wildly they deviate from them. Dreams are perhaps just such random
meanderings about the ASU's of our minds. Locally, they make sense-but
globally ...Different Styles of Translating NovelsA poem like "Jabberwocky" is like an unreal journey around an ASU,
hopping from one state to another very quickly, following very curious
routes. The translations convey this aspect of the poem, rather than the
precise sequence of symbols which are triggered, although they do their
best in that respect. In ordinary prose, such leaps and bounds are not so
common. However, similar problems of translation do occur. Suppose you
are translating a novel from Russian to English, and come across a sentence
whose literal translation is, "She had a bowl of borscht." Now perhaps many
of your readers will have no idea what borscht is. You could attempt to
replace it by the "corresponding" item in their culture-thus, your transla-
tion might run, "She had a bowl of Campbell's soup." Now if you think this
is a silly exaggeration, take a look at the first sentence of Dostoevsky's novel
Crime and Punishment in Russian and then in a few different English transla-
tions. I happened to look at three different English paperback translations,
and found the following curious situation.
The first sentence employs the street name "S. Pereulok" (as transliter-
ated). What is the meaning of this? A careful reader of Dostoevsky's work
who knows Leningrad (which used to be called "St. Petersburg"--or should
I say "Petrograd"?) can discover by doing some careful checking of the rest
of the geography in the book (which incidentally is also given only by its
initials) that the street must be "Stoliarny Pereulok". Dostoevsky probably
wished to tell his story in a realistic way, yet not so realistically that people
would take literally the addresses at which crimes and other events were
supposed to have occurred. In any case, we have a translation problem; or
to be more precise, we have several translation problems, on several differ-
ent levels.
First of all, should we keep the initial so as to reproduce the aura of
semi-mystery which appears already in this first sentence of the book? We
would get "S. Lane" ("lane" being the standard translation of "pereulok").
None of the three translators took this tack. However, one chose to write
"S. Place". The translation of Crime and Punishment which I read in high
school took a similar option. I will never forget the disoriented feeling I
experienced when I began reading the novel and encountered those streets
with only letters for names. I had some sort of intangible malaise about the
beginning of the book; I was sure that I was missing something essential,
and yet I didn't know what it was ... I decided that all Russian novels were
very weird.
Now we could be frank with the reader (who, it may be assumed,
probably won't have the slightest idea whether the street is real or fictitious
anyway!) and give him the advantage of our modern scholarship, writing
Minds and Thoughts^379