The Museum of Abandoned Secrets

No one knows a novel like its translator, who must question the significance of every comma and colon, consider alternative meanings of every adjective and adverb, research obscure historical and cultural references and understand the author’s intent sometimes better than the author. So, when we received a review copy of The Museum of Abandoned Secrets, by Oksana Zabuzhko, we reached out to Nina Shevchuk-Murray, whom we have worked with to translate Peter Aleshkovsky’s Fish and his forthcoming Stargorod.

First, congratulations on your achievement! But I have to say, at 680 pages, this is a truly intimidating tome. And even a cursory skim reveals an amazingly rich, dense language, with long, stream of consciousness sentences and a plot that spans many generations. As someone who knows this book intimately, why should a reader take on this huge novel? What rewards lie in wait?

One of Oksana Zabuzhko’s truly extraordinary talents as a novelist is her ability to observe and relate the most intimate thoughts and perceptions of her characters. When one reads this book, one often comes to recognize one’s own habits of thinking, ways of seeing the world, relationships with others. The characters in the novel – because one comes to know them so intimately – become family. I think it is absolutely safe to say that one gains a whole new family: Daryna, the unstoppable TV journalist; her mother Olga, her stepfather and her friends; the man she loves, Adrian, who is an antique dealer and a failed physicist, and the other characters to whom Daryna is connected through the stories she tells – and the secrets she uncovers.

What was the biggest challenge with translating a book of this breadth?

I would be totally lying if I didn’t say that the sheer volume of this work was not intimidating. Not only was there a mass of language, there was also an incredible diversity and complexity, which, let’s also be frank here – attracted me to this project in the first place. I think I was fortunate to be on a very tight schedule for this translation, which made it absolutely necessary to work every day (no weekends) and to produce a very specific output of new translation every day. With a book like this, I think, if one were to take it on without a set pace, it would be very tempting, to use Daryna’s phrase from the book, to go “wandering, mind and body, in tangential details, sinking into obscure complexities.” For me personally, it worked out better to commit myself to a determined, disciplined, regimented approach and work through difficulties as they came up. Of course, there was a handful of requisite middle-of-the-night epiphanies when I’d wake up because I’d just realized I did something totally wrong two months and three chapters before.

Did it help that you were born and raised in the region of Ukraine (Lviv) where much of the action takes place?

ne of the main characters in the book, Adrian, comes from a Lviv family and his great-aunt, Hela, as we find out, was an anti-Soviet resistance fighter during and after WWII. Much of this fighting took place in Western Ukraine. I definitely felt a sense of pride and a sort of ownership for those parts of the book – I think you always get this warm feeling of recognition when the street names are familiar, when you actually know which specific building the author is talking about, when you can really picture the action. It helps you connect.

Why should American readers be interested in this book?

I live in Lithuania now, and there is a lot of shared history and similar history. I also have come to see how much misperception there still is about this whole region and what happened here during the Second World War. You have to remember, Soviet authorities completely silenced the fact that there even was anti-Soviet resistance, so I think there’s still a lot of reclamation and acknowledgement to be done. That said, the last thing I would want people to think is that one should only read this book if one is interested in Ukraine. You should read this book for the same reason as you read other books: you learn new things. The characters teach you a new way of looking at the world.