Interview with Gennadij Kiselëv, translator from Italian to Russian

One of the first Italian authors you translated was Buzzati (in 1984 you published the translation of the story La grande pulizia [The great cleanliness]). But even after many years, your interest in this Italian author has not diminished, and you continue to translate him. How do you explain this devotion?

I’m pleased to recall that long ago I published a story by Dino Buzzati in Tetradi perevodčika [Translator’s Notebooks], a once famous magazine, a real ‘showcase’ – as they would say in Italy – of translation theory and practice in the second half of the 20th century. That short story was used as an example for an article dedicated to the poetics of Buzzati and his conformity to the canons of the parable genre. At the time I had just graduated from the Institute of Foreign Languages, so Buzzati’s magical realism could not fail to impress me. However, the magnetism of Buzzati’s prose lies above all in the power of a language that is apparently flat, but which is profoundly and implacably enigmatic. One can pore over Buzzati’s enigmas all one’s life, as J.L. Borges wrote at the time. And that’s why we keep coming back to the best works of this Italian classic of allegorical prose, from the collection Sessanta racconti [Sixty short stories] to La famosa invasione degli orsi in Sicilia [The Bears’ Famous invasion of Sicily ] an enchanting allegory for children and adults, in which Buzzati combined his skills as a writer with his talent for figurative art. These two talents have made him the author of more than one book in which text and image become one. I hope that these books can still reach the Russian reader.

You have translated several contemporary authors into Russian, including Italo Calvino, Umberto Eco, Tiziano Scarpa and Emanuele Trevi. Among your contemporaries there are also two figures of ‘classical’ drama, Goldoni and Gozzi. What role do they play in your work as a translator?

Not all texts lend themselves to being seen through the prism of translation, with the transformations that this entails. The authors listed enclose such magic in the language and figurative universe of their works that it can give rise to surprising nuances of form and meaning in another language, in this case Russian. The enormous potential of the Russian language allows for the recreation of the ornamental mosaic of Calvino’s novel Se una note d’inverno un viaggiatore  [If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller ] or the bewitching rhythm of Landolfi’s Racconto d’autunno [Tale of Autumn], overflowing with verbal diamonds, a true kimberlitic chimney of linguistic magma; but also the popular Venetian speech interspersed with the eloquent speech of the aristocrats, which characterises the comedies of Goldoni and Gozzi. The writer, like the translator, has only one type of material at his disposal: the word. To quote Vasily Tredyakovsky [Russian poet and translator of the 18th century], ‘if the author is abstruse, the translator must be even more so’.

What advice would you give to young translators: should they start by translating the works of ‘classic’ authors or contemporary authors?

The classical corpus of literature offers endless creative possibilities (proof of this is that we are still looking for new approaches to translating the Divine Comedy). I don’t think the same can be said of contemporary authors, who have not yet been tested by time. Hence an obvious conclusion: we must not multiply through translation the emptiness of books that it would have been better not to publish, or indeed not to write at all.

To what extent is the choice of Italian books to be translated into Russian influenced by the ‘fashions’ of Italian publishing?

Translators follow the ‘fashions’ – that is to say the dictates of publishers, Italian or otherwise – to the extent of their own lack of ideas or their own naivety. By agreeing to translate yet another mediocre book marketed as a major literary breakthrough—often written by authors who have long exhausted their creative potential or by celebrities from film, politics, football, or even superficial popularisers of various subjects—translators merely become part of a commercial mechanism. In doing so, they are not unlike a parcel, unaware of its own contents.

Which Italian author would you still like to translate?

Every self-respecting translator has a few books ‘in reserve’ waiting for better times. I have about ten, including short prose and long works, like Horcynus Orca by Stefano D’Arrigo. I would gladly return to living authors I have translated in the past. I believe they are capable of new and enlightening works. After all, experience tells us to rely above all on books that have not yet been written.