Notebook
translator’s note
Translating Identity
by Jennifer Lobaugh
A PROFESSOR ONCE COMPLAINED to
me that American students struggle to learn
Russian because English, as a language, is
too selfish. “You’re obsessed with the I,” she
said. She was referring to a key difference in
the grammatical structures of our two native
languages: in Russian, a subject is not always
required. This happens in English, too, but
mostly in colloquial contexts. In American
elementary schools, children are taught that
a sentence is not a sentence without at least
a subject and a predicate. But in Russian,
thanks to the language’s more elaborate
grammatical inflections, speakers are grant-
ed considerably more latitude.
This syntactical flexibility allows for
an ambiguity, perhaps even an anonym-
ity, that cannot be achieved in English-
language poetry, or at least not in the same
way. When Aleksandra Tsibulia opens her
poem with the discovery of “a corpse in
the cabbage,” she doesn’t have to tell us who
“found” it. We know from the verb’s conju-
gation that the missing subject is feminine,
but it could refer to the speaker, or a third
party, or even to you.
With my own writing, I am most likely
to find myself when I’m looking for some-
one else, and I suspect this is true for many
poets. We tend to distance ourselves from
speaker and subject as much as possible,
using syntax as subterfuge, hoping to say
something but not to be seen. In English,
we may call on persona or enjambment or
slippery pronouns to puzzle out who the
real subjects of our poems might be, but the
capacity to do this on
such a basic syntacti-
cal level is a gift.
My deep apprecia-
tion for this linguistic
ambiguity notwith-
standing, it presents
a significant challenge
for the translator. Tsi-
bulia’s poem goes on
to detail several more
discoveries, both grim
and wonderful, and
each time, the sub-
ject is not revealed. I
wanted to preserve as
much of that obscu-
rity as possible, but I knew I couldn’t leave
each sentence as it was. English demands
its subjects.
My initial impression was that the find-
er must be the speaker herself—dare I say
even the poet herself? For another poet, a
single narrative involving so much lurid-
ness might seem unlikely to be autobio-
graphical; for Tsibulia, however, anything
seems possible. Her work is lush and bru-
tal, visceral and cerebral, lonesome and
teeming. When she tells you a story, you’re
inclined to believe her.
Finally, I asked her directly: Who is the
subject of this poem? I was surprised to
learn that all four of the finders are in fact
different people, the last of which being Tsi-
bulia herself. Armed with this information,
I kept the last subject as “I” and changedthe first three to “she,” hoping to save at
least a little bit of the mystery intrinsic to
the Russian.
Why is it, in English, that we can’t toler-
ate this ambiguity of subject? Why do we
need to know? Perhaps my Russian profes-
sor was right, and we’re just too selfish for
this kind of grammatical structure. Perhaps
an identity crisis would be good for us every
now and then.Jennifer Lobaugh is an American poet and
translator. Her work has appeared in such
journals as The Southampton Review and
New Poetry in Translation.Editorial note: To read Lobaugh’s
translations, turn to page 13.Aleksandra Tsibulia6 W LT SUMMER 2019