Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Translation DOWN often takes place for mostly practical reasons from the language of dominance to the languages used by peoples living within the field of domination. In the Hapsburg Empire, for example, laws, regulations, official announcements, and daily news were translated from German, the language of the court and imperial administration, into the seventeen official languages of that ramshackle state. But books didn’t follow behind to any great extent. No lively culture of literary translation sprang up into Slovene, Slovak, Serbo-Croatian, Ruthenian, Czech, and so forth. That’s because there was a much more straightforward way of becoming a cultivated citizen of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: by learning German. In like manner, many serious books in English about history, science, literature, and the arts cannot be commercially translated into Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, or Dutch because interested readers in these communities read them in English already. Economic, military, and cultural domination obviously affects translation flows, but typically not in direct or straightforward ways. A truly dominant language that has a great army and a well-filled treasury behind it—say, Latin throughout the period of the Romans’ domination of Europe and the Mediterranean—is the one tongue from which you do not ever need to translate. People just learn it, because without it their prospects are blocked. English does not dominate the world in the way that Latin did, because it is massively translated into vernaculars. Translation is the opposite of empire.

When speakers of Spanish, Portuguese, and English spread into the New World between the fifteenth century and the eighteenth, they did not initiate translations into any of the languages of the native inhabitants of the Americas. They created empires. But when Soviet Russia consolidated its hold on the many peoples of Siberia, the Caucasus, and Central Asia in the 1920s, it did so with firm political convictions that were explicitly anti-imperial. To demonstrate and implement those self-directed beliefs, the Soviet Union launched a huge program of translation from and into the indigenous languages of what were called “the nationalities”—Kazakh, Turkmen, Georgian, Azerbaijani, and so on. There was a good deal of hypocrisy in the Soviet stance, but the important thing to realize is that only translation could serve as a public alibi for what was in most other ways a classic instance of imperial expansion. Russian literary classics were made available in Kazakh, Ingush, Daghestani, and so on, but translation UP was a necessary complement. Two-way trade was needed to demonstrate the truly anti-imperial nature of the Union.

The problem Soviet language planners faced was that it takes a long time to establish functioning translation relations between two languages. Schools have to be established to educate a generation of bilinguals, who then have to develop their own translation tools and conventions. It can’t be done overnight, however great the need. But Soviet Russia was a revolutionary enterprise in a great hurry to usher in a new world. That’s why it began to cheat. Native poets in the main non-Russian languages were hard to find, and it was even harder to find Russian poets able to translate them. The Soviet solution was to invent them. Dzhambul Dzhabayev is the most famous example of Soviet pseudo-translation, partly because the deception was so long drawn out. A well-known Kazakh folksinger at the time of the Revolution, Dzhabayev was compelled to lend his name to patriotic poems written in Russian by a whole factory of hacks, who presented them as having been translated from Kazakh. Dzhabayev was translated into many other languages—from Russian, in fact, but always officially from Kazakh. Because “Kazakhstan’s national poet” lived to the age of ninety-nine, the Moscow song factory was able maintain the illusion for many decades.[128]