The Inhabited Island - The Strugatsky brothers, Andrew Bromfield (trans.)

 

Edition Decree: Solid Honors Done to Middling Work of Authors

(review copy from publisher)

Censored, obstructed Soviet tomes can be hard to come by--you have an author you love, and you know there are books left to read... but they haven't been translated, or translated in full. The sorrow!... So it was great news to hear of this Strugatsky book released in new, uncut form. This edition is more extensive than other editions by page number, although it was hard for me to discern what all didn't make it through the censors. The afterword denotes certain changes.

The story itself is not my favorite Strugatsky-- I think "Dead Mountaineer's Inn" is their tightest, most atmospheric, profound, and entertaining read. Even "Roadside Picnic" did not become a book I would reread almost annually like Dead Mountaineer... and perhaps that will be the case with "The Inhabited Island". It is an adventure story, told with great Strugatsky effect: A foreignness of place, cartoonish characters that inspire humor or pity, and lots of action. This is very much a "jump from the plane / quick, they're after us!" kind of story, set in a dystopian world. So you would think it's written for the paperback shelves, 150 pages of thrill?... No. It weighs in at 400 pages. It is a lot of Strugatsky for the money, and it took me a little extra effort to get through it. Hence "Middling" in the title... they had a lot of fun writing it, but it is certainly not their most profound work.

You can look at Bromfield's list of translations to get a sense of his translation work--a lot of latter-day Soviet writing, not really the old classics. And his tone has that contemporary feel, a modern tone. I tend to enjoy the idioms of pre-Cold-War classics with rustic peasant phrases, so I won't criticize Bromfield's style. It's simply not what I shop for... though to study Russian lit from 1990 onward, I wouldn't turn away a book with his name on it.

I enjoyed Bromfield's rendition of Omon Ra, which was written in 1992. I did not enjoy his translations of Kharms, from ~1928 (I had read other translations of Kharms, then picked up Bromfield's translation of "Incidences" as a gift, and found that the tone and vocabulary was not at all like the translation I loved so dearly. It felt casual and modern, rather than tongue-in-cheek serious and occultly intelligent).

Translation is important not just for capturing the author's personality, but for embodying the era when it was written. And some translators might think they need to translate away those distant ways of times past, as well as the foreign words themselves... but I like leaving that distance intact. (e.g. in Dostoevsky, you can call it a 'droshky' and not a horse carriage. I'll figure out that people keep getting into something that has horses in front to go from place to place.) So, to conclude, you will find here a tone that caters more easily to our contemporary English ear, rather than how it would have been translated the year it was written, I daresay.

As a final positive remark, I most prize my copy for the appendix in which Boris Strugatsky speaks about his writing process with his brother. I always wondered, how would two brothers write novels together?? Line by line, bickering over what happens next? I won't give anything away, but this short read is edifying; it discusses brother to brother creative process, and the brothers vs. Soviet Russia process.