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The Translated Man:
Matvei Yankelevich on Daniil Kharms
SS: The scene that is “Pushkin and Gogol” seemed like it was easy work. Or was it?
MY: It’s easy enough at first glance, and then you look back and you’re, like, it still isn’t right. [Laughs] Even though “Pushkin and Gogol” is, on the surface, very easy, and the first draft comes out pretty easy, you spend a lot of time agonizing over whether you have the right group of 15 words that gets repeated over and over. When you have so few words that are repeated all the time, you have to be really sure that you’ve chosen the right words. That really is what’s agonizing about Kharms for me, because it’s different from translating anybody else. I have to constantly think, am I going to use this word, and can I use the same English word in all the contexts that it appears in the book? Kharms has these favorite words and expressions, and I have to make sure I’ve picked this one way of doing it, and that it works for all these different cases.
SS: I don’t want to seem like a lowbrow, but you’d have been scared to see how long I was laughing after having read it. It’s so sublime.
MY: [Laughs] It’s always funny. I read it over and over, and every time I just can’t help but crack up. I think it has to do with some very deep sense of what it means to laugh, and where laughter comes from. Kharms was certainly investigating that, sort of the way Henri Bergson did, and I think he had read some Bergson, and was trying to figure out what was the key thing that makes people laugh. He kind of gets it in that scene.
SS: A lot of the surprise in Kharms’s work derives from his habitual warping of traditional cause-and-effect relationships. Have you ever considered what the persistence of that mindset does to an individual? Do you think he went nuts as a consequence of having to sustain it constantly, or was he already fairly bent by the time he set pen to paper?
MY: I think you’re onto something. In forcing himself to not look at the world the way others did, he acquired — either on purpose or through the process of training himself to think along these anarchic, chaotic lines — some nervous tics and habits that were somewhat close to going mad. He had this thing about hiccups. He apparently created a tic that would happen without his actually wanting it to happen. He practiced having this tic, and finally it became uncontrollable. His friends in the late thirties would remark that he had these weird body movements, these spasms, these hiccups. He was trying to create this moment of unpredictability — as if life wasn’t unpredictable enough — but to break up the continuum and to be aware of the present moment in a different way. He seemed to desire that kind of destabilization. It was his idea of what he wanted to be: he wanted to implement his thinking about the world into real action. That demanded of him an abnormality: in the way he dressed, the way he behaved, and the way cause and effect worked in his own life. His belief in miracles, obviously, something that would disrupt the chain of cause-and-effect, was really important to him. In some ways, it probably did drive him to a certain level of — I wouldn’t say insanity or madness, but he was probably on the way to a schizophrenic state. That was also fueled by the stress of being hungry, of not being able to publish his work, of knowing, at some point, that somebody would come and arrest him, like many of his friends had been arrested.
It’s really unclear, by the end of his life, whether he really was mad, or whether he was just very honest about how he wanted to think of the world. When he talked to the detectives in his arrest in Leningrad, in 1941, and told them he believed in things like miracles, and this idea of the slight error, he was basically telling them the truth about his philosophy. To them, this was madness. It’s unclear whether he knew that would be their reaction, as someone who might truly be mentally ill wouldn’t realize that someone in the outside world would think they were weird for saying such things. On the other hand, it seems like he really did know that would be their reaction: that he calculated that, hey, if I just told them what I believed, they’re going to think I’m mad, and I won’t be forced to do hard labor in the camps, and I can then hang out in the prison, which is a little easier. Some believe that this was his way out. But he didn’t realize there would be a blockade of Leningrad, that there would be no provisions, and that the provisions there were would not be shared with the prisoners, and that he would eventually starve to death.
SS: Final question: Having absorbed Kharms’s work, I have a notion that, had Kharms survived the war and left Russia, he would have worked as a writer/scenarist on The Ernie Kovacs Show before settling down to marry and impregnate Veronica Geng (pre-death by cancer) as a condition of acquiring American citizenship. Does that not seem inconceivable?
MY: [Laughs] I find it very hard to find that conceivable, but I think anything would have worked, right?
SS: I’m certain of it, Matvei: his future was in television. And Geng.
MY: Yeah, really. Okay. I don’t know. He was actually very interested in film in the twenties. That’s a possibility. Although I think he might have been a part of the Golden Age of the radio. [Laughs] Perhaps. He loved to perform. Apparently, he did a lot of magic tricks and performed for kids in the thirties, for money, even though everyone knows that he hated kids. He definitely wanted to be a performer. I can’t quite imagine him on TV, but, you know, maybe you’ve got something there.
* (orthodox)
** Larissa Volokhonsky takes the untranslated text and devises a hyper-literal pony version, along with notes about the peculiarities of the author’s style (diction, syntax, personal idiosyncrasies, historical influences). Volokhonsky passes this Nabokovian rendering to Richard Pevear, who doesn’t speak or read Russian. With Volokhonsky advising him about the range of linguistic possibilities the original Russian affords, Pevear composes a more readable English text. Pevear hands it back to Volokhonsky, Volokhonsky offers criticism, suggests several more possibilities, hands it back to Pevear, Pevear works some more, hands it back to Volokhonsky, and both eventually arrive at a translation they can live with.