The Cossacks

I'm continuing my work on a new translation of Tolstoy's The Cossacks. The story - it's a povest', or novella (one might even call it a short novel) - is set in the Caucasus during the Great Caucasus War which lasted from 1834 to 1859, when Russian forces engaged the Muslim fighters, including Chechens and other mountain tribesmen, led by the charismatic Imam Shamil. Though I now have a working draft, there's a question of what to do about one important feature of the whole narrative - the proliferation of Tatar and other non-Russian words in the text. In the original Russian, Tolstoy used these words intentionally, to create a sense of foreignness and exotic strangeness. Olenin, the aristocratic hero of the tale, leaves his comfortable but - for him - empty and unsatisfying existence in St Petersburg society and embarks on a long journey to the Caucasus in order to find a new and more genuine and natural life among the primitive Cossack villages where the Russian military forces are based. But he finds that he cannot abandon his civilized values, and the Cossacks never accept him. Olenin's sense of estrangement is brought home to the reader by the linguistic element. The Cossack villagers are Christian and Russian-speaking, but they live "isolated in a corner of the earth, surrounded by semi-savage Mohammedan tribes and by soldiers". They have intermarried with Chechens and other hill tribes, and though the inhabitants of the settlement don't actually speak Chechen or Tatar in Tolstoy's text, the sense of the proximity of those alien cultures is created by a liberal sprinkling of foreign words: aul, beshmet, chapura, kizyak, chikhir, karga, kotluban, and so on. Sometimes Tolstoy supplies his own notes on the meaning of words and phrases, but more often the reader is left to savour the foreignness unaided. In earlier English translations, efforts were made to soften and even eliminate this aspect of the text, but in the process much of the stylistic rawness and vividness of Tolstoy's writing was lost.

It's a problem: I expect I will try to preserve as much of the linguistic richness as I can - and negotiate the rest with the copy editor. The main thing is to try to keep the writing as alive and dynamic as it is in the original.