The Night Reporter

A Note on the Translation

A Note on the Translation

“Translation is the art of failure.”

– Umberto Eco

Those who have ever questioned Umberto Eco’s statement about translation being the art of failure would suspend all doubts once exposed to the task of translating any of Yuri Vynnychuk’s works into any language – be it structurally and culturally remote English, German, and French or the more kindred Polish and Russian. And it is not only because any literary work is, according to Lawrence Venuti, an asymptote – a line that a curve of translation infinitely approaches but never crosses. The thing is that any of Yuri Vynnychuk’s works is merely not “any.” It is always a unique outlier that evades generalizations and escapes the traps of classifications. It is small wonder that throughout the entire project our minds seemed to have been haunted by Eco’s voice repeating “I told you so… I told you so…,” especially when we had to spend hours upon hours dismantling the author’s densely idiomatic style, dissecting the polyphony of his registers, resorting to countless resources, online dictionaries, etc., while chasing the meaning of batyar1 slang and deciphering the contaminated speech of his characters. We groped for adequate means in the English language to convey the spirit of the original and create asymptotic equivalence rather than a dynamic (Eugene Nida) one. Just like perfection itself, the latter proves to be unattainable, because “no man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man” (Heraclitus).

Translating Vynnychuk (Винничук) one is doomed to feeling “vynnym/винним” – guilty for all the inevitable losses that happen on the way of transferring his unfathomable literary world condensed in this particular work – The Night Reporter (Нічний репортер). Rendering the synesthetic plasticity of his kinesthetic, acoustic and olfactory images could be compared to an attempt to give a verbal account of a pantomime, a symphony, and a perfume at the same time. Therefore, translating Vynnychuk is not only an interlinguistic, but also an intersemiotic endeavor, with which Roman Jakobson would surely agree. It is like subtitling a movie with a very elaborate script in which the actors’ speech is so swift, and the scenes change so fast that you cannot but cite Faust’s’words “Verweile doch, du bist so schön” (Ah, linger on, though art so fair!).

Nevertheless, the feeling of vyn-a (вин-а – guilt) in translating Vyn-nychuk did not prevent us from being vynakhidlyvymy (винахідливими – inventive) while balancing between foreignization and domestication strategies as well as literality and co-creativity. There were many question marks and gaps that were filled with the help and advice of our friend and colleague Svitlana Budzhak-Jones and the author himself, for which we express our heartfelt gratitude. By a remarkable turn of events or just by pure accident (the law of literary attraction must have come into play), the Universe seemed to be prompting answers to our questions by letting us stumble onto various sources of information (books, movies, and websites) that resulted in being of high value in the execution of our translation. One such helpful hand stretched by the Universe was the 1941 movie The Maltese Falcon based on the 1930 Dashiell Hammett novel by the same name. We watched it and took notes on linguistic features to get a sense of the kind of language used in English around the time the action of Vynnychuk’s novel takes place (1938). As much as possible, we strove to exclude contemporary English slang such as “dude” in the current sense of the word or “bro” that were not widely in use in 1938. With no disrespect intended, we also opted for what would now be politically incorrect slang such as “dame” and “chick” to maintain the flavor of vocabulary in use circa 1938. However, a highbrow translation scholar might still not agree with all such decisions. Therefore, we’ll return to Umberto Eco’s words and make them even shorter and simpler – TRANSLATION IS THE (AN) ART.

Alla Perminova