The Books of My Life: Fathers and Children/Fathers and Sons

I read Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev's Ottsy i deti (1862) literally Fathers and Children, but often translated as Fathers and Sons, for the first time, if memory serves, probably in Rosemary Edmonds's fine translation for Penguin, when I was a teenager. Unfortunately, a lot of Turgenev's tale about generations--literal and symbolic fathers or father figures and mothers and mother figures like Nikolai Petrovich Kirsanov, Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov, Vasily Ivanovich Bazarov, Arina Vlasyevna Bazarova; the liminal figures of Anna Sergeyevna Odintsova, Yevgeny Vasilievich Bazarov, the Princess Kh, and Yevdoksya Nikitishina Kukshina; and children or surrogate children like Arkady Nikolayavich Kirsanov, Mitya, and Yekaterina Sergeyevna Lokteva, some of them locked in generational battles, some of these ideological--went right over my head as classics tend to do when you are young and you are really not given or don't quite grasp much of the historical, social, and cultural context to understand them in. I recently read Fathers and Children again and, thanks to the education that comes with schooling and with growing up and growing older, an education that hopefully makes one wiser, I think I grasped the book, and particularly the historical social and cultural context of Turgenev's classic work, much better than I did as a child.

This time I read two translations of Fathers and Children, one, an extensively revised version of Constance Garnett's translation by Elizabeth Cheresh Allen contained in Alllen's extensive The Essential Turgenev (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1994), the other a translation by Michael Pursglove published by Alma Classics (Richmond, Surrey, 2010). The former was translated from the complete works of Turgenev published between 1978 and 1986 while the latter was translated from the OGIZ edition of 1948. Both, as a result, seemed to contain variations of Turgenev's text presumably because they were translated from two different editions of Turgenev's classic.

As is always the case with translations, I was somewhat annoyed by a few of the choices the translators made. I really didn't like Allen's decision to translate Odintsova as Mrs. Odintsov (Garnett apparently translated it as Madam Odintsov) and to leave the last names of the males the same, Bazarov, for instance, as they are in Russian. I didn't like Pursglove's decision to translate Kirsanov as Mr. Kirsanov while translating Odintsova as Odintsova and leaving the other male names as they are in the original Russian text. Both decisions, to me, were unnecessary because the intelligent reader would eventually grasp how Russian name forms work as they were reading the book, just as one grasps the hybrid language of Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange as one reads through that book. Or the editor of the translation could, as often happens with translations of Russian classics or translations of contemporary works from the Russian, put a note on how Russian names work in the translation itself.

Do I have a slight favourite among the translations I read? I really don't. The two I read closely and others by Peter Carson (Penguin), Bernard Guilbert Guerney (Modern Library), Richard Freeborn (Oxford World Classics), Bernard Isaacs (Progress), Michael Katz (Norton Critical Editions), and Avril Pyman (Everyman's Library), I randomly checked them against, were excellent if sometimes annoying because of their anglicisation of Russian names (Peter for Pyotr or Petr, for instance). What tips the balance in favour of Pursglove for me is the fact that it, like Carson's, Freeborn's, and Pyman's translations, contains excellent historical and cultural notes, which are necessary if one is to grasp the social and cultural context of the great works of literature, and it contains, like many of the Alma Classics releases, an excellent twenty-four page biography and summary of Turgenev and his works which is almost worth the price of the book alone. 

Speaking of supplementary material, I very much like the Norton Critical Edition of Fathers and Children edited by Michael Katz (Father and Children (New York: Norton, Norton Critical Edition series, second edition, 2009). Like all the publications in that series Katz's edition of Fathers and Children contains extensive primary material on the book, including letters and essays from Turgenev on Fathers and Children, and enlightening essays by a host of scholars which put the book in political (Fathers and Children as reflective of mid-19th century Russian and European politics) economic (Fathers and Children and economic radicalism in 19th century Russia), and cultural (Fathers and Children as centred around generational conflicts; Fathers and Children as a pastoral/courtly/picaresque book; Fathers and Children as an updated version of the Biblical tale of the prodigal son; Fathers and Children as reworking of the Greek myth of Actaeon and Artemis; the impact of Pushkin on Fathers and Children; Fathers and Children as influenced by Hegelian dialectics, the role of women and daughters in Fathers and Children; Bazarov as inherently ambiguous) contexts.

By the way, translations of Turgenev's Fathers and Children just keep on coming in the twenty-first century. In 2022 the New York Review Books published a new translation of the work by retired haematologist Nicolas Pasternak Slater, the son of Lydia Pasternak Slater, chemist, translator, and sister of the famous poet, memoirist, and fiction writer Boris Pasternak, and his wife Maya Slater, retired teacher of French literature at Queen Mary University in London University, both of whom have extensive translation experience. I look forward to taking a look at it.