Translator's Note

I suspect that when Ekaterina wrote this poem, she did not expect it to be translated. With its first line, ‘Я думаю только по-русски’, the narrator is hemmed in by a linguistic wall of her own making. Bringing this poem into English, or any other language, would seem to be a contradiction in terms. Translated into English this first line becomes ‘I only think in Russian’, an utterance to make Wittgenstein shudder.

The poem’s second line is no more straightforward, as I found out when I discussed it at a Russian translation workshop held as part of ALTA 43, the annual conference of the American Literary Translators’ Association. As it turns out, if you want to whip up a posse of Russian translators into a frenzied state, just ask them how to translate a select group of typically Russian tea-adjacent snacks, in this case the ‘баранки’ of the poem’s second line. Should they be biscuits, bagels, bubliki, bread rings? In the end, the debate about this one little word got to the heart of the poem itself.

The narrator of this poem is telling us about her world inside the Russian language, a world she feels at home in, and whose limits she cannot conceive of crossing. My translation of the poem, by definition, cannot bring the English-language reader inside that world. To translate the poem is precisely to cross the limits the narrator has set herself, to step outside of her world. What, then, would be the point?

My translation, I decided, may not be able to bring the reader inside the world of the Russian language, but it can make them aware of their outside-ness. In this sense, my translation inverts the poem’s perspective – what is familiar to the poem’s narrator, like the баранка she dips in her tea every day, becomes a bread ring. Not a bagel, not a biscuit, but this vague, unfamiliar object with no precise, clear referent. I take this effect further a few lines later, when the reader is presented with a direct transliteration of the Russian. I might have left this text in Cyrillic, but I wanted this to be a poem to read aloud. I think the uncertainty about how to pronounce those familiar-unfamiliar lines can only add to the reader’s sense of being outside the language-world of the poem.

The approach had some unexpected consequences, such as the pleasing (to me) irony of the lines: ‘vdokhnula i vydokhnula, those familiar, intelligible words’. But I hope there is more to my translation than these little jokes at the reader’s expense. Like many of Ekaterina’s poems, this one ends on an aphoristic note, and an unexpected one. A poem that seemed to be about the limits of language, an ode to Sapir-Whorf, in fact becomes the opposite. We may think of ourselves as walled in (or out) by our language(s), as the poem’s first line seems to suggest, but ultimately, even for those of us who live, or imagine we live, within one language alone, this is never the extent of our world, or our self. In fact, the poem suggests, there is always something outwith. I hope that for the reader of my translation, too, something will emerge from a language they don’t know.  

Robin Munby

In the Classroom