
Any Russian will recognize these last two foods as being from Alexander Pushkin's novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin (1824-1831). And for the Soviet reader, and writer, the contrast is amusing: the fancy and gourmet and foreign foods of Pushkin's rake and our own "meatless" soup, vegetarian not because of lenten traditions but for the sake of economy. Vail and Genis don't mention the pineapple, but any Russian reader knows that that hothouse fruit is what comes next in the Pushkin excerpt.
What, I asked my students, shall we do with the American reader? Do we need copious notes and context for them to understand the meaning of this text? From the 19th century classic (not footnoted in V&G because Pushkin is a household name in Russia and every reader would know the provenance of the bloody roast beef) the authors bring up a 20th century classic. "As the prophet of our scandalous generation, Venichka Erofeev, said"...
Here too--the Russian dissident reader, the Russian in exile, knows that V&G are talking not just about Venedikt Erofeev, but about his protagonist in the novel Moscow-Petushki, sometimes translated into English as Moscow Circles or Moscow to the End of the Line. So the poet-prophet figure of the 19th century (brought to his apotheosis, possibly, by Solzhenitsyn in the 20th), is now undercut by a serious dependence on alcohol.
That works for me. In a course on Russian food don't we need to get into the question of alcohol use and abuse? Of course!
And yet ... when I was quoting Erofeev to my colleague, a native Russian who is a product of the Soviet school system, she reminded me -- Erofeev is rewriting Soviet literature and offering a subtle (indeed invisible to the naked eye) commentary on Soviet life and Soviet slogans -- perhaps on what has caused his protagonist to drink in the first place. When V&G quote Venichka: "Life is given to a person one time only..." the normal Soviet reader finishes for him: "and we must live it in such a way that we will not experience horrific pain because of years lived pointlessly and with no goal."
Venichka never said that. He said "we must live it in such a way that we don't make errors in our recipes." And his recipes are all for "cocktails" like "Silvery Lily-of-the-Valley" and "The Tear of a Comsomol Girl," (The "Tear of a Comsomol Girl" is so fragrant, Venichka tells us, that you can lose consciousness just by sniffing it. "I, for one, have," he admits.)
(Okay, you need to know this recipe in English, right? That website didn't do it for you? Here you go:
But that's not the only thing a Soviet reader thinks of. For them, Venichka is also quoting. He is quoting the "quintessential" Socialist Realist hero Pavka Korchagin, protagonist of Nikolai Ostrovsky's book How the Steel is Tempered (1932-34), a slogan-spouting figure shoved down their throats in school when their teachers made them internalize Soviet morality. (Read the relatively lame Wikipedia article about Korchagin here, or go read the novel. Totally worth your time in a kind of perverse way.)
How, I wonder, are we going to create an apparatus for this book translation that really works for an English-language reader? A great problem for my students to grapple with, even if they can't solve it.
That first introductory essay includes another snarky comment that is incomprehensible to the reader today and which I explained to the students via the kiwi. In the text, V&G comment: "You don't dictate to the stomach. Just try to explain to it that the avocado is edible and not merely decorative."
What? my students asked. Well, said I. Think about the kiwi.
For you, the kiwi is normal. But when I was a kid in the 1970s, the kiwi was only just arriving in the U.S. for the first time. We had no idea what to do with them. Do you eat the brown fuzzy part or not? Is the white part in the middle okay to eat? What about the seeds? When is it ripe? When is it overripe? Why is it slimy?
Kiwis were beautiful, but it took us many years of interacting with them to understand and appreciate them. For the unfamiliar they really did look decorative. Just like the avocado in much of Russia and Central Europe even today. Think about how disgusting an unripe avocado is ... and then think about how far it has to travel to reach Russia. How would an unsuspecting Russian raised on Socialist realist fiction know when and how to eat it?
This is harder than you might think. I've taught sections of the book and written about it before, but this time we are translating selected essays into English. The introduction already defies naming. Currently we are calling it "Expressions of the Soul," but the literal translation would be "Beautiful Gusts of the Soul." You see the problem. (Perhaps the title is playing on blagorodnye poryvy, noble impulses? Comments are welcome!)
The book is typically Russian, in that it has many layers and is built on literary and cultural allusions. For example, at one point the authors begin to reminisce about what were frankly impoverished culinary conditions -- the kinds of things they bought at their university cafeteria: "36 kopek studen' [a kind of aspic or jelly], jam-filled piroshki or pastries, meatless borscht." These food items are quite culturally conditioned if perhaps not very comprehensible. From there it gets worse, though. They move on to "bloody roast beef, Strasbourg pie," and declare: "but this is not nostalgia anymore, now it's the classics."
Any Russian will recognize these last two foods as being from Alexander Pushkin's novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin (1824-1831). And for the Soviet reader, and writer, the contrast is amusing: the fancy and gourmet and foreign foods of Pushkin's rake and our own "meatless" soup, vegetarian not because of lenten traditions but for the sake of economy. Vail and Genis don't mention the pineapple, but any Russian reader knows that that hothouse fruit is what comes next in the Pushkin excerpt.
What, I asked my students, shall we do with the American reader? Do we need copious notes and context for them to understand the meaning of this text? From the 19th century classic (not footnoted in V&G because Pushkin is a household name in Russia and every reader would know the provenance of the bloody roast beef) the authors bring up a 20th century classic. "As the prophet of our scandalous generation, Venichka Erofeev, said"...Here too--the Russian dissident reader, the Russian in exile, knows that V&G are talking not just about Venedikt Erofeev, but about his protagonist in the novel Moscow-Petushki, sometimes translated into English as Moscow Circles or Moscow to the End of the Line. So the poet-prophet figure of the 19th century (brought to his apotheosis, possibly, by Solzhenitsyn in the 20th), is now undercut by a serious dependence on alcohol.
That works for me. In a course on Russian food don't we need to get into the question of alcohol use and abuse? Of course!
And yet ... when I was quoting Erofeev to my colleague, a native Russian who is a product of the Soviet school system, she reminded me -- Erofeev is rewriting Soviet literature and offering a subtle (indeed invisible to the naked eye) commentary on Soviet life and Soviet slogans -- perhaps on what has caused his protagonist to drink in the first place. When V&G quote Venichka: "Life is given to a person one time only..." the normal Soviet reader finishes for him: "and we must live it in such a way that we will not experience horrific pain because of years lived pointlessly and with no goal."
Venichka never said that. He said "we must live it in such a way that we don't make errors in our recipes." And his recipes are all for "cocktails" like "Silvery Lily-of-the-Valley" and "The Tear of a Comsomol Girl," (The "Tear of a Comsomol Girl" is so fragrant, Venichka tells us, that you can lose consciousness just by sniffing it. "I, for one, have," he admits.)
(Okay, you need to know this recipe in English, right? That website didn't do it for you? Here you go:
15 grams LavenderSo ... when I read Erofeev, I think about the ways in which Soviet alcoholics tried to manage their habits on limited budgets. I think about the guys standing in the shadows trying to find someone to split a half liter bottle of vodka with them; or about the man who in 1987 asked me to buy some eau de cologne for him at a local pharmacy because they wouldn't sell to him any more; or about stories of boys in the Soviet army, posted in far-away outposts, going blind from drinking brake fluid.
15 grams Verbena
30 grams water (artesian is best)
2 grams nail polish
150 grams mouthwash
150 grams lemon soda)
But that's not the only thing a Soviet reader thinks of. For them, Venichka is also quoting. He is quoting the "quintessential" Socialist Realist hero Pavka Korchagin, protagonist of Nikolai Ostrovsky's book How the Steel is Tempered (1932-34), a slogan-spouting figure shoved down their throats in school when their teachers made them internalize Soviet morality. (Read the relatively lame Wikipedia article about Korchagin here, or go read the novel. Totally worth your time in a kind of perverse way.)
How, I wonder, are we going to create an apparatus for this book translation that really works for an English-language reader? A great problem for my students to grapple with, even if they can't solve it.
That first introductory essay includes another snarky comment that is incomprehensible to the reader today and which I explained to the students via the kiwi. In the text, V&G comment: "You don't dictate to the stomach. Just try to explain to it that the avocado is edible and not merely decorative."
What? my students asked. Well, said I. Think about the kiwi.
For you, the kiwi is normal. But when I was a kid in the 1970s, the kiwi was only just arriving in the U.S. for the first time. We had no idea what to do with them. Do you eat the brown fuzzy part or not? Is the white part in the middle okay to eat? What about the seeds? When is it ripe? When is it overripe? Why is it slimy?
Kiwis were beautiful, but it took us many years of interacting with them to understand and appreciate them. For the unfamiliar they really did look decorative. Just like the avocado in much of Russia and Central Europe even today. Think about how disgusting an unripe avocado is ... and then think about how far it has to travel to reach Russia. How would an unsuspecting Russian raised on Socialist realist fiction know when and how to eat it?
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