This is very much a qualified recommendation. I listen to Lexicon Valley, a podcast connected with the online news outlet Slate, very sporadically. I have to be in the right mood. While overall it’s pretty entertaining, there are occasions when the hosts Mike Vuolo and Bob Garfield can be gratingly smug and self-satisfied. There’s quite a bit of that kind of nonsense at the beginning of The Many Lives of Anna Karenina, the episode I’m recommending here. It’s worth ploughing through though or indeed just jumping ahead to about the 5 min 40 mark (wonderful stuff, this modern technology, etc, etc.) as things improve markedly with the arrival of guest Masha Gessen, a Russian-born journalist and commentator, now based in New York. She’s there to give some authority to a discussion that takes the publication of a couple of new translations of Tolstoy’s famous novel as its starting point.
As you’d expect, Gessen has a lot of interesting things to say and the points she makes on narrative voice are particularly intriguing. The idea that Tolstoy’s description of events is quite arch or even sardonic, was a revelation to me. Granted, I read Anna Karenina a long time ago, way before I seriously contemplated visiting Russia, let alone moving there, but I tend to remember it as seeming quite earnest. But perhaps that says more about me at the age that I read it than it does about the quality of the translation I read.
On a good day, my Russian language skills are just about sufficient to have a reasonably in-depth conversation. However, the relative lack of breadth of my vocabulary in Russian means that reading Russian literature in the original, sadly, is a bit of a chore. Having to look up words all the time is a little bit like instead of going to the cinema to see a film, going to watch the thing as it’s being shot, with the director shouting, ‘cut!’ every time something needs to be fixed. So, like Vuolo and Garfield, I’m reliant on translators to be able to enjoy the works of Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky et al. And also like them, from time to time I find myself asking, ‘Have I really read Anna Karenina, or just an approximation of it?’ Towards the end of the programme, the hosts and guest tackle this question. Finally, Gessen picks up and runs with a theatrical analogy from Garfield and then redeploys it to make persuasive case for the need to continue producing new translations.
Like I said at the beginning, it’s not without its flaws, but worth a listen all the same.
If you enjoy their look at the trials and tribulations of translation, you might also like What’s the Deal with Seinfeld in which they ask why the sitcom never caught on in Europe the way it did in the States. What does this last bit have to do with Russia? Very little intrinsically, but I had largely dismissed the misadventures of Jerry and co. as not particularly amusing until a good friend of mine from Texas, who I met in Moscow, persuaded me to have another look. So there you go, a very random bit of biographical detail on yours truly.
