Mikhail Bulgakov. The Life and Times

October 17, 2020

What happened before

I met the Bulgakov expert Marietta Chudakova (1937-2021) several times in Moscow. During my second meeting with her in June 2007, she offered me a signed copy of her book Жизнеописание Михаила Булгакова [Zhizneopisanie Mikhaila Bulgakova] or «Life Story of Mikhail Bulgakov». «I wrote this biography twenty years ago, and everyone who writes a book on Bulgakov mentions it in his bibliography as an ultimate reference, but it has never been translated,» she said, «wouldn't that be a nice and challenging project for you?» She was hoping for an English translation, but at that time I would not have dared to make a translation even in my native language (Dutch), so I could not answer positively.

Almost ten years later, on December 17, 2016, we received a press release that the publishing house Glagoslav Publications would publish an English translation of Marietta Chudakova's biography on January 29, 2017 under the title «Mikhail Bulgakov: The Life and Times». After almost thirty years, her dream would come true. People who were interested could place a pre-order by paying € 19.10, the book would be shipped «in January 2017».

I immediately reserved (and paid for) that book, but nothing arrived in January. Nothing happened in February either. On March 19, 2017, I received a message from Glagoslav Publications promising that the book I pre-ordered would be shipped «in the month of May 2017». On May 5, 2017, it was confirmed that it would be ready on May 8, 2017. But in May 2017… Well, you guessed it – still nothing. In total, the release date of «Mikhail Bulgakov: The Life and Times» would be postponed 14 times in two and a half years. I the announcement of the tenth postponement in May 2019, the pre-order price was also increased to € 24.50. I paid, but I never received my order.

Two weeks ago I went to have another look at the Glagoslav Publications website and I suddenly read that the book was available. The mentioned publication date was July 30, 2019. A bit strange, because on August 27, 2019 they had reported that it would be released on August 31, 2019. Normally I would have done something to claim my copy from the publisher, but I was so eager to read this book that I downloaded the ebook. Not from the Glagoslav website, but from bol.com. So Glagoslav Publications had to pay a distribution commission to a third party. Voilà, my little revenge.

But let us now review the book.

Anyone who picks up this book will probably be charmed by its relatively smooth writing style - a style that does not at all correspond to that of the archivist and philologist Marietta Chudakova. In itself, this should not be much of a problem, and, in fact, it would be a good thing, if someone had managed to render Chudakova's extensive knowledge in a language that is easily accessible to Bulgakov's many enthusiasts, who certainly are not all linguists. After all,  as a philologist of her time and her environment, Chudakova uses long sentences with many subordinate clauses, and her original text contains an innumerable number of semicolons and statements in brackets, often in the middle of a sentence. But simplyfying a text becomes problematic when content is sacrificed for the sake of readability, because if you look a little further, and especially if you compare this English translation with the original Life Story of Mikhail Bulgakov by Marietta Chudakova, you would come to some  weird conclusions.

The first conclusion: Mikhail Bulgakov (The Life and Times) is not a translation of Marietta Chudakova’s book.  It is a book written by translator Huw Davies that is based on Chudakova's book.

To begin with, Davies has not fully translated Chudakova’s book, he simply dropped sentences, paragraphs, sometimes even entire consecutive pages. In total, he has not translated the equivalent of 94 pages, or 13 % of the text.

Why? Well, if we take a closer look at the omitted parts, it turns out that these are segments of text that have a somewhat «difficult» content that is not, as such, mentioned in a Russian-English dictionary, or that cannot be found with simple Google Search commands. One example: Chudakova writes that Osip Mandelstam had taken «the oath of the fourth class.» Apparently, Davies has not found the meaning of the term «fourth class» anywhere, and has therefore deleted the entire sentence. If he had looked a little harder, he might have ended up on a French Wikipedia page that neatly explains the 'Society of Classes' on which he could have seen that the concept of the «fourth class» is used to describe the «proletariat» or the «working class». But alas, Davies didn't find it, si his readers don't even know what oath Osip Mandelstam had taken.

All right, you could say that it’s okay;  you might not need to know everything that Chudakva has written.  True, «what you don't know doesn't matter,» as long as the rest is correct. But that doesn't quite apply here either. When Davies dares to translate a more difficult - or sometimes even easy - part of the text, he misses the mark more than once. For example, Chudakova writes that Bulgakov went for a walk with his wife, but according to Davies, he did so with his sister. And, when Chudakova writes that Bulgakov and his wife went to the Art Theatre to give a document to the courier, according to Davies, he went to the Art Theatre alone to give the document to the courier's wife. He also made little effort to verify names: the American theatre director Halsted Welles (who had staged Days of the Turbins in New York in 1934), was first «a man named Wales», and later simply «director Vels».

Perhaps trivial, and maybe not that bothersome if you don't care about such details, but there are dozens of examples of such «carelessness» in this translation. There is, for example, one characteristic that is striking and that repeatedly leads to outright misinformation for the reader who wants to use this book to try tounderstand Bulgakov’s personality. Translator Davies has difficulty taking notice of the word «not» in Chudakova’s work: a  small word of barely three letters, but if you don’t see it the reader can get really confused. For example, Chudakova writes: «And what bliss it is not to ride on a tram anymore!», but the translator apparently disagrees, because he wrote that Bulgakov thought: «And what bliss it is to ride on a tram now!».  This is a bit embarrassing, because immediately after this, follows a whole paragraph with  a colourful description of Bulgakov's well-known aversion to trams. So Bulgakov was actually «not» happy about that, Mister Davies. He hated trams, and often railed against them in several of his works. In another place, Huw Davies does the opposite, adding the word «not» where Chudakova had not written it. Chudakova writes that Bulgakov often felt pain: «During the illness he had a lot of pain, unconsciousness,» but  the translator casually changes that to: «During the illness, he didn't suffer any wild pain or loss of memory». This is a rather awkward observation, particularly when you know that Bulgakov suffered greatly from nephrosclerosis, the disease from which his father had died at a relatively young age, and from which, as a doctor, he was well aware would happen to him too.

Davies clearly has a problem with the word «not», in one way or another. And in his translation it happens not once, nor twice, but about twenty times in total.

Finally, one more comment about this translation: in one place in his book, Davies did not delete a piece of text, but instead added one, perhaps well-intentioned, to better inform the reader - not a bad idea in itself,  If, that is, the information was correct. Quod non.

In Chapter 5 of her book, Chudakova describes how Bulgakov and his wife Yelena Sergeevna tried at one point to find out which of the regular visitors to their new flat might be a spy from the secret police NKVD. She describes this, just as Bulgakov did in The Master and Margarita, in veiled terms, without mentioning names; however, she does add a number of hints about that person in several places in her book, including having Bulgakov say that the informer often came to their house uninvited and that he had a degree from the Oxford University. Davies perhaps thought he could give the reader a helping hand by inserting, on his own initiative, the name of Baron Boris Steiger, in brackets, in Chudakova’s text. There is just one inconvenience: it was not Steiger that Bulgakov and his wife had in mind. For Steiger never visited the Bulgakovs' home, and he only had a high school diploma, not a degree from the Oxford University. Davies could have prevented this mistake with a simple Google Search by which he would have quickly discovered that Bulgakov was thinking of Emmanuel Zhukhovitsky, who was a regular visitor to the flat and often came uninvited (much to the annoyance of Yelena Sergeevna) and who was the only person in their circle of acquaintances having... an Oxford degree.

Perhaps the translator could have avoided many of these errors or mistakes by having prepared himself better  for his assignment. He could have read, for example, Yelena Sergeevna's diary or Mikhail Bulgakov's correspondence in the preparation of his immense mission. Many things would have been much clearer to him, and he would have certainly wasted less time on research or guesses. He did not even have to  read that diary and correspondence in a foreign language for him (Russian), because the most important parts of it had already been translated into English in 2012, by Professor J.A.E. Curtis from the University of Oxford, and published in her acclaimed book Manuscripts Don't Burn. But perhaps he was under strong time pressure. After all, his potential readers needed to have a great amount of patience for reading his book after having paid for it, as you could read at the beginning of this article. What is also strange: the aforementioned Professor J.A.E. Curtis wrote the foreword to this «translation». But I wonder whether she was able to read the translation herself in advance, because as an expert on Bulgakov's work, she should certainly have noticed the errors or mistakes.

In summary: Huw Davies has delivered a fairly readable biography of Bulgakov, which is based on Marietta Chudakova's book, albeit incomplete and incorrect in several (frankly: too many) places. You may enjoy reading it, but don't use it as a source for your master's thesis, because it might end badly for you.

 

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