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January 25, 1998
BOOKEND / By MICHAEL SCAMMELL
The Don Flows Again
t is common wisdom that important works of literature should be retranslated at least once in every generation. The greater the original, the more translations it can bear -- witness the continuing flood of new versions of Homer, Dante and books of the Bible. The point is that few translators can match their chosen authors for genius. Another reason is that a translation is only one of a myriad possible readings, a critique of the original, a provisional version limited and defined by the translator's talents and the intellectual currents of his time. In rare instances -- Dryden's Virgil, Pope's Homer, Urquhart's Rabelais -- translations attain classic status, but they cannot compete with their originals for authority and influence, unless, like Edward Fitzgerald's ''Rubaiyat,'' they surpass them.
In recent times the thirst for new translations has intersected with a surge of interest in writers' biographies and a post-modernist demand for veneration of the text. ''Authentic'' versions of English-language classics like Joyce's ''Ulysses,'' Lawrence's ''Sons and Lovers'' or Crane's ''Red Badge of Courage'' are all around us, and the appetite for more is still growing. One site where both currents merge is Russian literature. For three decades there has been a steady process of recovery and rediscovery -- of poets like Mandelstam and Tsvetayeva, of prose writers like Bulgakov and Andrei Platonov.
The root cause of their earlier neglect was, of course, censorship, but recovering their work in its pristine form is no simple matter. If censorship meant only politically motivated cuts, the text can be restored. But censorship inserts another level of obfuscation between the author's supposed intentions and the published text. Determining which cuts were editorially motivated and which a censor's work is sometimes impossible. And which cuts were the author's own, and why were they made? A classic example is Bulgakov's ''Master and Margarita,'' still an enigma even in its fullest form.
The latest candidate for re-examination and retranslation is Mikhail Sholokhov (1905-84), whose epic novel about the Russian Revolution and civil war, ''The Quiet Don,'' recently appeared ''complete . . . uncensored,'' the publisher says, in a ''fully revised translation'' that conforms ''most closely to the author's original writings.'' That Sholokhov should have had to wait till now for re-evaluation is no surprise. His sentimental naturalism has been deeply unfashionable for years.
Sholokhov has not been helped by the Soviet regime's nonsensical canonization of him as a classic of Socialist Realism, by his loyal membership in the Communist Party or by his role in later years as a scourge of dissidents. But his masterpiece remains the finest realist novel about the Revolution. During the 12 years of its composition and publication, it repeatedly ran into censorship problems (unblocked by Stalin personally one or more times), and all Soviet editions before 1984 were distorted by the political exigencies of the moment, as were the corresponding translations.
Brian Murphy of the University of Ulster has performed a service by setting out to rectify the matter for English speakers, though the results of his enterprise are decidedly mixed. Murphy is an expert on Sholokhov, well qualified to decipher and explicate textual problems created by, among other things, the disappearance of the original manuscripts, publication delays and the depredations of censors. Unfortunately, he evades the challenge by relying almost exclusively on an English translation done by Robert Daglish in Moscow in 1984. Murphy's all-too-brief ''Note on the Text'' is silent about editorial matters and gives almost no details of his own role in the process.
The use of the Daglish translation has other disturbing elements. There is no copyright acknowledgment of Daglish or his Moscow publisher, Raduga, which has a copyright line in its own edition. There is also no acknowledgment that Daglish's translation was his second revision of a much earlier and shorter version by ''Stephen Garry'' (pen name of Harry C. Stephens). Garry's two volumes, incidentally, published as ''And Quiet Flows the Don'' and ''The Don Flows Home to the Sea,'' are still advertised by their American publisher as ''complete and unabridged,'' despite lacking about 25 percent of the original text.
Daglish's second effort, which adopts Garry's florid version of the title, ''Quiet Flows the Don,'' is much better than his pre-1984 version. The syntax is freer and more idiomatic, the diction more modern, the descriptions more vivid. Its main drawback is its dialogue, which remains stilted and implausible. American readers need to be warned that this is British English. Can they deal with ''broth of a boy,'' ''blighter'' and ''bugger'' (in the sense of bastard), or know that ''I expect you've got a bit of crumpet back home'' is an inquiry about a girlfriend?
Murphy has supplied a chronology of Sholokhov's life, the historical background, notes, glossary, maps, a bibliography and even a text summary. Yet on a subject of great interest to readers of ''The Quiet Don,'' namely the vexed question of its authorship, he is nearly silent. To put the matter in a nutshell, Sholokhov, the author of a sweeping epic of 1,300 pages with convincing scenes of war and peace, stirring battle passages, historical sweep and mature descriptions of love and family life, was 22 years old when he submitted the first volume for publication and 25 when he had completed three-quarters of it. That meant he was only 17 when the period he evoked so magnificently came to an end. And he must have written the bulk of the novel at phenomenal speed, in less than four years. Even Sholokhov's first editors wondered how this uneducated youth (he left school at 13) acquired such a profound knowledge of Cossack life, such a mature understanding of history and such a superb literary talent.
Rumors of plagiarism surfaced almost immediately. Sholokhov was alleged to have stolen a manuscript from the map case of a dead White Army officer -- hence the improbably sympathetic portrait of the Whites from the pen of a Communist. A literary commission rejected the charges, but they surfaced again in the 1930's, in the 60's (after Sholokhov's Nobel Prize in Literature) and with renewed force in the 70's. By then there was a candidate for authorship: a White Cossack officer and writer, Fyodor Kryukov. Critics claimed to find both his voice and Sholokhov's in the novel. Detailed comparisons of the two men's work and biographies indicated a large number of discrepancies, however, and the coup de grace to the Kryukov theory was administered by a 1982 computer study demonstrating fairly conclusively that Kryukov could not have written a major portion of ''The Quiet Don.''
Sholokhov's critics loathed his politics; supporters were indulgent of the Soviet regime. There was also the problem of the novel's uneven quality: even admirers admitted the prevalence of poor writing, especially in the later volumes. Sholokhov's secretiveness did not help, nor the fact that most of the manuscripts had been lost when the Germans occupied Sholokhov's hometown in Russia.
Then, in 1991, the journalist Lev Kolodny astonished the Russian literary world by announcing that he had found the manuscripts of Volumes 1 and 2 -- those most in dispute -- in a house in Moscow. In 1995 he published a thrilling account of his search for them, and a description of the manuscripts. They were indisputably in Sholokhov's hand, with authorial deletions and emendations, and their dates coincided exactly with the known facts of Sholokhov's early life.
Kolodny's discovery did not put an end to speculations about the true authorship of the novel, but it tilted belief decisively in Sholokhov's favor. Meanwhile the plagiarism debate remains a fascinating segment of modern Russian literary history that is still relevant to the textual riddles surrounding ''The Quiet Don.'' Unfortunately, Murphy barely mentions it, nor does he dwell on the equally fascinating alternative -- that a masterpiece was written at astonishing speed by a provincial youth of 21 to 25.
Sholokhov's admirers cite Dickens and Thomas Mann as precocious precursors, forgetting that they went on to produce whole shelves of outstanding books, whereas Sholokhov's subsequent career was spectacularly mediocre. A more convincing comparison, perhaps, is with Stephen Crane, who was 24 when he published ''The Red Badge of Courage,'' about a civil war that ended six years before he was born. Crane died young, whereas Sholokhov lived on until he was 78. What would have been his reputation today if he had died 50 years earlier?
Michael Scammell is working on ''Cosmic Reporter,'' a life of Arthur Koestler. He teaches writing and translation at Columbia University.
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