Though not yet standard practice, bilingual editions of translated works are becoming increasingly welcomed by readers, both as a method of language engagement and an embodiment of a text’s various appearances and lives. In this following essay, Ian Ross Singleton discusses the power of reading and learning from a bilingual text, as well as the many dialogues that can transpire from this meeting of reader, writer, translator, and the worlds they each bring along.
I have bilingual books to thank for access to much of my knowledge of each and every language I utter—specifically Russian and, most recently, Ukrainian. I began to learn Russian about seventeen years ago. I was delighted to be able to access the originals, alongside helpful translations, in books such as Russian Stories / Русские рассказы, edited by Gleb Struve, which introduced me to the work of writers such as Evgeny Zamyatin and Fyodor Sologub, among others. Penguin also published a bilingual anthology of Russian poetry that became the basis of my education in this language, from which I memorized poems by Aleksandr Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Aleksandr Blok.
There are bilingual books by individual poets as well; Pushkin Threefold, translated by Walter Arndt (Dutton Books), gives the original Russian texts of Pushkin alongside literal English translations and verse translations. The book shows how translators must scrutinize, interpret, and create texts that are nonetheless complemented by ready comparisons with the original. Nativity Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), a collection of the exile Joseph Brodsky, includes work written during the end-of-the-year holidays or discussing the story of Christ’s birth, and provides both a way of reading Brodsky’s original Russian poetry as well as elegies by poets who admired his writing, such as Derek Walcott, Anthony Hecht, and Seamus Heaney. Even the American poet Carol V. Davis wrote It’s Time to Talk About… / Пора говорить о…, a bilingual book of poems written in Russian and English, published in Russia by Simposium in 1997.
A bilingual book lends itself to a dialogue between two languages, the kind of negotiation that take place in a bi- or multilingual mind. It also creates a space for the kind of lingering that a bi- or multilingual person does with their words—the space a translator navigates in their relationship with both the original and their own renderings. It signifies companionship: of the author and the reader, of the author and the translator, and, if the reader is a language learner, of a teacher and a student. A bilingual book also does much to demonstrate the intimacy between the translator and their source texts—a relationship that involves a close scrutiny of language and meaning—and thus it also fosters the relationship between the two texts.
As a multilingual person and a translator, I am always pleased to see the original of any language alongside its translation, to see the text from which a feeling or sense moves through the translator and their language. I began seeking out these books in Russian before Vladimir Putin came to power in Russia; now, Russia has invaded and continues to wage war against Ukraine. As a result of this war, there have been challenges to the anti-Ukrainian sentiment of poets such as Brodsky and even Pushkin. Contemporary Ukrainian writers are negotiating how to approach Russian (if it’s a language they use) while recognizing the significance of Ukrainian as a language repressed by imperialist Russian culture. There is, and should continue to be, a dialogue about language with regard to the Russian war against Ukraine.
Near the end of 2022, two books of poetry appeared in the US: one with Russian on the left-hand pages, the other with Ukrainian, and both with English translations of the poems on the right-hand side. The two poets are both immigrants: one from Russia, one from Ukraine, and write in the languages of their birthplace despite having lived for years in the US. I want to juxtapose these two books, which have in common their bilingual presentation of the originals and translations of their poems, and I want to do so because the war against Ukraine has upended the linguistic worlds of so many Russian and Ukrainian speakers. I want to juxtapose these books because discussions about the linguistic world of Ukraine—the languages uttered right now and that will be uttered in Ukraine—are very close to my heart. The cultural aspect of this war is the only way that I can resist the Russian aggression. Bilingual books work against cultural barriers, which are arguably always interior, and have very much to do with the language we use to communicate with one another.
A Succession of Somnolent Souls (Демография дремлющих душ), by Aleksandr Veytsman and translated by Laurence Bogoslaw, is a book of poems in Russian covering themes far and wide. As Bogoslaw writes in his introduction to the book: “Veytsman is an émigré who knows English fluently but still chooses to write in Russian. He is that rare specimen of his generation who has not only learned from the masters of the nineteenth century (Pushkin, Baratynsky, Tyutchev) and the twentieth (Blok, Akhmatova, Pasternak, Mandelshtam)—but has internalized their heritage so deeply that he weaves it seamlessly into scenes of the present day and scenes from his own imagination.” A reader can assume Veytsman lives his life in English in this part of the world, yet he writes poetry in Russian influenced by poets such as Brodsky or Arsenii Tarkovsky, father of the famous Soviet filmmaker. Veytsman’s collection also translates between media by referencing various artists; in “After Tarkovsky” (“Из Тарковского”), a house plays a prominent role—almost like a character in the poem—as a space where various times overlap, much as in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Mirror (Зеркало), in which Arsenii Tarkovsky voices his poems over various scenes. Tarkovsky writes, “Live in a house, and the house won’t collapse” (my translation of “Живите в доме, не рухнет дом”). Veytsman writes, “Take a peek in that house,” (Bogoslaw’s translation of “Загляни в этот дом”), as if to advise the reader to take a peek into somewhere foreign, in the way bilingual books permit their readers a peek at the foreign original.
The Ukrainian poems in Paper Bridge by Vasyl Makhno, translated by Olena Jennings (Plamen Press, 2022), also allude to works of art by other arts, especially artists who work in languages other than the poet’s.
In Makhno’s “Rain in New York” (“Дощ у Нью-Йорку”), I recognized the Ukrainian-Russian calque дрозди (drozdy)—like the Russian word for “blackbirds”. Since my first language is English, and my background is first in English poetry, this poem initially called to mind Wallace Stevens’ blackbirds, with its extension of meanings through various birds. However, these blackbirds are Makhno’s, and they’re mentioned after “freckles,” which I wouldn’t have recognized in Ukrainian—even with my knowledge of the Russian word for freckles.
It’s important to point out that I began learning Ukrainian in 2022, after the war began. Before that, my translations had mostly come from Russian, the native language of most of the Ukrainians I have known. Now that I’m learning Ukrainian as well, Russian has become an “interlanguage”—a bridge, often volunteering itself while I search for a word in Ukrainian.
In the bilingual Paper Bridge, I can see and hear the Ukrainian word ластовиння (lastovynnia): how it has in it another bird, the swallow. The Ukrainian word for swallow is ласка (laska), but in my interlingual Russian that letter t remains in “ласточка” (lastochka). Receiving the assistance of one letter from my knowledge of Russian, and guided by Paper Bridge, I learned the Ukrainian word, which can also sound like the word for gentleness and is even included in the Ukrainian phrase for “please.”
Paper Bridge is—quite literally as a bilingual book—a bridge between the respective cultures of the languages it presents. Friedrich Schleiermacher, in “The Different Methods of Translating” (translated by Susan Bernofsky in The Translation Studies Reader), discusses such a tension as between interpretation and translation, or as a tension between the function of a translation and the feeling the translator has for the original language. This tension has to do with the accessibility created by familiarity with a given culture, and translators, like poets themselves, must consider the audience of a translation and how far they’re willing to peek into the foreign culture through its language.
In A Succession of Somnolent Souls, similarly written by an émigré in a language not common to the place in which the poems came to be, Bogoslaw gives a detailed and expansive introduction to his translations—which, while moving between languages, often change the concrete meaning of the text in order to capture rhythm and rhyme from the original. Yet, Bogoslaw is generous to the reader, not necessarily establishing an idea of translation like the “famous dichotomy,” defined by Lawrence Venuti, of either “‘domesticating’ or ‘foreignizing’ a given image or allusion.” Bogoslaw appears to see himself doing something more along the lines of Mark Polizzotti’s framing: of a translation as something that both “preserves and renews” the original.
Bogoslaw uses what he calls “inventions” (or even the sometimes derogatory Russian word “отсебятина / otsebyatina: from the self,” a word for translation that some consider to be defiant of the common idiomatic rules of a language) in his translations. Jennings, on the other hand, veers less often from ordinary English usage—even if it means losing some of the sound of the original. In Makhno’s “Rain in New York,” Jennings translates: “the wind tore at my poems,” which in Ukrainian is: “вірші вітер затер” (virshi viter zater). The alliteration and rhyme are only accessible in the original, perhaps with the exception of the o sound in both “tore” and “poems.” Nonetheless, by presenting the originals, both translators give readers access to the comparison of sound, even if the reader can only read Cyrillic letters.
There is a range of readers that spans from the aforementioned ones—who can hear the sound of the words yet don’t know the meaning—to readers for whom that sense of sound is deeply woven with the meaning of the words. Within this span lies a point at which readers of the original will be able to find allusions based on the repetition of sounds and meanings that they’ve heard and read before. Bilingual books remind a reader that the very work of poetry itself is an act of communication, as all language is, as well as an act of doubling or building from that which has come before. For a translator, this communication between artists, this building from one work of art to another, requires research reaching back to the sources which originally stimulated the poet’s imagination. Bogoslaw explains the research process he undertook in preparing his translations; one example is a poem about the pianist Maria Yudina, which includes the description of a concert depicted at the beginning of the English-language film Death of Stalin. The translations of Veytsman’s ekphrastic poems can then have another “original,” since a translator like Bogoslaw watches Sergei Eisenstein’s Battle on the Ice in order to translate Veytsman’s “Scenes from Eisenstein” (“Из Эйзенштейна”).
In addition to being gateways into other works of art, bilingual books are, of course, also gateways into other languages. In Paper Bridge, most of the poems include an address to a second person. This linguistic act begins with the title poem itself, the stanzas of which go back and forth across a bridge between “you” and “I.” The word “ти” (ty or “tu” in Ukrainian) doesn’t appear until the last stanza, but it’s implied in the first with its imperative: “stop writing” (“не пиши”). This imperative appears directly after a reference to the writer themself, мене (mene or me), in the line “Sleep frees me.” This implied “you” comes from a command issued within an inner dialogue between the self that rests and the self that works, the manuscript mentioned several times in the poem as “a bridge out of paper.”
Perhaps the dialogue between the writer and their self is similar to that between a poet and an imagined reader—or, if the poet is religious, between the poet and God. Brodsky’s famous answer to the Soviet question of who authorized him to be a poet—that God authorized him—comes to mind. When it uses extensive allusion, poetry gives a sense of doubling by reflecting other works of art within itself or by “weaving it seamlessly,” as Bogoslaw describes Veytsman’s work, with the poet’s own imaginings. In “Cavafy’s Monologue,” I hear “рукописи не горят” (rukopisi ne goryat, or “manuscripts don’t burn”) from The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov in Veytsman’s line, “I would have burned the manuscript if only it could burn” (“Я сжёг бы рукопись, коль можно было б сжечь”). This poem makes several uses of references to remind a reader of the difficult, often failing work of a poet, who uses symbols and metaphors to craft their works. The process of doubling, of language regenerating itself, overlaps the process of translation and the weaving of two versions together in a bilingual book. In the last line of “Cavafy’s Monologue,” Bogoslaw chooses to use a sight rhyme to give the right-page reader a sense of the rhyme of the original: “Forgive me that into Jerusalem I come, / but I see Rome” (“Прости за то, что я вхожу в Ерусалим, / но вижу Рим”).
The difficulty that Bogoslaw meets is that, as a reader of the Russian can see and hear, the words for “Jerusalem” and “Rome” do rhyme in that language and only slant rhyme in English. But such a difficulty can be an opportunity for a translator, especially one who is willing to be as transparent as both Bogoslaw and Jennings are, in presenting the originals for their translations.
Both translators offer their choices for approval by a translingual reader—one who can go back and forth between the languages, as these poets themselves can. In “Granada, Nicaragua,” Makhno uses the word “собачий” (sobachyi) to describe the streets, a word translated as “dogged” by Jennings. While the original and the translation here don’t necessarily equate, the repetition of the sound makes sense to a translingual reader of both the languages. The meaning here is amplified; Jennings translates Makhno’s, “And if among the dogged streets / I recall everything I had forgotten here: / Everyone ferments their life somehow / Trying for the sound of sweetness.” It’s no irony that this meaning comes to a reader from a Ukrainian poem taking place in a Spanish-speaking setting, written by a New Yorker, and having to do with the way people try to make the “sound of sweetness” of our lives.
For “Granada, Nicaragua,” Makhno uses the less common Ukrainian letter Ґ, a fact accessible to readers due to the text’s bilingual nature. The Cyrillic letter Г is a G in Russian, while in Ukrainian, it’s an H, and if one wants to write a G sound in Ukrainian, one must use Ґ; the end must be upturned. There’s a need for that sound in Ukrainian; it has a sense to it that is necessary in “Granada, Nicaragua,” while other places, such as “La Merced,” remain in the Latin alphabet, even in the Ukrainian original. A translingual poet such as Makhno can move between languages and alphabets in this way, and a bilingual book (which, with such inclusions of the Latin alphabet, would technically be bilingual even without Jennings’ translations) provides access to all of these sounds.
Another example of the poet wrestling with the decision to keep the sound in one alphabet or another occurs when comparing Makhno’s “Rain in New York” to his “Looking at the Ocean.” “Rain in New York” mentions a well-known place in New York City, Washington Square, which the poet inscribed into the original, “я також читав під дощем на Washington Square” (ya takozh chytav pid doshchem na Washington Square, or “I also read in the rain in Washington Square”). But in “Looking Out at the Ocean” (“Перед океаном”), the poet brings up “Sheepshead Bay” (a perhaps less well-known but no less beloved part of the city) as “в бухті овечої голови” or, literally, “in the bay of a sheep’s head.” There’s no capitalization. Looking at a map of this Brooklyn neighborhood, it’s unclear whether it was named after the shape of the nearby shore, which may no longer look the way it did at the time of the naming. Makhno uses the name literally after he has told the reader: “Make your way around the coast by yourself.” The shape of the literal language here is important, and this bilingual book allows us to see and hear the Ukrainian through its Cyrillic letters.
Bilingual books let language be in its skin, embodied, remaining—whether you can read all of it or are merely able to be in its presence. In “Looking Out at the Ocean,” language is “washed away with time” (“змиває час”). The very phrase “the ocean” goes on and “flows into my sensitive ears” (“зливає океан до мого чутливого вуха”), “rustles women’s skirts” (“шумить спідницями жинок”). There are several bridges and connections here. Language, no matter what you do with it, is accessible; it’s an actor or agent, at least for the butterflies, who are “shielded by your word” (“словом твоїм накрились”) before they leave.
I should stop here and make a disclaimer. Before reading “Looking Out at the Ocean,” before 2022, I wrote, “Even though she was sitting, she felt as light as the butterfly, throwing herself — since butterflies are feminine in her language—against the window. She flew out of the open sunroof, opened her wings and was free above Odessa. The smell of cotton candy rose from Park Shevchenko. There, not far below her, was that turning devil’s wheel. There was the Opera Theater. The Black Sea was as flat as a pane laid on the floor. For a moment, this butterfly forgot she wasn’t a bird. She kept going, her torso as black as that vastness, which did not swallow her, only lightly kissed her with puckered waves before she herself plunged in.” This passage is from my novel Two Big Differences, which takes place in Odesa, Ukraine, a place with many connections with language and the sea and minute and vast meanings, all connected through words in English, Russian, and Ukrainian.
Perhaps Makhno and I read the same poem by Pablo Neruda, whose Spanish is at the start of both the Ukrainian and the English versions of “Looking Out at the Ocean.” Perhaps Makhno is familiar with the scene from The Big Green Tent by the Russian writer Liudmila Ulitskaya that inspired that passage. By including all of the language involved with the meanings that Makhno, Jennings, and any reader of this book co-create, the book opens up a world where the smallest and shortest of lives are made immortal through words, and where the ocean is only as big as the way it makes sense for the person witnessing it: “The ocean tells you to look at the membranes and patterns on the wings / Of these butterflies that will disappear and never fly tomorrow / But today, they are shielded by your word / And here, by the ocean, they only flutter their goodbyes” (“океан каже тобі: дивись на лопатки й перетинки крилець / на цих метеликів що зникнуть й до завтра не долетять / але сьогодні вони словом твоїм накрились / просто перед океаном прощально так лопотять).
When I read this passage from my own novel, a Ukrainian friend who now lives in the US mentioned this word for butterfly, метелик, which is not feminine, as I wrote that it was in the language of that Odesan character. So, when I wrote about my character, I marked her as a Russian-speaking Ukrainian. Now, after the Russian invasion of and ongoing war against Ukraine, such a person would very likely be speaking Ukrainian—would consider it her language as well. Such small moments of bilingual meaning should be encouraging to any reader of one or both of the languages of a bilingual book. As with Russian and Ukrainian now, these languages help people make a concrete connection with the words themselves, both subtle as butterflies and vast as oceans when it comes to meaning.
Ian Ross Singleton is author of the novel Two Big Differences (MGraphics Books), which came out in 2021 and is about the Ukrainian Revolution of Dignity and, specifically, Odesa, Ukraine in 2014. He has written criticism about literature in journals such as Ploughshares, Fiction Writers Review, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He is Nonfiction Editor at Asymptote. His fiction has appeared in journals such as New Madrid, Fiddleblack, and Midwestern Gothic. His translations have appeared in journals such as Café Review, St. Ann’s Review, Cardinal Points, Springhouse Journal, and EastWest Literary Forum.
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