Dead Souls

by Nikolai Gogol

In this translation Guerney more than lives up to his own characteristically pithy description of the translators art: A translator ought to be able to write in his own right; an ability to parody (or mimic ...) is, outside of enormous vocabularies in at least two languages, the prime requisite for the high art. In other words, a translator must know what his author is up to, what his vocabulary is, what his mannerisms are, and carry over his spirit into another tongue. His spirit, for the letter killeth. (The reader will get the letter too, never fear.) A sort of ouija board affair. One lends ones knowledge of English, say, to the original author.10 Guerney’s Dead Souls comes closest to giving the English reader a feeling for the spirit of Gogol—the variegated lexicon, alternately folksy and high-flown; the baroque, sometimes clumsy syntax; and the narrator’s voice—the representation of an oral performance that ranges from the persona of a hilariously deadpan standup comedian to that of a visionary, prophetlike orator.