The Captain’s Daughter

I blogged last week about the underrepresentation of literary translation in UK publishing, and about an event being held at Waterstone’s Hampstead to celebrate and promote translated fiction in the UK.  I’ve just heard from Robert Chandler, a translator who has worked with Hesperus Press on numerous occasions and who spoke at the event, who informs me that the evening was a resounding success, with well over 100 people in attendance, which is heartening news indeed for anyone who concerns themselves with the fortune of foreign fiction.  And I’m assuming that most visitors to this blog do precisely that.

It struck me that not all readers of the blog will have been aware that Robert Chandler was recently interviewed for the Hesperus Press online magazine, so I thought I’d reproduce an excerpt from the interview here, for the benefit of those that missed it.  The interview was on the subject of Robert’s recent translation of Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter for Hesperus Press.

Ellie Robins: Congratulations on your recent Commendation in the 2007 Rossica Prize, which recognised years of excellent work in making Russian literature accessible to readers of English. Many readers are intimidated by translated fiction; what advice would you give to them?

Robert Chandler: The same as with regard to any other fiction: to trust to your own ear and your own judgement. If the words seem dead, then perhaps they really are dead and you would do better to read something else. But if you can hear a living voice, then keep listening!

ER: You also translated the Hesperus edition of Pushkin’s Dubrovsky. How do you rate The Captain’s Daughter alongside Pushkin’s other works? RC: It’s a masterpiece. At first reading it seems to be simply a well-told adventure story, but it is actually one of the subtlest and wittiest of all nineteenth-century Russian novels.

ER: Would this be a good start for those unfamiliar with the works of Pushkin?

RC: Yes, this or the ‘Queen of Spades’, which is included in a volume I edited for Penguin Classics: ‘Russian Short Stories from Pushkin To Buida’. There is also Stanley Mitchell’s wonderful translation of ‘Eugene Onegin’, but that will not be published until 2008. And there is ‘The Egyptian Nights’, an unfinished work, half-poetry and half-prose, that is included in the Hesperus edition of Dubrovsky. This is marvellous, unique in its fusion of passionate romanticism and elegant Jane-Austen-like wit. I was intrigued by the reaction of my niece, a writer herself, when I asked her to look through a draft of my translation before I submitted it. It never entered her head – I had forgotten to tell her – that ‘The Egyptian Nights’ is only a fragment. She simply said it was one of the most perfect short stories she had ever read.

ER: Immediately prior to writing The Captain’s Daughter, Pushkin wrote A History of Pugachov, a work of historical research based on the events that inspired The Captain’s Daughter. How significant do you think this work of non-fiction was in the shaping of The Captain’s Daughter?

RC: A History of Pugachov is an extraordinary work of history, way ahead of its time. It is based on archival research and first-hand interviews. One of its remarkable features is that Pushkin does not attempt to impose any false coherence on events. The number of minor battles and chaotic movements of small detachments of troops is more than any reader is likely to be able to take in. It is hard to imagine that even Pushkin himself could have held all the details of the campaigns in his mind. Rather than frustrating the reader, however, this has the effect of reinforcing his trust in Pushkin’s honesty. In any case, Pushkin has already anticipated criticism by including, as his epigraph to the work, a remarkable passage by Platon Lyubarsky, a senior figure in the church who had already written about the rebellion:

To render a proper account of all the designs and adventures of this impostor would, it seems, be almost impossible not only for a historian of average abilities but even for the most excellent one, because all of this impostor’s undertakings depended, not on rational considerations or military precepts, but on daring, happenstance and luck. For this reason (I think) Pugachov himself would not only be unable to recount all the details of these undertakings, but would not even be aware of a considerable portion of them, since they were initiated, not just by him directly, but by many of his unbridled daredevil accomplices in several locations at once.

 Just as individual characters in The Captain’s Daughter anticipate individual characters in Tolstoy’s works, so the whole of Tolstoy’s philosophy of history is anticipated by Pushkin– both in this epigraph and in The History of Pugachov as a whole.

The full transcript of the interview can be read in the magazine, here.  If you’d like to receive an email to notify you when future editions of the magazine have been uploaded, add your email address to the mailing list on the left sidebar of our home page.  I can categorically promise that you won’t be spammed: I’ve spent most of this morning purging my inbox of offers for discounted software.  I’m sure there’s an irony somewhere in the fact that all I really want is some better anti-spam software…  Ho hum.

Ellie