Yuri Andrukhovych's thirteen essays are an incisive attempt at clarifying his personal and Ukraine's intra- and intercultural identities, covering a span of 100 years between the beginning of WWI in 1914 and the beginning of the unraveling of Ukraine in the fall and spring of 2014. In his travelogue-cum-philosophical quest, Andrukhovych gets somewhat lost in his “final territory,” which does not seem to be really final, but is more like a stop-over in his intellectual travels. Within the universe of his essays, Andrukhovych is casting about between autobiographical events, set mosaic-like in his longest opening essay “The Central-Eastern Revision,” and the other twelve “Culturological and Political Essays.” Where does Ukraine come from, what is Ukraine, where precisely is it located, are there distinctive/trademark Ukrainian personal and national (ethnic) identities, where is it heading, where am I myself on this vertiginous cultural trip?—These are the key questions Andrukhovych poses and attempts to answer in a semi-fairy tale manner.
To review a translation, the reviewer needs to be bilingual (in the refined, linguistic sense of the word), knowledgeable about the subject matter of the piece under review, well-versed in established translation strategies, and skilled at applying them in practice herself. S/he must also have a vivid imagination, a creative mind, a sense of empathy, and, last but not least, a sense of humor and humility to absorb not infrequent reviewees’ responses. In short, such a reviewer needs to be “a translator's translator.” I feel obliged to make these points because most of the translation reviews that I come across in scholarly US periodicals turn out to be the reviewers’ comments on the translation text as if it were the original, with very little, if any, comparative analysis of the actual original and its translation/s. To quote Lawrence Venuti, it is “belletristic” reviewing. But the process of reviewing translated imaginative prose, to say nothing of poetry, is multidimensional, multitrack and time-consuming.
An easy option for a translation reviewer is to read the English translation, looking for any infelicitous turns of phrase, and then go back to the original to figure out why and how they originated. This approach should never be a “gotcha” exercise—it is simple professional attention to detail. It is also a matter of professional ethics to not just find awkward stretches of language but also to suggest one's own improvements. Such a search has revealed few mistranslations or awkward phrasings. To give a couple of examples, “ … not a single spectre of the current political anti-heroes fails to disturb with its presence … ” (16) should have been “not a single specter disturbs them with its presence,” as the meaning in the original is the opposite of that in the translation; or the beginning of the sentence “Perhaps might it be precisely here … where we will be able to do something similar more frequently?” (63) should be “It may well be (precisely) here … that we will be able … ” with a period, instead of a question mark, at the end.
It is intensive reading of two texts in parallel (simultaneously), though, that usually reveals most discrepancies between translation and original. In this case, these are also few. For example, the adjective “лункий” was mistaken for the noun “лунка,” which has yielded the insignificant mistranslation “this hole of emptiness” (72) instead of “this echoing (or resonating) emptiness.” A translator sometimes gets hypnotized by the text, failing to see beyond the familiar-looking or sounding words, and this is not just the all-too-familiar case of the “translator's false friends.” Mistaking “the art of training a bear” for “the art of dressing a bear” (74) in the English translation is grammatically correct and may sound reasonable in the given context until you closely compare the two texts.
The biggest challenges in Andrukhovych's essays, however, are cultural allusions (such as to Eudes of Deuil, wisely elided on page 73), which the translators comment on wisely in sparing endnotes; metalinguistic explications that might confuse the reader, such as “ … ego zarezalo tramvaem (13) … . This is an impersonal form with the neuter ‘o’ past-tense ending … ”; or “ … this Cyrillic ‘C’ flipped inversely, which itself demonstrates ‘vicinity’ … ” (73); and something hardly ever translatable—the culture- and language-specific chains of associations, the sound symbolism, and the natural rhythm of the language being translated. If the original and the translation are read out loud, Andrukhovych's refined but punchy Ukrainian text feels like crushed ice in the mouth, for which the Anglo-Saxon and Latin word roots in the translation are but a bland match. Languages happen, however, and the translators in this case did a great job.
To conclude, the author's intellectual journey via his essays is not complete; it comes to a halt in March 2014. This leaves a five-year gap between then and now—the very beginning of 2019, when Ukraine and its people are going through the harshest political, economic, and cultural crisis since the end of WW II. One would like to hope that Andrukhovych is not permanently lost in his “final territory” of faux post-modernism, self-deprecatingly dissected in his essay “Time and Place, or my Final Territory” (80–87), and that he will produce a sequel to this highly enjoyable, although, in places, disturbing, selection of ruminations. At this point in time, the current collection will serve particularly well as a resource for Ukrainian culture courses at US colleges and it will also be a compulsive read for the general, intellectually alert public. In the meantime, we should feel grateful to the translators for making Andrukhovych's incisive essays available, for the first time and in one place, to English-speaking audiences.
