The Complete Plays

A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

The texts on which these translations are based are those in A. P. Chekhov, Polnoe sobranie sochineniy i pisem v tridtsati tomakh [Complete Works and Letters in 30 Volumes], ed. N. F. Belchikov et al. (Moscow: Nauka, 1974–1984). The Russian texts of the plays were drawn from the latest versions published in Chekhov’s lifetime and subject to his revision.

Chekhov had his doubts about the efficacy of translation and, after reading some Russian prose translated into French, concluded that transmission of Russian literature into another language was pointless. Later, when his own plays began to be translated, he lamented that purely Russian phenomena would have no meaning for foreign audiences. To offset these misgivings, the translator of Chekhov must be as sedulous in making choices as the author was in composing the original work.

From his earliest farces, Chekhov wrote plays with an eye to their being performed. He often had specific actors in mind, and, despite his discomfort with histrionic convention, he expected his dialogue to be recited from the stage. Therefore, translating his plays entails problems different from those encountered in translating his prose fiction. At first sight, the vocabulary and sentence structure seem straightforward enough. Under scrutiny, however, the seeming simplicity turns out to be illusory.

The literary psychoanalyst Gregory Zilboorg, initiating American readers into Russian drama in 1920, stated point blank that Chekhov was fundamentally untranslatable, more so even than Ostrovsky and Gorky. “Chekhov’s plays lose their chief element in translation into whatever other language: the particular harmony and rhythm of the original. The student must bear in mind that studying Chekhov’s drama in English he actually studies only some elements of them, the rest being lost in a foreign language.”¹

The “harmony and rhythm” so lost derive from a number of sources. First, Chekhov uses language to consolidate his major plays: recurrent phrases echo off one another, often for ironic effect. George Bernard Shaw was another playwright well aware that it was precisely this adhesive repetition of key words that knit a play together. He scolded his German translator:

The way in which you translate every word just as it comes and then forget it and translate it some other way when it begins (or should begin) to make the audience laugh, is enough to whiten the hair on an author’s head. Have you ever read Shakespear’s Much Ado About Nothing? In it a man calls a constable an ass, and throughout the rest of the play the constable can think of nothing but this insult and keeps on saying, “But forget not, masters, that I am an ass.” Now if you translated Much Ado, you would make the man call the constable a Schaffkopf. On the next page he would be a Narr, then a Maul, then a Thier, and perhaps the very last time an Esel.²

This was such a salient principle for Shaw that he hammered at it the following month: “I tell you again and again most earnestly and seriously, that unless you repeat the words that I have repeated, you will throw away all the best stage effects and make the play unpopular with the actors. . . . Half the art of dialogue consists in the echoing of words—the tossing back & forwards of phrases from one to another like a cricket ball.”³

What is true for Shaw is equally true for Chekhov. In Chekhov, a commonplace uttered in the first act may return to resonate with fresh significance. For example, in Uncle Vanya, Astrov complains that when people can’t understand him, they call him “peculiar” (stranny); later, Yelena uses that very word to describe him, thereby revealing that she doesn’t understand him. To translate it as “peculiar” in its first occurrence and “odd” in its second would be to lose Chekhov’s thematic irony, the cement he employs to bind the play together. The same holds true for chudak (crackpot) and its derivatives. Similarly, in Three Sisters, the phrases vsyo ravno (it doesn’t matter, it’s all the same) and nadoelo (fed up, sick and tired) recur regularly, and in The Cherry Orchard, changes are rung on neschastye (unhappiness, misfortune, trouble). It is the translator’s obligation to preserve these verbal leitmotivs as much as possible.

Next, lexical and etymological elements subliminally affect the atmosphere. In Uncle Vanya, words based on dush— (implying psyche and soul) and dukh— (implying breath and spirit) help create a sense of stifling and suffocation. In The Cherry Orchard, earthy terms such as nedotyopa (half-chopped) contribute to the theme of hewing the cherry trees. Literary allusions to the Russian classics (Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolay Gogol, Ivan Krylov, Aleksandr Ostrovsky) enrich the cultural context. For the educated Russians of Chekhov’s time, they would have been immediately familiar.

However, the translator must be alert to what I call imbedded quotations, less obvious than the explicit citations from literature. In The Seagull, Tre-plyov refers to Pushkin’s unfinished verse play Rusalka in regard to Nina, and later Nina says that both he and she have fallen into the omut. In this context, it might be translated as “whirlpool” or “maelstrom,” but its use in Vanya, the suggestion that Yelena dive — plop! — into an omut, reveals that an alternative meaning is intended: a “millrace,” precisely the body of water into which Pushkin’s heroine threw herself to become a rusalka or water-nymph. Similarly, when Astrov remarks of Yelena, “Ona prekrasna, spora net,” he is quoting Pushkin’s version of Snow White, the “Tale of the Tsar’s Dead Daughter and the Seven Warriors”; the evil tsarina turns to her mirror with the question whether she is really the fairest in the land and the mirror replies: “Ty pre-krasna, spora net,” “Fair art thou, no contest there; but the Tsar’s daughter’s still more fair . . .”

In his last plays, Chekhov is extremely careful in choosing his words. A French translator has pointed out that in The Seagull, Chekhov employed three separate words for why: otchego, zachem, and pochemu. I have been very careful to observe those choices, translating them by “how come,” “what for,” and “why.” Hence, in this translation the famous opening line is not “Why do you always wear black,” but “How come you always wear black?”—which distinguishes Medvedenko’s way of asking a question from that of others.

Every character in Chekhov speaks in a particular cadence. Compare Pishchik’s short asthmatic phrases with the run-on grandiloquence of Trofi-mov or with Anya’s iambic meters. Although both Vershinin and Tusenbach spout speeches about the future, one can tell merely by the tone and phrasing which one is speaking. When Nina Zarechnaya starts picking up Arkadina’s phrases, we are given insight into her character.

Third, and this is harder to pin down, the “specific gravity” of a statement may reside in its structure. Since Russian can reassemble the elements of a sentence to make a particular emphasis, English has to find a way of reproducing this. Mere literal translation, offering a direct statement, may conceal the subtle emphases of the original. To render Charlotta Ivanovna’s “Uzhasno poyut éti lyudi” as “These people sing horribly” is to miss her idiosyncratic syntax and the course of her thought as a foreigner, which imply, “It’s awful the way these people break into song at the drop of a hat” (although to spell that out explicitly would be to over-translate).

Finally, certain words and phrases which held a special meaning in Chekhov’s time may require that an explanation be imbedded in the translation, particularly if it is meant to be performed. Nado delo delat should not be rendered literally as “It is necessary to do something” or even as the customary “We must work,” because it has to convey the idea that it is an outdated and platitudinous slogan of liberalism. The quotations from Nekrasov’s poems have to reflect the pseudo-progressivism of the person doing the quoting. Who is the unpronounceable Poprishchin referred to in two of the plays? Just what sort of food are the raznye kabuli that the Professor imposes on the Voinitsky household? (Spicy Central Asian stews, which account for his dyspepsia and offer a vivid contrast to the nanny’s homely noodles.)

The same applies to jokes. Chekhov often imbeds jeux de mots and facetious phrasing as depth charges; the translator’s first task is to be aware of them, and then to find a way of making them detonate properly. At the beginning of Ivanov, Count Shabelsky complains that Anna has no more musical ear than a farshirovannaya ryba. This is invariably rendered as “stuffed pike” or “stuffed trout,” which misses the point. Shabelsky is always teasing Anna about her Jewish origin; the fish in question is therefore not a piece of taxidermy but gefilte fish.

These particularities of Chekhov come in addition to the usual problems experienced in translating from Russian: the passive constructions, such as Tyazhelo mne (literally, “it is heavy to me”); the distinction between verbs of imperfect and perfect action (the difference between strelilsya and zastrelilsya, Konstantins having shot himself and having shot himself for good); and onomatopoeic sounds that are overlooked or scanted. The last lines of Uncle Vanya, the repeated my otdokhnyom, consist of soft, aspirated sounds, easily drawn out and wafted into the air. “We shall rest” (or worse, “we will rest”), with its terminal dental sound, cannot be manipulated by an actress in the same way.

“The shock of the new” in Chekhov’s handling of dialogue contributed mightily to his reputation in his lifetime, but this aspect also tends to be lost or overlooked. As the Swedish scholar Nils Åke Nilsson pointed out, Chekhov is an unacknowledged precursor of the Futurists and their launching of a zaumny or transrational language. He cites as examples the phrase “You’ve Gavrila-ed it up enough” in Ivanov, the trom-tom-tom exchange in Three Sisters, and Gaev’s billiard jargon, calling this a “new dramatic syntax.”⁴

The American critic Stark Young, when he set out to translate The Seagull for the Lunts in 1938, singled out “those balances, repetitions for stage effect, repetitions for stage economy, theatrical combinations and devices, time-patterns, and so on, that are the fruits of much intention and technical craft, and that are almost totally absent from the translation.”⁵ Yet even he trembled before Chekhov’s linguistic audacity: “Chekhov’s dialogue is perhaps a trifle more colloquial than mine. Certainly it is more colloquial than I should ever dare to be; for in a translation any very marked colloquialism is always apt to hurt the economy of effect by raising questions as to what the original could have been to come out so patly as that” (p. xix).

Young took as an example Trigorin’s remark that when he gets a whiff of heliotrope skoree motayu na us, “quickly I wrap it around my moustache.” Any good Russian dictionary will tell you that this is a figure of speech meaning “I make a mental note of something.” Perhaps, as Stark Young feared, it is as wrong to translate it literally as it might be to translate “he got my goat” literally into Russian. Nevertheless, to translate it as he does, “Quickly I make note of it” is to substitute the bland for the colorful. My own solution, bearing in mind first Chekhov’s fascination with facial hair (every one of his major plays contains remarks about whiskers) and next that Trigorin is an avid fisherman, is “I instantly reel it in on my moustache.” Trigorin’s following phrase Lovlyu v sebya i vas na kazhdoy fraze Young renders awkwardly as “Every sentence, every word I say and you say, I lie in wait for it.” However, it ought to continue the piscatorial imagery, since Chekhov may have had in the mind the biblical idiom “to fish in troubled waters,” in Russian lovit’ rybu v mutnoy vode. It helps to know that from his long boyhood experience as a chorister under his father’s tutelage, Chekhov’s mind was well-stocked with scriptural commonplaces. My solution goes “I’m angling in myself and you for every phrase.”

Finally, I have not tried to pretend that Chekhov is anything other than Russian. Although I have converted weights and measures into Western equivalents, so that an audience can more easily gauge distances and density, I have left currency, beverages, and, in particular, names in their Russian forms. Modern readers and audiences rapidly adjust to patronymics, diminutives, and nicknames. If one is to turn Pavel into Paul and Yelena into Helen, then one must go the whole hog and refer to Uncle Jack instead of Uncle Vanya and, to be consistent, Ivanov as Mr. Johnson.

NOTES

1 Gregory Zilboorg, “A course in Russian drama,” The Drama (November 1920): 69.

2 Bernard Shaw’s Letters to Siegfried Trebitsch, ed. Samuel A. Weiss (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), p. 30 (December 26, 1902). The words translate as “sheep’s head,” “fool,” “muzzle,” “beast,” and “ass.”

3 Ibid., January 15, 1903, p. 36.

4 Nils Åke Nilsson, “Two Chekhovs: Mayakovskiy on Chekhov’s ‘futurism,’” in Jean-Pierre Barri-celli, ed., Chekhov’s Great Plays: A Critical Anthology (New York: New York University Press, 1981), pp. 251—261.

5 Stark Young, “Translating The Sea Gull,” in The Sea Gull, A Drama in Four Acts, translated from the Russian of Anton Chekhov by Stark Young (New York: Samuel French, 1950), pp. xii–xv.