Chekhov had his doubts about the efficacy of translation and, after reading some Russian prose translated into French, concluded that transmission of Russian literature into another language was pointless. Later, when his own plays began to be translated, he lamented that purely Russian phenomena would have no meaning for foreign audiences. To offset these misgivings, the translator of Chekhov must be as sedulous in making choices as the author was in composing the original work.
From his earliest farces, Chekhov wrote plays with an eye to their being performed. He often had specific actors in mind, and, despite his discomfort with histrionic convention, he expected his dialogue to be recited from the stage. Therefore, translating his plays entails problems different from those encountered in translating his prose fiction. At first sight, the vocabulary and sentence structure seem straightforward enough. Under scrutiny, however, the seeming simplicity turns out to be illusory.
The literary psychoanalyst Gregory Zilboorg, initiating American readers into Russian drama in 1920, stated point blank that Chekhov was fundamentally untranslatable, more so even than Ostrovsky and Gorky. “Chekhov’s plays lose their chief element in translation into whatever other language: the particular harmony and rhythm of the original. The student must bear in mind that studying Chekhov’s drama in English he actually studies only some elements of them, the rest being lost in a foreign language.”1
The “harmony and rhythm” so lost derive from a number of sources. First, Chekhov uses language to consolidate his major plays: recurrent phrases echo off one another, often for ironic effect. George Bernard Shaw was another playwright well aware that it was precisely this adhesive repetition of key words that knit a play together. He scolded his German translator:
The way in which you translate every word just as it comes and then forget it and translate it some other way when it begins (or should begin) to make the audience laugh, is enough to whiten the hair on an author’s head. Have you ever read Shakespear’s Much Ado About Nothing? In it a man calls a constable an ass, and throughout the rest of the play the constable can think of nothing but this insult and keeps on saying, “But forget not, masters, that I am an ass.” Now if you translated Much Ado, you would make the man call the constable a Schaffkopf. On the next page he would be a Narr, then a Maul, then a Thier, and perhaps the very last time an Esel.2
This was such a salient principle for Shaw that he hammered at it the following month: “I tell you again and again most earnestly and seriously, that unless you repeat the words that I have repeated, you will throw away all the best stage effects and make the play unpopular with the actors. . . . Half the art of dialogue consists in the echoing of words—the tossing back & forwards of phrases from one to another like a cricket ball.”3
What is true for Shaw is equally true for Chekhov. In Chekhov, a commonplace uttered in the first act may return to resonate with fresh significance. For example, in Uncle Vanya, Astrov complains that when people can’t understand him, they call him “peculiar” (stranny); later, Yelena uses that very word to describe him, thereby revealing that she doesn’t understand him. To translate it as “peculiar” in its first occurrence and “odd” in its second would be to lose Chekhov’s thematic irony, the cement he employs to bind the play together. The same holds true for chudak (crackpot) and its derivatives. Similarly, in Three Sisters, the phrases vsyo ravno (it doesn’t matter, it’s all the same) and nadoelo (fed up, sick and tired) recur regularly, and in The Cherry Orchard, changes are rung on neschastye (unhappiness, misfortune, trouble). It is the translator’s obligation to preserve these verbal leitmotivs as much as possible.
Next, lexical and etymological elements subliminally affect the atmosphere. In Uncle Vanya, words based on dush— (implying psyche and soul) and dukh— (implying breath and spirit) help create a sense of stifling and suffocation. In The Cherry Orchard, earthy terms such as nedotyopa (half-chopped) contribute to the theme of hewing the cherry trees. Literary allusions to the Russian classics (Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Nikolay Gogol, Ivan Krylov, Aleksandr Ostrovsky) enrich the cultural context. For the educated Russians of Chekhov’s time, they would have been immediately familiar.
However, the translator must be alert to what I call imbedded quotations, less obvious than the explicit citations from literature. In The Seagull, Tre-plyov refers to Pushkin’s unfinished verse play Rusalka in regard to Nina, and later Nina says that both he and she have fallen into the omut. In this context, it might be translated as “whirlpool” or “maelstrom,” but its use in Vanya, the suggestion that Yelena dive — plop! — into an omut, reveals that an alternative meaning is intended: a “millrace,” precisely the body of water into which Pushkin’s heroine threw herself to become a rusalka or water-nymph. Similarly, when Astrov remarks of Yelena, “Ona prekrasna, spora net,” he is quoting Pushkin’s version of Snow White, the “Tale of the Tsar’s Dead Daughter and the Seven Warriors”; the evil tsarina turns to her mirror with the question whether she is really the fairest in the land and the mirror replies: “Ty pre-krasna, spora net,” “Fair art thou, no contest there; but the Tsar’s daughter’s still more fair . . .”
In his last plays, Chekhov is extremely careful in choosing his words. A French translator has pointed out that in The Seagull, Chekhov employed three separate words for why: otchego, zachem, and pochemu. I have been very careful to observe those choices, translating them by “how come,” “what for,” and “why.” Hence, in this translation the famous opening line is not “Why do you always wear black,” but “How come you always wear black?”—which distinguishes Medvedenko’s way of asking a question from that of others.
Every character in Chekhov speaks in a particular cadence. Compare Pishchik’s short asthmatic phrases with the run-on grandiloquence of Trofi-mov or with Anya’s iambic meters. Although both Vershinin and Tusenbach spout speeches about the future, one can tell merely by the tone and phrasing which one is speaking. When Nina Zarechnaya starts picking up Arkadina’s phrases, we are given insight into her character.
Third, and this is harder to pin down, the “specific gravity” of a statement may reside in its structure. Since Russian can reassemble the elements of a sentence to make a particular emphasis, English has to find a way of reproducing this. Mere literal translation, offering a direct statement, may conceal the subtle emphases of the original. To render Charlotta Ivanovna’s “Uzhasno poyut éti lyudi” as “These people sing horribly” is to miss her idiosyncratic syntax and the course of her thought as a foreigner, which imply, “It’s awful the way these people break into song at the drop of a hat” (although to spell that out explicitly would be to over-translate).
Finally, certain words and phrases which held a special meaning in Chekhov’s time may require that an explanation be imbedded in the translation, particularly if it is meant to be performed. Nado delo delat should not be rendered literally as “It is necessary to do something” or even as the customary “We must work,” because it has to convey the idea that it is an outdated and platitudinous slogan of liberalism. The quotations from Nekrasov’s poems have to reflect the pseudo-progressivism of the person doing the quoting. Who is the unpronounceable Poprishchin referred to in two of the plays? Just what sort of food are the raznye kabuli that the Professor imposes on the Voinitsky household? (Spicy Central Asian stews, which account for his dyspepsia and offer a vivid contrast to the nanny’s homely noodles.)