“Translation requires a constant subjection and submission of the ego. Empathizing with work very different from one’s own has its own merits, expanding the boundaries of self.
As an experienced “adventure” traveler, I know the first expedition is a scouting mission, and the rewards are in returning to the places I’ve visited.
It is the spontaneity of creating, as with music, of making things come to life, which seems to me closest to meaning in life, that ‘oceanic feeling’.”
Alex Cigale is an American literary translator. He speaks English, mostly fluently, and Russian, with a stutter (and has almost forgotten his high school French, and the years he lived in Israel and spoke Hebrew). He decided to answer our questions in English.
How did you start translating literature? What are “your” authors and languages?
I am Russian-born, immigrated at age nine, but continued reading in Russian, and studied it in high school and college. Recently, I’d “returned” to a former Soviet Republic were Russian is still lingua franca, to live in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan and teach at the American University of Central Asia (part of Bard College’s network of international schools). My original intent was to apply for a Fulbright in Tashkent, Uzbekistan (where my mother had been born) to translate the work of the Fergana poetry school, but that country has not allowed in an American scholar since 2004. I went instead to teach in Kyrgyzstan as a writing specialist because of my “poetry connection” (more on this later): the president of AUCA, Andrew Wachtel, himself an American Slavist, translates Russian poetry, and the Dean of another network school, the Smolny Institute in my “native” St. Petersburg (at age two I moved there from Chernovtsy, Western Ukraine) is a Brodsky scholar. The Russian “Language” poet Arkady Dragomoshchenko had taught at Smolny until his recent passing and there was talk of initiating a collaborative online international poetry seminar.
At various times after college I have done some “commercial” translation. My first paid work immediately after college was translating the memoir of a Holocaust survivor whose son (part of the narrative, and himself a survivor) had been my physics teacher in high school. This became my very first publication, the “Guinea Pigs” chapter of Muted Voices: Jewish Survivors of Latvia Remember (1987), about human subjects of Nazi medical experiments. (Though not per se literary, I don’t think it makes sense to distinguish literary quality on the basis of the fiction/non-fiction divide.) After graduate school, I recall translating chapters in two other scholarly works on archives, one in The Solzhenitsyn Files, about the writer’s legal case, and another in Stalin’s Letters to Molotov (both published in 1995). While in Kyrgyztsan, I translated for pay the United Nations Development Program’s 2012 Report for the country, and am currently working on a series of books that can only be summarized as Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Coffee. But other than such “technical translation,” I have yet to do a book-length work and so can hardly claim the title of “professional” translator.
But let me backtrack a bit: I started in, and abandoned translation after, college, having done a dozen or so of Joseph Brodsky’s poems for my thesis. I stopped in part because I DIDN’T want to be identified as a translator, to ride his substantial coat-tails, but rather to try to stand on my own two feet. (Another constant theme, an impediment that had turned me away from translating poetry, by the way, has been the difficulty of obtaining permission/rights.).This was just before and after Brodsky’s Nobel Prize in the mid-80s. While I have no regrets about it, being a reluctant translator, as you can imagine, this “strategy” didn’t get me very far. At that time, it had never occured to me that translation might be something viable in itself, and it doesn’t seem so now, apart from teaching, and work as an editor. But, in the swagger and ignorance of youth, I had bigger plans, some sort of work in international affairs.
When I got to the University of Michigan, Brodsky had already left but his presence, and that of Carl and Elendea Proffer and their Ardis Publishers (whom I’d briefly studied with and worked for) were strongly felt influences. That was my very beginning (I also half-heartedly wrote another thesis for my second major, in Russian Studies, on Alexander Blok: Poet and the Revolution.) So, my language is Russian and my authors are, primarily, poets too numerous to mention, dead (Silver Age) and alive. Translation has always been for me foremost an extension of my own poetic practice, the dual purpose being an opportunity to practice the writing craft while serving as a sort of cultural ambassador, helping to make the entire range of the Russian canon (and its making) available to the English-reading public.
I returned to translation in the mid 90s, participating in a multi-year project that resulted in my contribution to Crossing Centuries: the New Generation in Russian Poetry, an anthology of the last quarter-century of "unofficial" or "non-conformist" Russian verse, in which 8 of the 80 or so poets appeared in my translation. And again, more recently, in 2009.... I have turned to translation approximately every decade, now for the third time, as a way to “cleanse my palate” and “buy time”. As selfish as it may seem, it would be dishonest not to emphasize here “what translation has done for me” (I have spoken elsewhere of what I’ve done “for translation,” in recent interviews at The Conversantand the Asymptote blog,) Of course, I feel greatly enriched by it, but I've generally taken up translation when I've needed a break, to put my own work aside having completed a phase, and needing to mature before going on to the next one, hence “buying time”. Translation being “in demand,” in part, this has been a consious attempt to “stand out” among a crowded poetry field. So: “a poet among translators, a translator among poets”. I’ll mention here a few of my score of projects moving toward book publication. Perhaps most “commercially” viable is a Selected Writings of the Russian Absurdist Daniil Kharms that’s now, with the support of the editor, before the committee at Northwestern University Press (individual pieces have appeared prominently in Narrative Magazine, PEN America, The Literary Review, Green Mountains Review, Gargoyle, Interlit Quarterly, Numero Cinq, and so on.) And there is as yet unannounced book with Iowa University Press by the great living Russian poet Mikhail Eremin of the St. Petersburg philological school (The project has been awarded a 2014-2015 NEA Translation Fellowship -- Ed.) I have a contract for the Selected Writings of the younger “new epic”/“sci-fi” poet, Fedor Svarovsky, How I Was Saving the World (under consideration for the PEN/Heim Grant,) with the new Coeur Press. Among other projects moving toward book proposals are anthologies of Russian Futurism and Acmeism (Silver Age), Russian Poetic Miniatures and Minimalisms, and The Brief History of the Russian Epigram. There is also a possibility of retranslating a deliciously lyrical novella by an Imaginist poet of the 1920s, Anatoly Mariengof, Cynics, as well as numerous contemporary poets: a Selected of the Chuvash Russian Gennady Aygi; Waves and Ladders; Prose Poems of Alexander Ulanov, and so on. What do you like /dislike about your job as a literary translator?
You know, I do treat it exactly as that, a job, in terms of putting in the time and getting the results, and I think I have a rare combination of skills that makes me suited for it, but thankfully, it’s not anything one can concentrate on for more than a few hours every day (and I do often hit my desk by 6 am.) I’ll stay with the same theme I began with, the implications of practicing the craft to “one’s own” writing. The caveat is the obverse side of this. Translation requires a constant subjection and submission of the ego. Empathizing with work very different from one’s own has its own merits, expanding the boundaries of self. I do believe that translation is an act of reading with empathy, stepping into another's shoes and voice, what I’ve taken to calling “a distributed self”. However, Anxiety of Influence multiplied manyfold is an inherent part of this. As I’ve said already, I have always alternated phases of translation with “my own writing,” never doing both in parallel, and every time I’m not writing, I find myself doubting whether “I can still do it," or that I even need to do it. And there’s the other critical voice: “Am I, in comparison, good enough?” (whatever that means).
Part of the work of a translator is being an editor, of selection, so that I’m always working on the very best of the best. While I understand that this is not at all a “norm” for even the best poets, one can’t help but be beset by doubts, and feel at least some resentment for being “taken away from” and not having the opportunity to do “one’s own work”. What I meant by “buying time” is that I had made a very conscious decision to gain attention for my own poetry through translation. I have little doubt that what makes me stand out as a translator are my own poetic skills. During Soviet times, poets unable to publish for political reasons turned to translation to salvage a poetic practice, and earn an income. In some respects, my choice has been a default, an economic one (though of course a translator’s legacy is better than none).
What is the most enriching experience you have had?
The greatest benefit has been the social one, and the occasional opportunity to travel. I truly love giving readings, for the opportunity to make music, the comraderie, being an educator at heart, and taking part in conferences and the travel associated with this. While I’ve been saying yes to every reading I’ve been offered, only a rare one has involved an honorarium. My best experience so far was taking part in the conference associated with the production of the Crossing Centuries anthology. On that occasion, the Russian Academy of Arts and Sciences was one of the sponsors and paid for my flight and put me up in a hotel for a week. This has been my only opportunity so far to spend a month, in the summer of 1996, to return to St. Petersburg and get to know Moscow for the first time. The capital of poetry is a social and cultural one, the opportunities to read and to teach. Even my Assistant Professorship at AUCA arose as a-product of my writing and translation. I look forward to other such opportunities; to a large extent, that is what keeps me going.
What made you feel closest to an author?
As for my own work, what I have found most enriching is being able to subsume myself in the author’s landscape. My two years of living and working in Central Asia unfortunately didn’t produce the results I’d hoped for. I worked the equivalent of a full two teaching jobs, and had very little time or opportunity to travel, or even to meet let alone translate the writers I had come for. And yet I suspect, and at least based on my previous experience hope, that the roots have been laid. As an experienced “adventure” traveler, I know the first expedition is a scouting mission, and the rewards are in returning to the places I’ve visited.
I’ve had a soul connection to the region, as both my parents had either been evacuated there as infants during World War II , or were born and raised there (my father, to Kazakhstan, my mother, in Tashkent). The people being tribal and nomadic, there is something very “bibilcal” and awesome about the landscape (by the way , I spent two years in Israel as a child in the early 70s when it was not yet quite developed, and have also internalized the landscape and culture of the American Southwest; and these tribal, biblical connections are closely felt by the native people themselves). Immersing oneself in the landscape, even more than the culture, has given me a way into the work of the indigenous Russian language poets I have been translating (Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Chuvash, Buryat, Khanty, and Chukchi.)
What have you found most difficult to translate?
Archaism, regionalism, folksiness. The particular registers and textures inherent in traveling in cultural space-time (which seem to be the same thing) are impossible to get anything like “right” simply because nothing of the sort exists in the target language. Doing a Ukrainian flavored Russian in American southern flavored English would yield absurdly bad results for example. This has been a particular impediment in translating the work of the minor Acmeist Ukranian Russian poet, Vladimir Narbut. Another example is the regional flavor of the Uzbek and Kyrgyz Russian poets I’ve translated (Shamshad Abdullaev and Kubat Djusubaliev) where the somewhat non-standard syntax is itself a marker of difference. What I often find myself doing is resorting to the registers that seem to be such markers in all languages – a seemingly “broken” syntax, a kind of sing-song inflection – often in effect leaving the original “untranslated’ so to speak, a kind of literalness that gives a sense of the original. Allusions to places and names and the use of foreign words are another example of such “otherness”: where in the original language these may suggest a sort of romantic exoticism, in English they either hark back to orientalism or are merely strange and unfamiliar. The only choice one has is between leaving it untranslated and finding something familiar.
Moreover, I find that the work of great poets is often marked by such syntactic and lexical otherness, a kind of invented language. I have in mind here the Acmeist Osip Mandelstam, who was born in Warsaw by the way. Also, the stunning oddness of the work of such Russian Futurists as Velimir Khlebnikov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Boris Pasternak in his early poems. The last thing I’ll remark on is the impossibility of capturing the particularly emotionally intense quality of lyrical Russian that is the greatest marker of the most “Russian” of poets: Alexander Pushkin, Alexander Blok, and Marina Tsvetaeva. Partly, this has to do with the richer, more precise emotional vocabulary of Russian. But mainly, this difference is a cultural one. Sentiment most often comes across as flat sentimentality in English. The emotional intensity of Tsvetaeva’s voice makes her, at least for me, the most untranslatable of Russian poets.
What have you enjoyed most translating?
Oh, my goodness, so many different pleasures, its’ really difficult to single out any specific one. So far I’ve mostly spoken about dealing with all the different kinds of resistances of a poetic text. While there are particular pleasures in this, it is more akin to solving a puzzle, requiring drafting, redrafting, and revising, a process which only rarely allows one the same sense of a kind of fluidity that is present for stretches in the process of composition. So I’ll go ahead and say a few words here about the Russian prose I have translated, which is admittedly very little. Beginning with work on Kharms and Mariengof, I have found the most immediate and consistent pleasure to be “getting in the flow” of Englishing prose rhythm, still for me a somehwat novel experience and part of the process of my becoming “a writer” (with greater opportunities such as this one to write prose). As a poet, I have been very conscious that one is “not a writer” per se; for lyrical poets especially, and I think I am primarily one, it is tempting to adopt a condescending attitude toward writing prose as a commericial, pragmatic, and therefore “lower form” of literary activity.
Which author would you love to translate?
As an academic excercise, I recently translated with my students the incredibly convoluted, breathless, run-on sentences of Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov. The main product of this has been a newly gained appreciation of the coherent and consistent choices made in the classic translations of Constance Garnett. I regretably missed the opportunity to re-translate Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Soulsunfinished book two (for NYRB,) because I wasn’t ready for it, thought it couldn’t be done, and didn’t see the point in doing so. This has been a commonplace for all of my attempts, at least of the classic authors, preceeded as they have been by decades of close reading and re-reading, an internalizing of the personality of the voice. More recenly, I’ve done selections from, and think I may want to take on re-translating, the late prose poems of Ivan Turgenev (these are all parables) as well as the short, humorous, early “meta-fictions” (feullitons) of Anton Chekhov.
I have been working for some weeks, each of the last few summers, on the prose poems of Alexander Ulanov (a mid-career poet from Samara, Russia;) these have always favorably reminded me of the poems of Francis Ponge that I have loved so much. And I have began work on three contemporary Russian-American prose writers, each very different from the other (Pavel Lembersky, Margarita Meklina, and Katia Kapovich). A point of commonality between them is, I would say, the lyrical quality of their prose. Lembersky’s work is reminiscent of the absurdist quality of the stories of Daniil Kharms that have been my most consistent commitment, but for our age. He is always flying off on narrative and discursive tangents, the latter often taking on a post-modernist, self-reflexive character of commentary on the nature of composition, language, memory, consciousness and the like. Meklina for me is perhaps the most lyrical of the three, and her work is perfused with an existential whistfulness and painfulness. Kapovich’s fiction (she is primarily a poet) has the most classic yet always playful narrative arc; of the three, it seems most marked by the personal experience of the poet herself.
What I mean to say here is that the most “pleasurable” work has been the most “fluent” kind, getting in the flow of lyrically sinuous poetry of prose. The Imaginists (the poet Mariengof’s 1927 novella I’d mentioned earlier) for example, had made the pushing of metaphor to the most ridiculous lengths their central tenet and this is done with delicious results in his Cynics. I have practically never been willing to dedicate the time to writing prose myself, feeling it only a distraction from poetry I couldn’t afford, but have over time come to the conclusion that it will be my natural progression, and that many of the things I would like to do are only possible in prose or multi-genre work. One last pleasure – for the contemporary prose I’m translating, and even to a greater extent for the Daniil Kharms that I hope will become my first major book – is getting the Russian into colloquially equivalent, absolutely smooth English.
If you were not a literary translator, what would you do?
As I’ve said all along, identity being complex, “translator” is not my primary one. In the book blurbs I am now being asked more often to write, I have taken to playfully adding after the labels of “poet, teacher, editor, translator” that of “bicyclist”. That, along with being a hiker, is what has given me the most pleasure in life. I have always felt most alive in nature; I’m sure I would have been happy as a naturalist, or a Park Ranger. The one thing I’ve understood since I was old enough to make a conscious decision is: I do not know how life is worth living without being able to take pleasure in creative work. I’m assuming the “would” in the question implies free choice. Of course I don’t know if I “would” have been “good enough,” but I think I’d loved to have been a musician. That part of my education in poetry began with piano lessons at age five, the cello soon after, and later, guitar. I’m convinced that this early training remains the single greatest influence on my poetry, where my primary concern has always been with making musical shapes over and above any content. And this educated “ear” has also served me well as a translator.
Having won a math scholarship to the University of Michigan, my family’s expectations for me (I’d say till about age 35) was to become “a doctor or a lawyer,” and this existential dilemma, in Yeats’ words, to “choose one’s work (and know one’s mate)” had always weighed heavily on me, the sense that I could be anything I wanted to be, but that making choices precludes the possibility of other choices. I arrived in college intent on “doing science,” but having worked in laboratories quickly realized I didn’t have the right temperament; loving change and variety as I do, I was not cut out for pursuing the same work for months and years at a time. The laboratory method, however, work with one’s hands, and with materials (research-based writing, and an experimental and experiential approach,) remains very much with me to this day. The reason I mention this wanting to be a scientist, is that I am by large a very rational, somewhat literal person, and this of course has both its advantages and disadvantages, but on the whole, I think, it has contributed to my success as translator (as I’ve said, it is very much a disciplined, patient, puzzle-solving activity.) But it is the spontaneity of creating, as with music, of making things come to life, which seems to me closest to meaning in life, that “oceanic feeling” (which I guess is the commonality between being an artist and a naturalist).
List of translated authors:
Velimir Khlebnikov, Osip Mandelstam, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Daniil Kharms, Anatoly Mariengof, David Burlyuk, Anna Akhmatova, Vladimir Narbut, Mikhail Zenkevich, Joseph Brodsky, Mikhail Eremin, Gennady Aygi, Serge Segay, Jan Satunosky, Ivan Akhmetyev, Alexander Makarov-Kratkov, Alexander Ulanov, Kubat Djusubaliev, Amarsana Ulzytuev, Shamshad Abdullaev, Fedor Svarovsky, Pavel Lembersky, Margarita Meklina, Katia Kapovich.
