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‘A Young Doctor’s Notebook,’ Coming to America.

Hamm and Radcliffe bathing together in a young doctor's notebook — Daniel Radcliffe and John Hamm in the bathtub scene from ‘A Young Doctor’s Notebook.’

Bulgakov’s A Young Doctor’s Notebook to be aired in the U.S. on the cable channel Ovation.

An article in The New York Times today (July 14, 2013) announced that the British four part mini-series of A Young Doctor’s Notebook, based on the stories of Mikhail Bulgakov and starring John Hamm and Daniel Radcliffe, will air in the U.S. this Fall on the cable channel Ovation. This is especially good news for me as I had managed to view the first episode, but have been unable to find any version, paid or free, of subsequent episodes. Hopefully I will be able to view this series from Ovation’s website, and not have to get cable TV.

Previous to hearing about this production last year, I had not read the collection of Bulgakov’s stories that inspired it—Notes of a Country Doctor. Having decided to read an English translation of this collection before viewing A Young Doctor’s Notebook, and now having seen the first episode, I am more eager than ever to watch the rest as I am interested in how they handled Bulgakov’s unexpectedly dark, and deeply disturbing conclusion. I don’t know what to expect, really, as this production introduces the new and significant element of having the older doctor (Hamm) visiting and engaging with his younger self (Radcliffe) as he stumbles through his first assignment as “a real doctor” in a hospital in remotest rural Russia.

For my first mention of this production and review of the first episode, see my previous posts: Harry Potter and Don Draper do Bulgakov and A Young Doctor’s Notebook- episode 1 reviewed.

Also check out my translations, and discussions, of Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita: The “Foreigner”; My Approach to Translating Prose; The Old-Timers in Moscow Will Remember!; The Nature in Bulgakov’s Names; The Dread Pirate Archibald Archibaldovich.

Panyukov’s Televisions

Andrey Dmitriev’s character, Panyukov, marks time according to the life-cycle of his televisions

Panyukov's 'Sunrise' — ‘Sunrise’-Soviet Television Set

I have shifted back into translating prose for the time being. The poetry break was nice, but I want to try to actually finish a novel at some point. One of the attractive things about translating a poem, excepting epics like Pushkin’s Evgenii Onegin, is that it can be started and finished in a few days, maybe even just one. A novel, on the other hand, is a long term project.
I will present here another passage from The Peasant and the Teenager (Крестьянин и Тинейджер), by Andrey Dmitriev. As mentioned in an earlier post, this novel begins with the introduction of Panyukov, a man living in a village in rural Russia. Panyukov’s character is initially described through his own reflections on his past, on the “best of times” he had enjoyed when his friend Vova still lived across the road and they worked together raising livestock and growing food in their private gardens and greenhouse. The excerpt below hints that the passage of time for Russians living in farm country could be marked by the life-cycle of televisions. It is funny, poignant and sad in a way that only the relatively minor misfortunes of others can be. Continue reading “Panyukov’s Televisions”

Velimir Khlebnikov’s ‘Don’t Be Bad!’

Khlebnikov’s century-old poem resonates with the Russia of today.

I do love translating poetry, agonizing as it can be sometimes (see previous post- It Has to Be “Love”). My latest effort puts into English a poem written by one of the founders, and leading lights, of the Russian ‘Futurist’ movement, Velimir Khlebnikov (Viktor Vladimirovich; “Velimir” was his pen name). Below is my translation of Не Шалить (pron.-Ne Shalit’!= Don’t Be Bad!), followed by a discussion of Khlebnikov, the futurists and the resonance of this poem with Russian society today.

Don’t Be Bad!

Hey, cut-throat racketeers,
Heads full of sludge!
In old Cossack leathers
Through Moscow I trudge!
Not for its grandeurs
Is truth on our side,
So that in rich furs
We may haughtily ride.
Not in that strife
Did blood flow without check,
So that each merchant’s wife
Could wear pearls round her neck.
It’s no good to rail
All the night long
I will sing, I will sail
The Volga, the Don!
I will go tonight
Ahead where fate tends
Who’s with me in flight?
There are with me–my friends

February 1922
Velimir Khlebhikov
Continue reading “Velimir Khlebnikov’s ‘Don’t Be Bad!’”

‘Крестьянин и тинейджер’

Andrei Viktorovich Dmitriev’s Крестьянин и тинейджер-The Peasant and the Teenager: A view of Russia in its last decade as a Republic of the U.S.S.R.

Recently I have been engaged in translating and studying certain novels that have won the Russian Booker Prize, an award presented yearly since 1992 to honor outstanding Russian fiction . With this exercise I seek to gain a broader understanding of contemporary Russian thought and culture. My primary interest is in how Russians today view their own history, especially that of the Revolution of 1917 and the Soviet period.

The two works I’ve looked at most recently serve to bookend this period: Казус Кукоцкого (Kazus Kukotskovo = ‘The Extraordinary Case of Kukotsky’), by Lyudmila Evgenyevna Ulitskaya, and Крестьянин и Тинейджер (Krest’yanin i Tinyedzhyer = ‘The Peasant and the Teenager’), by Andrei Viktorivich Dmitriev. In a recent post (‘Казус Кукоцкого’) I examined Ulitskaya’s novel as to how it portrays the Revolution and its aftermath, finding her views consistent with my own narrative of this period. Turning to Dmitriev’s ‘The Peasant and the Teenager,’ I was delighted to find not only a portrayal of Russia in the decisive last decade of the U.S.S.R., but one from the perspective of rural, ‘collective farm’ Russia. Continue reading “‘Крестьянин и тинейджер’”

Kазус Kукоцкого-The Extraordinary Case of Kukotsky

A View of the Revolution and its Aftermath in Contemporary Russian Literature

Казус Кукоцкого, Людмила Улицкая — Казус Кукоцкого

I recently started translating a novel called Казус Кукоцкого (pron.-Kazus Kukotskovo) by Lyudmila Ulitskaya, who won the Russian Booker Prize for this work in 2001. This novel, whose title I’ve chosen to translate as The Extraordinary Case of Kukotsky, begins with a focus on the life of one Pavel Alekseyevich Kukotsky, who is, at the beginning of the book, a boy coming of age at the time of the Revolution of 1917. Not having any idea what this story was about before I started working on it, I am surprised and excited to find that, in addition to presenting some juicy translation problems, it addresses questions that I hope to find answers to in contemporary Russian literature: how do today’s Russians view the Revolution of 1917, the history of Communist Party rule, and life in Russia, generally, in the Soviet period? Here I will discuss one early passage from the novel in terms of both its challenges to translating it into English, and how it speaks to these questions.

The two paragraphs I will look at come at a point in the story when Pavel is of an age to attend university. It is just after the Revolution, and the Civil War is on. (These paragraphs are separated by one short one discussing Pavel’s character as a student, which I will not include here): Continue reading “Kазус Kукоцкого-The Extraordinary Case of Kukotsky”

‘A Young Doctor’s Notebook,’ Episode 1; Starring John Hamm and Daniel Radcliffe—Reviewed

A ‘Playhouse Presents’ Production, ‘A Young Doctor’s Notebook,’ Based on Mikhail Bulgakov’s ‘Notes from a Country Doctor’

I was not sure what to expect from a British TV production of a series based on the semi-autobiographical sketches of Mikhail Bulgakov, written in the mid-1920’s in Russia (see earlier post—‘Harry Potter and Don Draper do Bulgakov’). This four-part Playhouse Presents production, ‘A Young Doctor’s Notebook’, was initially aired at the end of 2012 on Britain’s Sky Arts network. On viewing the first episode, I was not surprised to find it to be very British in many ways, but with an impressive stock of allusions to Russian literature and culture. A great deal of effort seems to have been spent to get a lot into the seemingly simple story of the arrival at an isolated, seriously understaffed rural hospital, of a newly graduated medical student from Moscow. Continue reading “‘A Young Doctor’s Notebook,’ Episode 1; Starring John Hamm and Daniel Radcliffe—Reviewed”

Третья Мещанская: “№ 3 Meshchanskaya Street”, or “The Third Philistine”?

A Look Back at Abram Room’s Classic Film, Третья Мещанская: a picture of life in Moscow after Lenin, but before the full force of Stalinism.

The focus of my Russia studies has recently turned, through no conscious design of my own, to the period between the two World Wars, in the first half of the twentieth century. This may be no accident, though, as I am deeply fascinated by the unprecedented levels of dynamism, change, brutality and vision of Russian society in the decades after the Revolutions of 1917. My translations of Bulgakov and Mandelstam, my examination of the Soviet Five Year Plans, and my review of Douglas Smith’s book Former People all relate to this era when the revolution was still finding its way (see earlier posts- ‘The Old-Timers of Moscow Will Remember,’ ‘Leningrad,’ ‘All According to Plan,’ ‘Former People’). Deciding to continue in this direction, I thought I should take another look at a Russian silent film from 1927, variously called Третья Мещанская (Tret’ya Meshchanskaya), Любовь втроём (Lyubov’ Vtroyom), Three in a Basement (in Germany) and Bed and Sofa (in English speaking countries). I was introduced to this film as an undergraduate in a class on Soviet film, but watching it again, investigating its history and looking at some of the reviews published in Russia when it first came out, highlight for me the tasks Russians faced in trying to create a new society after the shattering of old social conventions, and the efforts of the Communist Party to define new ones. With this in mind I will offer my own review. Continue reading “Третья Мещанская: “№ 3 Meshchanskaya Street”, or “The Third Philistine”?”

“Alain Delon is Speaking French” (in Russian)

alain delon

“Mother teaches heart phone morgue” is how google-translate renders the seventh line of another glasnost-era Russian pop song that recently caught my attention. I had a Russian radio stream playing as I puttered around the house one day this summer, but wasn’t really paying attention until a repeated line in the chorus of a song grabbed my ear. I stopped what I was doing and thought, did they just sing “Alain Delon speaks French?” In fact, that was exactly what they were singing. I felt the urge to know why a Russian band would record a song about a French actor speaking French. A little research into this song revealed a degree of cultural interconnectedness that I was unaware of in the nineteen eighties when this song was produced in the still existing, and I presumed still closed, society of the Soviet Union.

It turns out that this song–A Look from the Screen (Vzglyad s Ekrana, which google-translate gives as “Sight Screen“)–by the group Nautilus Pompilius, was inspired by, and is even described as a “free translation” of, the song Robert De Niro’s Waiting, by the 80’s British pop band Bananarama. The line repeated in the chorus of the Brit song—”Robert De Niro’s waiting, talking Italian”—becomes, in the Russian song, “Alain Delon is speaking French” (Alen Delon govorit po Frantsuzkiy). Continue reading ““Alain Delon is Speaking French” (in Russian)”

Harry Potter and Don Draper do Bulgakov

Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) and John Hamm (Don Draper) to star in a British series based on autobiographical notes of Mikhail Bulgakov.
Danielle Radcliffe as the young Bulgakov John Hamm plays the orlder Bulgakov Mikhail Afanasyevich Bulgakov

The subject of some of my ramblings—Mikhail Bulgakov and his novel Master and Margarita—may become a little less obscure soon. A friend pointed me to a slate.com article about a British TV series premiering next month, called A Country Doctor’s Notebook, based on a collection of short stories of the same name by Bulgakov. Continue reading “Harry Potter and Don Draper do Bulgakov”