When a writer earns a second language, what does it mean to write in the distinct spaces within and between the two? In this essay on Russian writer Olga Zilberbourg, who also goes by Olga Grenets, nonfiction editor Ian Ross Singleton explores the various ways that language can reveal, point to, and emphasize in both originals and translations.
What does another language afford an exophonic writer—one writing in a language other than her native tongue? Olga Zilberbourg, also known as Olga Grenets in her Russian publications, is both translingual and exophonic. The English-language collection, Like Water and Other Stories, was published in 2019 after a trio of Russian books; then, in 2021, many of the stories from Like Water appeared in Russian as Задержи дыхание (Hold Your Breath). The stories of Like Water and its edited, translated successor open up the span of Zilberbourg’s/Grenets’ linguistic experience. The Russian iteration of the tales are not word-for-word translations, and, as with any translation, they present a reflection of the English-language original—no matter how close, even the strictest of translations alters a story. So, while Hold Your Breath may be a closely related work, it nonetheless stands as its own expression of (in this case) Grenets’ work.
Many of the stories in both collections present reflections on an immigrant’s experience. “Plastic Film With a Magnetic Coating” is about mixtapes, and the part they played in childhood romances and gender roles during the Soviet Union and the post-Soviet nineties. It is almost identical in both the English original and Russian translation, but in the English, the last sentence makes a disclaimer: “I’m speaking, of course, of a very different time and place.” What is significant about Zilberbourg’s work is that the two versions of this story span those two different times and places. In the Anglophone literary world, Zilberbourg is allocated under the umbrella of writers born in the Soviet Union, a clear mark of difference; to the audience of Like Water, then, this sentence is clear, intended to describe the exotic content of the story.
However, what might sound foreign to a reader of Like Water may, of course, be more commonplace to a reader of Hold Your Breath. The Russian translation of the story has a completely different ending, omitting this sentence entirely. Such a drastic change make sense; presumably, for the majority of those reading Hold Your Breath, the setting would not be a completely different place, and the narrative time is simply the not-so-distant past. In the English version, Zilberbourg’s narrator belongs to a generation that would recognize the romantic exchange of mixtapes in that time and place, and in the Russian version, the narrator adds a more specific, personal passage to their story, and it’s this reveal that concludes the Russian version of “Plastic Film . . .”
This passage in question specifies the narrator’s sexuality as one not necessarily falling within heterosexual norms: “Разумеется, когда через кассету я получила признание от девочки, я решила, что сообщение предназначено не мне, и ничего не ответила.” (“Of course, when, by cassette, I received a confession from a girl, I decided that the message wasn’t meant for me and didn’t answer.”) In English, the story can be intuited as relating to heterosexual relationships; in the Russian, there is a potential lesbian romance. In this case, the question of what an attained language can offer might be inverted to ask what a return to one’s primary language can afford.
In another story, “Like Water,” the queerness referred to in the Russian “Plastic Film…” becomes the source of drama in both versions. The narrator is puzzled by a response to one of her social media posts, wherein a friend from her birth country indicates that she was in love with the narrator. That this feeling takes place prior to the narrator’s immigration should be a signal to readers in both Russian and English; the language of its depiction is significant, as the narrator is speaking in first person, presumably addressing Anglophones in the society in which she now lives—but the social media post, revealing romantic feelings from another woman in their shared childhood, is in Russian. Did the narrator leave behind not only her culture and her first language, but also her sexuality? She has a memory—or, she admits, it could be a fantasy—in which two women are, “trying to navigate the folds of winter clothing to locate each other’s clits.” In Hold Your Breath, the translation is very close, “губами пробиваются сквозь слои тёплой одежды к клиторам друг друга” (“with their lips trying to get through the layers of warm clothing to each other’s clitori”). In English, the word “clit” retains a suggestiveness that “clitoris” doesn’t, but “clitoris” is the word used in the Russian version. Does this more clinical form of the word indicate a hesitation regarding these feelings, which might only have surfaced in the narrator after immigration, in the English-speaking world? The revelation in the social media post comes years after she has settled in her adopted country, and is a bit of a non sequitur. It’s as if the friend was waiting for an opportunity to reveal her feelings, one perhaps afforded only now that she’s so far away, and mostly interacting with social media in English. The search for “each other’s clits,” whether in memory or fantasy, in Russia, but the fact is only articulated in the US. Translated backward, in the sense of the language path of the narrator, into Russian, a Russian colloquialism more similar to “clit” might not preserve the innocence of the narrator’s story; in other words, English perhaps opens Zilberbourg to a word more appropriate in its bluntness, but still retains the innocence of the experience.
As another exophonic writer, Jhumpa Lahiri, describes the self-translation of her work from Italian into her primary language, English: “The act . . . enables the author to restore a previously published work to its most vital and dynamic state—that of a work-in-progress—and to repair and recalibrate as needed.” Perhaps Hold Your Breath represents a return to the repair, recalibrate, and/or revision stage of the work-again-in-progress. This re-envisioning can reveal even deeper meanings, and any differences between the texts can lead to questions about what the Russian re-envisioning might have drawn from the story—not necessarily the words themselves, but the significations shared between the stories’ dual linguism.
Take “Stroller Selection,” a piece of flash fiction in which an immigrant mother’s list of potential stroller colors leads her into a traumatic memory. The mother compares the color orange to Goldfish—a snack to Anglophone readers. To Russophones familiar with Aleksandr Pushkin’s fairy tale of an eternally dissatisfied wife, however, the “золотая рыбка,” or golden fish, is a deeply meaningful symbol, alluding to indecision. The traumatic memory is of the mother’s first sexual experience at eighteen, one of an assault, and as her recollection continues, different words (signifiers) come up for the same meaning (signified)—“. . . penetrated her with his finger his penis”—and merges the narrator’s indecision about strollers with indecision regarding details of the assault. Translingual writers like Zilberbourg are in a unique position to inform our understanding of how much language matters, and to how precise a degree. The translation process demonstrates both the pathos involved in a translingual writer’s depictions, as well as the potential for a tragic loss of meaning in translation. The goldfish in American context has nowhere near the amount of meaning that “золотая рыбка” does.
But just as translation can detract, it can also aid in character development. In “Her Turn,” the narrator, Oksana, invites the father of her child to coffee. Oksana relates to him, as they are both immigrants living in the United States. “Его история типична для иммигранта . . .” is the Russian translation of “His is an immigrant’s story,” suggesting that his life and his difficulties are perhaps even more valid to the public consciousness than her life—one on which he has already had so much influence. But in this new life, things have changed, a fact that is made clearer by reading the story in Russian. In both stories, there is a reference to his “barely comprehensible English,” but in the English version, he’s referred to as simply “the man,” and in the Russian, he is her “собеседник” (“conversation partner”). Once it becomes clear that he has failed to find success through immigrating, the fact also surfaces that he needs Oksana, even though he is in fact indebted to her. Near the end, there is a short passage describing Oksana’s job as a headhunter in the very field in which “the man” works. As Oksana is walking away from the meeting, thinking of how she’ll “keep his resume on file,” the Russian uses the verb “посмотрит” (“will look”); it’s the future conditional, a “maybe.”
While the story certainly achieves a similar result in the English original, the Russian translation—despite adding little to the story itself—is a strong reinforcement of how the tables have turned between the two characters. Now, Oksana is in the position of helping him, largely due to her success in the Anglophone world. Her new language has become the vehicle through which Oksana can avenge herself.
Zilberbourg often dedicates her writing to such themes of gender and power dynamics. In “Janik’s Score,” two competitive children, neighbors, play a high-stakes card game so late into the night that the narrator’s grandmother comes looking for them, falls, and is unable to stand. Though the story fixates on the competitive feelings often associated with boys (that which can surface as toxic masculinity in adulthood), in the English version, there’s no indication of the narrator’s gender until a reader hears her name, Lena. In the Russian version, because verbs in past tense are gendered, the narrator’s identity is evident to the reader much earlier in the tale. In English, the lack of this linguistic feature allows Zilberbourg to belie the reader’s expectations.
The choice of working as a writer is often depicted as a transaction—success in art in exchange for failure in life, as conveyed in the W. B. Yeats poem, “The Choice.” Zilberbourg’s protagonists often face similar dilemmas between work and life, such as in the story “Priorities,” in which a character faces a potential layoff after becoming a mother. But Zilberbourg’s protagonists are also subject to particular caveats; being immigrants and women, their choices surrounding selfhood are almost always wedded to the choice to emigrate, or to the choice to procreate. A story that best combines these decisions is “Doctor Sveta,” which discusses the pressures immigrant women regarding childbirth in their new life. Detailing a conversation about abortion during a birthday party for the narrator’s aunt, the English and the Russian versions don’t differ much. It’s more that “Doctor Sveta” thematizes how leaving one’s hometown, country, and language can afford freedom from certain pressures, and the way conversations about unwanted pregnancies, abortion, and women’s freedom can transpire—especially in a Russian, Soviet, or post-Soviet space. Such dialogues are often encoded in a way similar to the one at the heart of “Doctor Sveta,” and in the Russian version, many of the passages shift.
“Bananas for Sale” is one of the few stories in which there are no immigrant characters. It takes place during the post-Soviet nineties in Leningrad/St. Petersburg, when people found themselves encountering capitalism for the first time in their lives. Here, again, the re-envisioned story differs only slightly. For instance, after describing a tractor factory that was successful during Soviet times, there is the addition of a sentence: “Госзаказ приказал долго жить.” The four words literally mean, “government procurement ordered to live long,” but this factory is no longer employed. In English, this sentence’s dark humor might have carried over, but would have likely required a lot of context. When the Soviet government ended, so did the government’s support of industry, such as the tractor factory. Incomes disappeared, and now three metric tons of bananas sit in the factory; private enterprise, such as the sale of exotic fruit, has become a means of survival. To explain all of this context is to kill the joke, and the Russian version doesn’t rely on explanation. One can guess that most Russophone readers would already be aware.
There are other added passages, “Ну так что ж, любой впавший в глубокие раздумья, оправдает ли цель средства, мог свободно идти на улицу.” (“Well, so what, anybody falling into deep thought about whether the ends justify the means could go outside.”) Again, sarcasm is applied to desperate acts of survival. Perhaps irony itself is a means of survival, and perhaps it would be understood to an Anglophone reader well-versed in the history of that time, but it’s likely that many Anglophone readers would require a footnote or two where Russophone readers would most likely not. Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time, which details this same era, presents oral histories that are both painful and harsh, with many missing the society they knew all their lives. By using the voices of those who lived through those times, the work gives voice to narratives that don’t fall neatly into the opposing ideologies of the Cold War. “Bananas for Sale,” in its English version, may tell a story amenable to Anglophone readers, but in its Russian version, the story can access the gallows humor of survivors, depicting a familiar scene to people who may be survivors of that setting. The Russian language, here, gives its writer a context, a home in which it can also live and do what a story should do—help a reader cope.
Ian Ross Singleton is author of the novel Two Big Differences (MGraphics) about Odesa, Ukraine in 2014 during the Euromaidan Uprising. His short stories, translations, and criticism have appeared in journals such as: Saint Ann’s Review; Cafe Review; New Madrid; Fiddleblack; The Los Angeles Review of Books; and Fiction Writers Review.
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