A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

by George Saunders

I had a colleague at Syracuse come in and talk to my class about the challenges of translation. It was wonderful and nearly sunk the whole course. When she was done, we realized what pale imitations of the originals we were reading. She talked us through a section of another Gogol short story masterpiece, “The Overcoat,” showing us all of the sound-related jokes we were missing. For example, early in that story, a mother needing to name her newborn works through a series of names and finally decides to call him after his father, so that he becomes Akakii Akakievich. In Russian, my colleague told us, the language in that section contains a series of feces-evoking sounds that culminate in the announcement of the baby’s name. The “ka-ka” sound having the same associations in Russian as in English, “Akakii Akakievich” sounds, to the Russian ear, especially after this shit-related buildup, something like, you know, “Shit O’Shitvich.” (Or “Crap P. Poopton.” Or “Dumpy Dumperton.” I could go on.) A Russian audience, she told us, would have been giggling throughout and would have exploded in laughter at the reveal of the name. That, to say the least, was not our reaction. To us, it just seemed like a slightly off-balance account of how babies were traditionally named, we assumed, back there in nineteenth-century Russia.