Letters from
Gregory Freidin, Boris Dralyuk, Gary Saul Morson, Barbara Ann Porte, John Banville, Jonathan Stevenson, and Frederick Wegener
To the Editors:
An old-time reader of The New York Review and a Russianist, I am heartened by your continued interest in Russian history, politics, and culture, as in the review of the most recent translations of Isaac Babel [Gary Saul Morson, “The Horror, the Horror,” NYR, February 8].
The reviewer’s general thesis is spot on. Babel’s prose (for that matter, any modernist prose) loses its éclat when translators substitute their interpretive elaborations for the master’s condensed staccato phrasing. But one begins to question the reviewer’s judgment when he refers to Babel’s protagonist-narrator in Red Cavalry as Vasily (he is Kiril) Lyutov and then proceeds to quote from a new translation of “Crossing the Zbruch,” ignoring a real howler: “shards of the hidden dishware Jews use once a year—at Easter.” Babel’s Russian: “ɑɟɪɟɩɤɢ ɫɨɤɪɨɜɟɧɧɨɣ ɩɨɫɭɞɵ, ɭɩɨɬɪɟɛɥɹɟɦɨɣ ɭ ɟɜɪɟɟɜ ɪɚɡ ɜ ɝɨɞɭ²ɧɚ ɉɚɫɯɭ [cherepki sokrovennoi posudy, upotrebliaemoi u evreev raz v godu—na Paskhu].” Babel’s narrator, the crypto-Jew Lyutov, does many awkward things in Red Cavalry but he would never confuse Easter and Passover. Nor would any Russian, Jewish or otherwise.
The howler goes back to Walter Morison’s translation: “fragments of the occult crockery Jews use once a year at Eastertime.” Sanctified by Lionel Trilling’s introduction and usable, if full of errors, it served for decades as the standard rendering of Babel into English. I do wonder what an earnest reader has been making out of this “occult crockery” or “hidden dishware” that “Jews use at Easter.” An allusion to blood libel?
Yes, in Russian, the word Paskha may refer to either the Christian Easter or the Jewish Passover. But the context in the story—a Jewish hovel in a shtetl that had just suffered a pogrom at the hands of the retreating Polish army—points only to Passover. It is at Passover that traditional Jews bring out their best tableware (sokrovennaia posuda—literally, set-aside dishes) for the Seder meal (my grandmother did). The award-winning translator Peter Constantine could not help inventing the Seder plate, but he got the Jewish holiday right: “fragments of a holy Seder plate that the Jews use once a year for Passover.”
Translating Babel is a herculean task despite or, perhaps, because his deceptively simple stories “pierce the heart” with such chilling immediacy. Translation mistakes are unavoidable. But why err unnecessarily when the answer to the riddle, at least in this case, lies in plain view?
And one last thing. In the review, the photo of Isaac Babel with a child in his arms is of Babel holding his son—not grandson— Mikhail, taken in January 1927.
Gregory Freidin Emeritus Professor of Slavic Languages and Literature Stanford University Stanford, California
To the Editors:
As Isaac Babel’s Benya Krik says to a grieving mother after his gang has accidentally bumped off her son, “Everyone makes mistakes, even God.” Translators certainly make their share, as do reviewers. I want to point out a couple of mistakes made by Gary Saul Morson in his survey of several recent Babel translations, including my own. In the first place, the word Babel uses to describe the ruins of Novograd-Volynsk is skryuchennykh, not skruchennykh. The two are similar in sound and meaning, and can easily be confused. I translate the word that occurs, skryuchennykh, as “gnarled,” which is one of the meanings it carries when associated with old fingers or claws, and sometimes trees. In the very next story, “The Italian Sun,” Babel describes another scene of ruin: “the hooks of wicked old women’s fingers sticking from the earth.” The gnarled ruins and the hooked old fingers might resonate for a careful, imaginative anglophone reader. (Another