In the Language Of the Original

At one time, like millions of others, I listened to the kind of radio, popularly known as the lie-box. Today, I have instead a modern FM set in the kitchen. The latter is very important, because I had become an involuntary listener to the lie-box mostly when cooking and eating breakfast. Thanks to the lie-box I would now and then, also involuntarily, receive bits of useful information.

Once they broadcast an interview with a professional philosopher from Kyiv. I enjoyed it so much I decided I was making too much noise munching my toast. At some point the philosopher suddenly announced that he was going to quote from Kant. “I will use the language of the original to be more precise,” the philosopher added and read the passage in Russian.

I almost choked on the toast. Recovering from the shock somewhat, I thought but of course, Kant was born in Kaliningrad [then KЪnigsberg], so why shouldn’t he use the Russian Federation’s official language? This must have been the case.

It so happened historically (my, I love this clichО, used by all those wishing no change whatever!) that for most “educated fellow citizens” any cultural attainment originating from the West (and from the East) is associated with its Russian version. “I would never read Hemingway in Ukrainian,” a full-blooded Ukrainian told me recently. “This perhaps sounds very unnatural.” I replied that I had never come across a more normal and natural Ukrainian language than in Hemingway’s excellent Ukrainian translations done by Volodymyr Mytrofanov or Mar Pinchevsky. But I do not think my interlocutor was impressed. Apparently he, like most of my compatriots, did not have the time. God forbid that I am blaming him, I just state the fact.

Without doubt, this situation took shape over decades, perhaps centuries. On the strength of their metropolitan status, Moscow and St. Petersburg indeed published, demonstrated, and interpreted immeasurably more world attainments than Kyiv (I will not even mention the rest of Ukraine). Thus in accordance with elementary arithmetic, Russian translations had by far more chances to be distributed among the reading public. On the other hand, behind this was not only arithmetic. There was also politics, and not just some politics but the so-called cultural policy. Everything intellectual, modern, socially prestigious, “others’,” not ours, had to be associated with the Russian language. Only things Ukrainian were to be associated with the Ukrainian language, and those things were reduced to the only possible discourse, if you know what I mean, so I will not steal bread from the agrarian researcher Yeshkilev.

But even in the worst totalitarian times the personal factor crept in — every reading individual in Ukraine opposed in his own way this imposed distribution of roles — sorry, I mean the situation that had developed historically. For individuals originating from the traditional Ukrainian-speaking environment, reading world literary masterpieces precisely in Ukrainian translation was a matter of not only national importance, but also of aesthetic delight. Save for a handful of exceptions, these people might not read modern Ukrainian literature, all that socialist realistic multilingual gray corps that was officially considered such literature, but just Ukrainian translations of foreign authors. They always read them. This signifies that they were programmed not to read anything in Russian translation, for can there ever be too many good texts?

And yet most “educated compatriots” abided and continue to abide by another guideline, one that accepts and shares the imperially imposed status quo. Here the crucial factor is, of course, that of the mother tongue. Precisely that part of the Ukrainian reading public to whom Ukrainian is a “second mother tongue” — meaning actually “ first foreign language” — as rule tends to agree with the thesis that Hemingway would sound unnatural in Ukrainian.

Certainly, it is everybody’s private business what to read and in what language. However, I am strongly tempted to quote from Shakespeare and I will use the language of the original to be more precise: быть или не быть — вот в чем вопрос [ To be or not to be? That is the question].