Translator Interview: Alexander Rojavin on literary translation, the precision of language, and the works of Alexander Genis & Fazil Iskander

May 22, 2023 | SupaduDev | Author Interviews

ASP is pleased to present the below interview with Alexander Rojavin, translator of Alexander Genis’s Dovlatov and Surroundings: A Philological Novel and Fazil Iskander’s Man and His Surroundings, for #ReadTheWorld, an online bookfair celebrating translation organized by the American Literary Translators Association (ALTA). In honor of #ReadTheWorld, use the code READTHEWORLD at checkout until 11:59 pm EDT on May 23, 2023 for 30% off.

Man and His Surroundings (Fazil Iskander) irreverently explores Soviet and post-Soviet identity, politics, and history. In what Iskander himself calls the book’s seminal novella, the narrator meets a man who believes himself to be Lenin, thawed out after decades of cryogenic storage. The narrator endures a phantasmagorical account of what “Lenin” thought and did during the October Revolution of 1917 and how another revolution is imminent. In another novella, the narrator tells of a nationally renowned fencer as the fencer sits at a neighboring table, discussing the impossibility of equality on earth, while his son pesters him for ice cream. The novellas enrapture the reader with their humor and impart a better intuitive understanding of the Soviet cultural heritage and mindset.

dentity, politics, and history. In what Iskander himself calls the book’s seminal novella, the narrator meets a man who believes himself to be Lenin, thawed out after decades of cryogenic storage. The narrator endures a phantasmagorical account of what “Lenin” thought and did during the October Revolution of 1917 and how another revolution is imminent. In another novella, the narrator tells of a nationally renowned fencer as the fencer sits at a neighboring table, discussing the impossibility of equality on earth, while his son pesters him for ice cream. The novellas enrapture the reader with their humor and impart a better intuitive understanding of the Soviet cultural heritage and mindset.

Academic Studies Press: You mention in your bio that literary translation has always been one of your first loves; can you elaborate more on that and your experience with literary translation? When did you first become interested in literary translation? What first drew you to it? Are there any particular works/genres/writers that you find yourself drawn to time and time again, or are you more apt to branch out?

Alexander Rojavin: Growing up a native speaker of two languages, you are immersed in translation as a matter of mundanity. I was born in the United States to Russian-speaking Jews from Ukraine, so, from an early age, I had to navigate through a thicket of wildly different civilizations. My own affair with translation began as passing fancy: as a kid, I would try to figure out the best way to translate certain lines from plays or video games or movies that I thought sounded particularly cool, either from Russian to English or vice versa. Whatever the line was, I always placed a premium on the translation’s sounding organic. It had to sound believable if said aloud. It had to be performable.

After I began working at Middlebury’s School of Russian, I would always help the resident theater director, Sergei Borisovich Kokovkin (an accomplished director, actor, and playwright), translate whichever play he was staging during the summer for the students. Naturally, the importance I lent performability became quite relevant here.

And then, things took off. I took one of the plays Sergei Borisovich staged (his own, titled “Pushkinopolis”), refined it while in college, complemented it with the translations of a few other modern Russian plays, and got it accepted by a publisher (Slavica Publishers, 2019).

After that, I branched out into novels. I initially wanted to translate Babel’s Red Cavalry, for the simple reason that I thought existing translations did not do a precise enough job conveying one simple line from “My First Goose,” but Boris Dralyuk’s 2015 translation took care of it, so I set my sights elsewhere. Since then, I’ve primarily translated novels, but to this day, I still prioritize performability in translation: the novels have to sound good if read out loud.

What do you wish more people knew about literary translation? What do works in translation offer readers? What gaps are bridged?

“In essence, the antithesis of literature isn’t silence—it is imprecise language” (94).

Short of learning the language and the worlds of culture that the language unlocks, other civilizations’ works of art are the surest path to understanding their archetypical mindsets and worldviews. Where logocentric cultures are concerned, translation is the best means of creating an inter-civilizational window, meaning that translation is an invaluable tool for introducing audiences to Russian-speaking archetypes.

My path into the national security field has always been firmly tethered to the humanities. In the worlds of intelligence and foreign policy, I argue that when officials or analysts must make strategic or tactical decisions regarding another culture, a lack of understanding about that culture—specifically a lack of understanding what is or isn’t surprising about that culture or its representatives’ behavior—is the greatest barrier to effective decision-making. If we accept this axiom, then literary translation—again, especially of works from logocentric cultures—offers invaluable and irreplaceable cultural-historical-economic-linguistic data that not only broadens the intercultural facility of the average reader, but is a critical input for decision-makers at the highest levels of government and military.

Geopolitical considerations aside, through literary translation, you can also implicitly function as a critic—after all, literary translation is an act of curation. Mind you, curation does not always equal endorsement! Some texts should be translated not for their artistic value, but as nothing more than intelligence. But I have had the fortune of translating only works that I find are quality works of art.

What’s the most difficult aspect of your work as a translator? What about the most rewarding?

They are one and the same: the precision of language. In each of my academic and professional tenures—theater, speechwriting, law, intelligence—linguistic precision lies at the heart of my work. Precision does not necessarily mean concision—it means saying the exact thing you mean, evoking the exact emotion in the audience, conveying the exact information in the exact manner, leaving your audience feeling, thinking, understanding, and doing precisely what you planned for. It’s not for nothing that I love Genis’s writings:

“Dovlatov considered precision to be the greatest virtue…Only let’s not confuse precision with pedantic faultlessness…Precision is the happy conjunction of means and ends. Or, as Dovlatov said, ‘unity of effort and result” (94).

Genis writes that Dovlatov saw only one unforgiveable sin in literature: approximation. As someone whose life is dedicated to countering disinformation, I see that same sin at or near the root of many societal ills. Professionalism, clarity of thought and communication, common courtesy, technocratic progress—they all fall by the wayside, while approximation reigns. Literary translation challenges you to be precise, rewards you for succeeding, and spurs you to champion precision elsewhere.

“In essence, the antithesis of literature isn’t silence—it is imprecise language” (94).

Does your love of literature inform your work as a policy analyst? If yes, how?

I’m on a campaign to convince anyone who will listen that humanities are a direct—and, indeed, best—path to the intelligence and policy fields. Today, STEM education is—understandably—at a premium, but the decline of humanities education is a direct threat to our national security. For my part, a background in humanities is what I look for in an analyst. In an era of postmodern information warfare, in order to parse a nation’s information environment effectively, you need to be able to situate political, military, economic, and legal (or pseudo-legal) developments in a much broader cultural context. Consequently, if you are unable to sustain a conversation about a nation’s literature, film, art, television, internet culture and history, theater, etc., you will be unable to provide the most precisely actionable insights necessary for effective operations in the information environment.

The information war side of the Russo-Ukrainian War has provided myriad examples of phenomena that are impenetrable to someone who is unacquainted with the histories of Ukrainian and Russian cultural production, let alone someone who doesn’t know the languages. Why do Ukrainian media snidely call explosions among Russian forces “cotton?” How did NAFO come about? How is Russian cinema a reflection, extension, and key battleground of the information war? What is “Iosif Kobzon’s concert?” Why are 200-year-old writers central to Kyiv’s and Moscow’s policymaking? Why are the legends of Russian rock so important to how the war has unfolded in Russia’s information environment? There are so many aspects about the war that are rooted in cultural production of all stripes that I would argue a grounding in the humanities should well be a prerequisite for anyone hoping to parse the information war side of things with any actionable degree of nuance.

Your translations of Fazil Iskander’s Man and His Surroundings and Alexander Genis’s Dovlatov and Surroundings: A Philological Novel were published this past spring. How did each of these projects begin? How did you get involved? What drew you to these works in particular that made you want to bring them to English-language readers?

My translation of these two novels is a simple matter of affinity. I almost exhaustively agree with each of the authors’ worldviews as presented through their literature. Moreover, both write in a style to which I am drawn—witty, erudite, semi-trolly, and unbowed by fear in the face of ideological tyranny. In his foreword, Mark Lipovetsky brings up Genis’s being hounded by representatives of the U.S. political fringes for his work, and in my intro to the translation of Iskander, I quote Bakhtin and Likhachev, who wrote that laughter is an antidote to autocracy. Oppression, violence, rigid ideologies—they do not speak the language of laughter, they are allergic to it. Both of these works wield irony and humor lightly and organically, to the frustration of those who insist on a joyless, dogmatic view of life. By translating them, I hoped to contribute a little bit extra to the information war against autocracy’s many desperate forms.

In other words, these projects began, because I liked the books. Translation comes naturally when you care about and like the material.

What can be gained from looking in the “mirror?” A path away from demagoguery, incoherence, and incompetence. A path towards sanity, progress, and confidence.

You mention in your introduction to Fazil’s Man and His Surroundings that “Iskander’s works held up a mirror to each era’s surreal shortcomings and, by reflecting them, rendered them powerless”; can you elaborate? What can be gained from looking at this “mirror” nearly 20 years after the original publication?

The context in which these translations are being published is war. As of this writing, the last 452 days have been one long day. And throughout these 452 sunsets and sunrises, the Ukrainian spirit has demonstrated its innate innovation, humor, and indomitability, which should have surprised nobody, but instead, unfortunately, came as a surprise to so many.

Ukraine, more so than any other state actor, has demonstrated with abundant clarity the role that humor and counter-trolling have to play in modern information warfare. From the fellas of NAFO to the countless memes that have emerged (Russians smoking where they shouldn’t be smoking, Chornobaivka, 2–3 weeks, russkiy voyenny korabl’, etc.), Ukrainian officials, journalists, commentators, soldiers, and ordinary citizens have shown to the world how humor lays bare the utter impotence of tyranny. In the war against the Kremlin and its hordes, humor has been as important a weapon as Javelins, HIMARS, Leopards, Patriots, Storm Shadows, and—finally—F-16s.

Iskander and Genis have always successfully wielded humor to similarly lay bare the impotence of ideologically incoherent regimes—political, literary, formal, or otherwise. The targets of their ridicule are united by unsustainable internal logics. Their power, like that of the king with no clothes, begins to dissipate when it is merely acknowledged. Ideological tyranny’s power is always threadbare—the tapestry of authoritarian power threatens to unravel at the slightest ironic pull.

In today’s context of war, broad addiction to the firehose of sensationalist and increasingly outrage-demanding headlines, and angrily flailing extremism, the lessons to be learned from Iskander and Genis are frustratingly relevant.

What can be gained from looking in the “mirror?” A path away from demagoguery, incoherence, and incompetence. A path towards sanity, progress, and confidence.

What might surprise English-language readers about these two books? What are you hoping readers will gain from each translation?

It is possible—and, indeed, urgently necessary—that we relearn as a society to resist the lure of populism. We must cognize the value of authoritative expertise. We must pursue data-driven policymaking and involve native cultural speakers in decision-making that involves different cultures around the planet. We must insist that positivist assertions of right and wrong are possible and needed in a world of shallowly understood postmodernism, without getting bogged down in identity-based culture wars.

Most importantly, I hope that readers will acknowledge the dangers of approximation and strive for precision, be it emotional, legal, linguistic, artistic, military, dramaturgic, technical, or what have you. We must be precise.

I would unironically claim that democracy worldwide depends on it.

Alexander Rojavin, May 2023

 

Dovlatov and Surroundings: A Philological Novel is now available for purchase here, or wherever you buy books. Man and His Surroundings is now available for purchase here, or wherever you buy books. Remember to use the code READTHEWORLD at checkout for 30% off the entire ASP site.

Alexander Rojavin is a multilingual intelligence, media, and policy analyst specializing in information warfare. He is currently editing a book on modern Russian cinema as a key battlefield in the Kremlin’s information war (forthcoming Routledge). At the same time, literary translation has always been one of his first loves.