Translating the Untranslatable
Our second #TranslationThursday post brings you an excerpt from Between Dog and Wolf, a novel by Sahsa Sokolov. In honor of of Russian Literature Week, we have shared an excerpts from titles published in our Russian Library series.
Russian Literature Week ends tomorrow with an event celebrating Russian literature at Book Culture in New York City, featuring The Man Who Couldn’t Die author Olga Slavnikova.
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Between Dog and Wolf by Sasha Sokolov. Translated by Alexander Boguslawski
Between Dog and Wolf, originally published in Russian in 1980, is a novel built on word play and literary allusions, with plot, that most easily of conveyed elements, hidden well in the background. Those very techniques brought comparisons to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and whispers that the novel was untranslatable. A topic the author and translator discussed with Michel Martin on NPR’s All Things Considered after its English language publication in 2016.
Read “Note V” from Between Dog and Wolf, which you can also hear being read in part in an NPR interview.
Want to read more? You can find more excerpts from our Russian Library series on ISSUU.
