Vol. 19 No. 20 · 16 October 1997
pages 20-21 | 4185 words
Sympathy for the Devil
Michael Wood
- The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor
Picador, 367 pp, £20.00, August 1997, ISBN 0 330 35133 8
- The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
Penguin, 412 pp, £7.99, May 1997, ISBN 0 14 118014 5
In an early chapter of Mikhail Bulgakov’s funny and frightening novel, The Master and Margarita, written between 1928 and 1940 and now available in four different English translations, a character loses his head – literally. He slips on a Moscow street and is hit by a tram. His last thought is ‘Can this be?’ and his severed head then bounces away across the cobblestones. The question and the grisly performance of an answer are characteristic of this remarkable book, which Bulgakov described as his ‘sunset novel’. He was writing it, without any hope or thought of publication, in a time and place where arbitrary arrests and disappearances were a common occurrence, and yet where people managed to devise for themselves, as they had to, a fable of normality. Bulgakov confronts this fable with a further fable, registers the fantastic nature of his historical world by conflating it with inventive variants on more traditional forms of fantasy, of the kind we may associate with Hoffmann or Gogol. The man who loses his head has also met the devil an hour or so earlier – a busy day for a man described as being ‘unaccustomed to unusual happenings’. When one of the devil’s assistants says to a young woman that he has been sent to see her ‘regarding a certain small matter’, she understands him immediately, albeit wrongly. Obviously he has come to arrest her. What a relief when she learns that he hasn’t; better the devil than the secret police.
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Letters
Vol. 19 No. 21 · 30 October 1997
From David Longley
‘Both critics,’ Michael Wood writes in his review of the translations of The Master and Margarita (LRB, 16 October), ‘say that Bulgakov knew that manuscripts do burn, as he had burned some of his own’ – a reference, presumably, to Bulgakov’s burning of his diary in 1929. Bulgakov himself probably had in mind Pushkin’s half-successful attempt to burn the compromising Chapter 10 of Eugene Onegin, an attempt which has left us with only one complete verse and only the first four lines of most of the others. But enough remained to hang him had the authorities been so inclined – and enough was lost to give his readers chagrin. But there is a further twist to the story that Michael Wood does not mention and one which, in happier circumstances, Bulgakov would have enjoyed. Although Bulgakov burned his diary, the KGB had, unknown to him, already photocopied it and stowed the copy away in their archive, where it was found, sixty years after the burning, by Vitaly Shentalinsky. A course of events confirming Bulgakov’s view of the devil as a ‘force forever intending evil, yet ever doing good’.
David Longley
University of Aberdeen
From Conrad Cork
Am I alone in finding the two translations Michael Wood reviews so unpleasant? Much of the time they read as if the translators only had a second-hand knowledge of English. Even allowing for the fact that familiarity acclimatises, I am much happier with Michael Glenny’s 1967 translation. At hundreds of points it is Glenny who scores. Simple things like the opening chapter being called in Glenny ‘Never Talk to Strangers’ – the natural form of the parental admonition – whereas Penguin’s translators, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, give ‘Never Talk with Strangers’. There is also the apparently perverse word choice of both the Penguin and the Picador versions: ‘a cavalry ala’ against Glenny’s ‘a squadron of cavalry’, for example (the only meaning for the word ‘ala’ in both my paper and CD-ROM dictionaries is ‘a membranous outgrowth on a fruit’). Which reads better: ‘how about the price of a drink’ (Glenny) or ‘how about a little pint pot’ (Pevear and Volokhonsky)? And how about ‘bending double’ (Glenny) as opposed to ‘mugging’ (Pevear and Volokhonsky)? Mugging?
Conrad Cork
Leicester
Vol. 19 No. 23 · 27 November 1997
From Val Lyubarsky
David Longley’s description (Letters, 30 October) of ‘Pushkin’s half-successful attempt to burn the compromising Chapter 10 of Eugene Onegin is probably misleading to the non-Russian reader. Pushkin was fully successful in his act of burning, but he ciphered most of what he burned. (Nabokov convincingly speculates that this was done later from memory.) Only the first third of the chapter was ever written. In 1904 the cryptogram surfaced and in 1910 was deciphered. This makes one doubt that Bulgakov had this – or any specific case – in mind when he wrote that ‘manuscripts don’t burn.’
Val Lyubarsky
Brooklyn, New York
