Advertisements are the translator’s hell. Only the other day, I struggled with a Russian analogue to “a patient journey to asthma management:” each version sounded either too Western or too Soviet. That fruitless exercise has put me in mind of Victor Pelevin, one of the most popular contemporary Russian authors, whose books are often tributes to his early career in advertising.
A classic example is Generation “П,” originally published in Russian under this funky title in 1999. The П is for P, which is for Pepsi. It traces a copywriter’s journey (sic) to greatness in the formative days of Russian capitalism. Andrew Bromfield’s version, published by Faber and Faber, is called Babylon, referring to the name of the protagonist, Vavilen Tatarsky (his pet name, “Vavan,” is rendered as “Babe” here), which brings up a whole host of Sumerian associations in the book. The book’s US title, Homo Zapiens, is Pelevin’s own invention: a term for a model consumer, it appears in a text communicated by the spirit of Che Guevara by means of an ouija board, where it’s abbreviated to ХЗ, a shortened form of the Russian equivalent of “fuck knows.”
“HZ” is not the only thing inevitably lost in translation. Some of the copywriting puns, abundant in Pelevin’s text, are dropped—wisely, as their original concentration is somewhat over the top. When you read that “half an hour of the most intensive intellectual exertion had led to nothing” rather than “to the birth of a degenerate slogan,” you don’t miss the slogan at all; its omission provides a welcome respite from the overload of Pelevin’s wordplay. What I did miss was some newly coined English word for “sovok” (on top of its alliterative qualities, совок means “dustpan” or “trowel”): usually translated as “homo sovieticus,” here it is reduced to “Soviet mentality.”
Many potentially challenging phrases in the original—such as “Money talks, bullshit walks”—are given directly in English. This habit of Pelevin’s is even more pronounced in his 2011 novel S.N.U.F.F., the latest to have appeared in English. The author’s English is nuanced enough for him to be able to invent such puns as “V-Arts & All” (the name of a design agency).
In Babylon, Bromfield more than makes up for the slogans that can’t—or don’t have to—be translated, inventing new ones: “Ariel. Temptingly tempestuous” (washing powder); “A first-class lord for you happy lot!” (God Almighty). The God ad concept has been rewritten in translation to match the slogan, but the scene’s ending is translated verbatim: “Dost Thou like it, Lord?” asks the copywriter, fighting tears. A slogan for Parliament—“The Motherland’s #1 Smoke!”—sounds really innocent compared to the one used today for an eponymous brand of vodka: “Real Russian Victory.” Some passages highlight the irony of the translation business: “it was hard to believe that not so very long ago he had been wont to spend so much time searching for meaningful rhymes that had long since been abandoned by the poetry of the market democracies.” In creating his own versions of Pelevin, his designated translator proves, time and again, the relevance of David Bellos’ words: “The ‘intranslatability of humour’ hasn’t survived the very first dig of the spade.”
Pelevin famously avoids public appearances and keeps his interviewers hungry for details. Little is known about his advertising career. As for his hero, Babe achieves quick success, having discovered “two terms…––’penetration’ and ‘involvement’––that proved very useful when it came to throwing curves.” Early on, he has an eye-opening conversation with a Soviet ideological apparatchik turned adman, who says: “Agitprop’s immortal. It’s only the words that change.” The prophesy that nothing is ever going to change in Russia opens the book and is repeated throughout, particularly with regard to propaganda. It really is same shit, different shovel, especially seeing that “for the most part customers for advertising in Russia are representatives of the old KGB, GRU and party nomenklatura.” The names of those distinguished institutions have since changed, but the state of affairs is still the same. The question “Have you done a single advertising project for a product produced here?” is also likely to cause the same reaction today as it does in the book, when the only ad for a home-produced product the character can recall is one for Kalashnikov: “But you could call that an image ad.”
Babylon became a hit in the Anglophone world thanks to Bromfield’s skill and verve. The popularity of Generation “П” in Russia, where it has enjoyed a cult status, is largely due to its portrayal of the wild ’90s, when “people weren’t sniffing cocaine, they were sniffing money, and the rolled-up hundred-dollar bill required by the unwritten order of ritual was actually more important than the powder itself.” No less potent was “fly-agaric energy,” which a copywriter would feed off—for instance, to produce the line “Nescafé Gold: The Taste Explosion!” The accompanying clip involves not one but “three powerful explosions” that leave a Mercedes “scattered in flying debris.” Practice and theory go hand in hand as the hero contemplates his role in the big free-for-all: “The term ‘involvement’…also forced Tatarsky to start thinking about just who he was involving in what and…just who was involving him in what.” A note from Boris Berezovsky thanking the media gurus: “for sometimes allowing me to live a parallel life” and wishing them “Good luck in business” reads like a message from beyond, doubly so now, several years after the death of the oligarch under suspicious circumstances.
Another powerful reminder of the ’90s zeitgeist comes from Wee Vova, a “red-necked, red-faced hitman,” whose discourse perfectly captures the spirit of the decade. “You into the Russian idea?” Wee Vova asks Babe, then gives him a pep talk on the subject, concluding: “And we don’t produce nothing, if you think about it, ‘cept for mazuma… Which is still only their dollars, whichever way you look at it, which makes it a mystery how come we can be producing ’em. But then somehow we must be producing ’em—no one’d give us ’em for free. I ain’t no economist, but I got a gut feeling something’s rotten here, somehow something somewhere don’t add up.” His other wisdoms, brilliantly rendered in English, include a recommended reply to “any bastard from any of their Harvards: one-two, tickety-boo, and screw all that staring.”
The tenor of Bromfield’s translation is British rather than American, although there are strategically important transatlantic variations. The use of “ass” (despite having “arsehole” elsewhere), the replacement of “dough” by “mazuma,” and similar devices seem apt given the context: it’s the star-spangled dream that Russian adventurers have been pursuing in their free market endeavours. Bromfield’s judicious editing is not restricted to superfluous slogans. Here is a taxi driver, also on the Russian idea: “As for that idea of yours, I’ll tell you straight: fuck only knows. All I want is the chance to earn enough to keep me in petrol and booze. Yeltsin-Shmeltsin – what do I care, so long as they don’t go smashing my face against a table”. The reference to the first Russian president is more meaningful to the Anglophone audience than the original rant about Dudayev, the first president of Chechnya.
Back to Pelevin’s title, it sets the tone for the crucial Pepsi vs Coca-Cola argument, the former being the drink of choice for homo sovieticus, the latter, a sign of progress, a Western thing. It’s always “Coca-Cola” in Russia, “Coke” being too ambiguous. More straightforward wordplay is required here, so Bromfield comes up with a memorable slogan for Adidas—“Three More White Lines”—to replace a vodka ad. The last paragraph is cut altogether, to finish on a more visual note, with a panning shot of “the bright-blue horizon, where a few wispy clouds hang high in the sky.” You could call that an image ad.
*****
Anna Aslanyan is a journalist and translator. She writes for a number of publications, including 3:AM, the Independent, the London Review of Books, and the Times Literary Supplement—mainly about literature and the arts. Her translations from Russian include Post-Post Soviet? Art,Politics and Society in Russia at the Turn of the Decade, a collection of essays edited by Ekaterina Degot (University of Chicago Press, 2013).
Read an essay by Brian Libgober on Victor Pelevin from our Jul 2012 issue.