Issue 3

About the Work

by katherine e. young

The Tale of Red-Haired Motele, Mister Inspector, Rabbi Isaiah, and Commissar Blokh  tells the story of the plucky little tailor Motele Blokh, a Jewish man in the Moldovan city of Chișinău (Kishinyov in Russian), who makes his fortune in the aftermath of revolution. What possessed Iosif Utkin, born to a Jewish family working in China and raised in the Siberian city of Irkutsk, to invent the tale of a tailor from Chișinău, nearly 4,000 miles away, is unknown. In any case, The Tale of Red-Haired Motele  was first published in the journal Molodaya gvardiya in 1925 and thereafter appeared in several illustrated, stand-alone editions. In his first public reading of the poem, the 22-year-old poet was reportedly championed by none other than Vladimir Mayakovsky. Much later, Yevgeny Yevtushenko was among those who praised Utkin's poem.

Despite the seemingly irregular line breaks in its printed form, The Tale of Red-Haired Motele  follows a fairly strict pattern of rhyme and meter—indeed, sections of the original poem were set to music for voice and piano by noted composer Mikhail Gnessin in the late 1920s. Translating formal poetry is particularly difficult when working with a language as grammatically and syntactically different from English as Russian. Because of these differences, Russian-English translators expect that any given text in Russian will be roughly 30 percent longer when translated into English. To give myself the extra syllables required to bring Utkin’s meaning into English, while at the same time preserving a sense of music in the translation, I chose a loose ballad stanza, with end rhyme only in the shorter, three-stress lines. As far as possible, given the differences in grammar and syntax, I conformed to the line breaks of Utkin’s original poem, so that the translation visually resembles the original. However, readers of Russian will note that the requirements of even loose ballad stanza in English sometimes led me to rearrange elements of lines or the lines themselves, and sometimes to adjust words: this is a “creative” translation, not a literal one.  

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iosif pavlovich utkin (1903-1944) was born at the Khingan station (in modern Yakeshi) of the Chinese Eastern Railway; his family members were railway workers. The family was originally from Irkutsk, Russia, where Utkin lived until 1920. He joined the Bolsheviks, served in the Red Army during the Russian Revolution, and finished his studies in Moscow, where he then worked as a journalist for Komsomolskaya pravda. In 1926, The Tale of Red-Haired Motele, Mister Inspector, Rabbi Isaiah, and Commissar Blokh  became Utkin's first published book. Utkin published five additional books of poetry; many of his poems were set to music and became popular songs. Utkin was wounded in the Second World War and perished in a plane crash while returning from the front.

katherine e. young is the author of the poetry collections Woman Drinking Absinthe  and Day of the Border Guards  (2014 Miller Williams Arkansas Poetry Prize finalist) and the editor of Written in Arlington. She is the translator of a memoir by Anna Starobinets, fiction by Akram Aylisli, and Russian-language poetry from Kazakhstan, Russia, and Ukraine. Awards include the 2022 Granum Foundation Translation Prize, the 2022 Pushkin House Translation Residency, and a 2017 National Endowment for the Arts translation fellowship. From 2016-2018, Young served as the inaugural Poet Laureate for Arlington, Virginia.

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