Blue Geese or Self-Serving Relatives: Translation Across a Major Cultural Divide

In the post-war Soviet Union, works by the leading literary figures of the non-Russian republics enjoyed a wide and enthusiastic readership. Many of these authors chose to write in the lingua franca of the Soviet empire, but some wrote in their native languages and were translated into Russian. The nature of these translations raises interesting issues, not only those one would expect in a translation over the significant linguistic distance between a non- Indo-European and an Indo-European language, but others that are due to differences between broader cultural traditions, written or oral. One such issue is: what constitutes a ‘language’ for the purpose of literary translation in situations where a whole genre might not have an equivalent in the culture of the target language? A striking example is a novel by the distinguished Buriat writer Chimit Tsydendambaev which became quite widely known following its appearance in Moscow in 1977 with the title Okhotniki za golubymi gusiami. Satiricheskii roman v novellakh, in an authorized translation into Russian by L. Parfenov, with a second edition in 1987. The novel appeared in the original Buriat only in 1989, with the title Kholo oiryn türelnüüd [Distant and Close Relatives], and a comparison of this text with the “authorized translation” is fascinating and puzzling. It appears that the author himself must have worked with his Russian collaborator to create a version couched not only in the Russian language, but in the communicative currency of a Russian genre. Detailed comparison of the texts reveals that while the literary devices of the original depend on the structures and rhetoric of Buriat-Mongolian, those of the Russian version are wholly Russian- based, resulting effectively in the telling of a somewhat different story. As a result, the very successful “translation” can at best be described as an “adaptation” of the original. Analogous genre problems have been noted with the Russian reception of Buriat drama, and the case of Tsydendambaev’s novel is unlikely to be unique in the history of Russian translations from literatures of the minority languages of the empire. The way we examine translations beween remote languages needs more sophisticated treatment.