Isaac Babel / Gapa Guzhva By Val Vinokur

Isaac Babel

 

Gapa Guzhva

By Val Vinokur -

 

February 16, 2018

Val Vinokur has just published “The Essential Fictions,” a newly translated collection of the works of Odessan Jewish writer Isaac Babel. This story was originally published with the following subtitle: “First chapter from the book Velikaya Krinitsa.” The stories “Gapa Guzhva” and “Kolyvushka” are the only extant sections of Babel’s projected book about the collectivization of agriculture. This story begins during Maslenitsa (also known as Butter Week and, here, Maslenaya, which is taking place now across the Slavic world). The holiday takes place before the start of Russian and Ukrainian Orthodox Lent and has roots in a Slavic pagan folk tradition that originally marked the end of winter and the beginning  of spring. Much like Mardi Gras, it involves feasting and revelry before the Lenten fast, with blini (crepes fried in butter) as the food of choice.. This story was written in the spring of 1930 and published in 1931. Additional explanatory notes to the story are included under the text.

Vinokur previously published Babel’s seminal Odes to Odessa with The Odessa Review and has also written for the journal about the history of Babel translation in English.

Isaac Babel’s The Essential Fictions / Rewiew

 

Isaac Babel’s The Essential Fictions

VERONICA SCOTT ESPOSITO
APRIL 2018

If we can agree—somewhat tautologically—that modernist fiction depicts the experience of a world transformed by modernization, we might further assert that the process of modernization itself is rarely so powerfully depicted in fiction as in Isaac Babel’s writing. Joyce and Woolf will give us the modernist consciousness, Proust will reveal the workings of modernized memory, and Kafka shows the sanctified bureaucracy—but Babel is different in that he shows not the effects of modernization by the very process in action. The state goes to war with the most up-to-date technology, exerting its influence over populations and geographical spaces previously inconceivable; outlaws strike whatever claims they can amid the chaos of transformation, desperately trying to outfox the encroaching law; those left behind exist more and more as outcasts among the general dislocation of a rapidly changing world; and of course, the modern political doctrine of communism is put into practice on an epic scale.

Guy de Maupassant by Isaac Babel

Guy de Maupassant

Guy de Maupassant

by Isaac Babel

Translated from the Russian by Val Vinokur

Isaac Bábel / Guy de Maupassant

In the winter of 1916 I found myself in Petersburg with a forged passport and not a penny to my name. I found shelter with a teacher of Russian literature — Alexey Kazantsev.

He lived in Peski on a yellow, frozen, foul-smelling street. He supplemented his meager salary by doing translations from the Spanish; at the time, Blasco Ibáñez was just becoming famous.

 

Isaac Babel

‘Odessa’ by Isaac Babel

Translated by Val Vinokur
Photo by Igor Sytnik

Odessa is a nasty town. Everybody knows this. Instead of saying “what’s the difference,” over there they say, “what’s the differences,” and also, instead of “here and there,” they say, “hayr and thayr.” But still, it seems to me you could say a lot of good things about this important and most remarkable city in the Russian Empire. Just consider – a city where life is simple and easy. Half of the population consists of Jews, and Jews are people who are sure about a few basic things. They get married so they won’t be lonely, make love so they will live forever, save up money to buy their wives astrakhan jackets, love their offspring because, after all, it’s very good and important to love one’s children. Poor Jews in Odessa can get very confused by officials and official forms, but it isn’t easy to shift them from their ways, their fixed and ancient ways. Shift they will not, and one can learn a lot from them. To a significant degree, it is thanks to their efforts that Odessa has such a simple and easygoing atmosphere.

 

The Art and Science of Translating Babel

By Val Vinokur 
April 5, 2016

In 1929, the great American literary critic Lionel Trilling read a book “about Soviet regiments of horse operating in Poland” that disturbed him, charged, as it was, with an “intensity, irony, and ambiguousness” of the kind that the usually placid academic wished to avoid. That disturbing book was Nadia Helstein’s 1929 translation of Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry (1926). Ernest Hemingway confessed: “Babel’s style is even more concise that mine,” proving that “even when you’ve got all the water out of them, you can still clot the curds a little more.” Trilling’s sensibility could not be more different from that of Hemingway, but they both seemed to find kindred interests in Babel. Hemingway had also read the Helstein edition, and also owned the 1955 Walter Morison translated edition of Babel’ Collected Stories. The generally ignored publisher’s note on the first page of that edition – now out of print for more than two decades – complicates its provenance:

The stories in the section entitled Red Cavalry, with the exception of “Argamak,” were originally published in Nadia Helstein’s translation by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in 1929; they have been revised by Walter Morison for this edition. “The Sin of Jesus” was translated by Mirra Ginsburg; “First Love” by Esther and Joseph Riwkin; and “Guy de Maupassant” by Raymond Rosenthal and Waclaw Soski. All the other stories have been translated by Walter Morison.