The Little Golden Calf
One satirical novel, two seriously different versions
It is rather unusual for two entirely new translations of a classic novel to be released within a month of one another. Since we have gotten several queries about the differences between our version, and the Open Letter version, we offer the following list of qualitative points of divergence that we have discerned.
- FIRST COMPLETE EDITION. The Russian Life Books version of The Little Golden Calf is the first ever unabridged English version of Ilf and Petrov’s novel. There were two previous English translations of the novel, in 1932 and 1961, but both translators seriously compromised their work by leaving out entire scenes, subplots, and segments (read more about these in our translator’s foreword to the novel).
BASED
ON THE ORIGINAL TEXT. Our The Little Golden Calf is based
on the first publication of the text, the 1931 magazine serialization,
which is the least-censored version of the novel to
be published in Ilf and Petrov’s lifetimes. We feel that this
variant is the one that best reflects the authors’ own
concept of the novel. The Open Letter version is based on a text compiled
by Ilya Ilf’s
daughter, Alexandra Ilf — who wrote the introduction to our edition — and
published with Tekst Publishers in Moscow in 2003. - TRANSLATOR. Dr. Anne O. Fisher, our translator, is also a scholar of Ilf and Petrov with several other translations of the coauthors’ texts under her belt. Dr. Fisher’s translations have already won wide recognition for Ilf and Petrov in the Anglophone community: her translation of Ilf and Petrov’s American Road Trip: The 1935 Travelogue of Two Soviet Writers (Cabinet Books and Princeton Architectural Press, 2006) made it onto Entertainment Weekly’s “The Must List” on November 10, 2006 and was shortlisted for the 2007 Rossica Prize for Excellence in Russian to English Literary Translation. (here is a comparison of her translation of The Little Golden Calf with another recently published version.)
- ANNOTATION. Our version is copiously annotated with over 300 informative and well-researched endnotes. We felt this extra effort was essential, since the novel is a treasure trove of direct, indirect, ironic, and altered quotations from classical and contemporary politics, literature, science, and music — indeed, The Little Golden Calf and its prequel, The Twelve Chairs, have been called “an encyclopedia of Soviet life” (a deliberate echo of the definition of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin as an encyclopedia of Russian life). The reader who is left unaware of the vast range of Ilf and Petrov’s quotations is missing part of what makes the novel so beloved by native readers.
- ADDITIONAL MATERIALS. The edition as a whole was conceived as a way to introduce the English-speaking reader to Ostap Bender as he is understood in Russian culture, that is, as a household name whose quips and comebacks are still used in everyday Russian speech to this day. Thus our edition includes:
- an introduction by Alexandra Ilf, herself a respected scholar of Ilf and Petrov’s works;
- a translator’s foreword;
- a bibliography of scholarship on Ilf and Petrov available in English;
- the notes;
- an appendix deciphering characters’ names, which are “speaking names” in the tradition of Dickens and Gogol;
- a bilingual appendix of popular phrases from the novel.
- TITLE. There are two words in Russian for “calf”: a normal, everyday word that is used today (telyonok), and a special, high-register word used in the Bible (telets). Ilf and Petrov chose their title as an allusion to the Biblical story of the Israelites’ misguided worship of the Golden Calf (zolotoy telets)— a clear reference to Bender’s (and Koreyko’s) own misguided quest for money. However, Ilf and Petrov did not actually use “zolotoy telets,” the set Biblical phrase for “the Golden Calf.” Instead, they called their book Zolotoy telyonok, using the everyday, normal word for “calf” to deliberately lower the register of the Biblical image. We feel that care we took in conveying the title’s sly, desacralizing intent is emblematic of the care we took throughout the edition.
- DESIGN. In keeping with the original publication
(as well as later editions of the Bender novels designed and illustrated
by, for example, the Constructivist Solomon Telingater or the trio of graphic
artists known as Kukryniksy), our version uses bold typography to
single out the novel’s quotations, slogans, signs, advertisements,
memos, announcements, and posters, using the opportunities of the book
form to recreate, as much as possible, the early Soviet experience of
being bombarded with New Soviet Culture (in the form of said quotations,
slogans, etc.) from all sides, at all times of the night and day. Here are two examples:
- COVER. Our cover was designed by the wonderful Ufa-based illustrator Julia Valeeva, who perfectly captured Bender’s iconic features (Bender's cap and scarf) as well as other symbolic images from the novel (the suitcase of money, the little plate with a sky-blue rim, the Koreyko file, etc.). This makes our edition immediately recognizable to Russians who grew up on a diet of re-runs of one of the four television or movie versions of the Bender novels, ranging from the classic 1968 The Little Golden Calf to the 2005 version, where Bender was played by Russian superstar Oleg Menshikov.
- SIZE. Our edition is over 35% longer than the 336-page Open Letter edition. In order to include the Additional Materials noted above, our edition is 448 pages long, yet remains compact and lightweight.
- PRICE. Our edition sells for $20, Open Letter’s edition sells for $15.95. Ours costs more, but we like to think (as enumerated above) that we are offering more. In the end, of course, that is for readers to decide.
