Caleb Crain

For Sale

Don’t worry, capitalism has not tainted the escutcheon of Steamboats Are Ruining Everything. No money was earned in the writing of this post. But since I have already wasted the time collecting the links, here are some books for sale on the web very cheap, including a couple that I’ve written about lately, a couple that I happily possess, and a few I still covet.

Because Soft Skull Press is being sold to Winton Shoemaker in June, they need cash now, for reasons I have not tried to fathom but which you may exploit, because David Griffith’s A Good War Is Hard to Find, which I wrote about last week, can currently be had for $9.

As semesters across the country end, university press publishers are hunkering down for the long sales-dry summer, to survive which a number of them cut prices. If you don’t have tenure or an equivalent salary, this is the time to buy hardcovers at the price of paperbacks. (All of the following are hardcovers.) The University of North Carolina Press is selling American Heretic, Dean Grodzins’s biography of Theodore Parker for $19.95; I posted a killed review of the book back in February (somehow that phrase reminds me of killed-virus vaccines). Students of Transcendentalism might also want to look into the University of Georgia Press’s white sale, where they can obtain the Complete Poems of the divinely mad Jones Very for $17.50, and the Selected Letters of Mary Moody Emerson, Waldo’s influential aunt, for $16.25. (At the University of Georgia website, you have to enter the special code “WS07” in order to get the discount.)

Meanwhile, Oxford will sell you the hardcover of Christopher Ricks’s Oxford Book of English Verse for just $15, and Yale will sell you Roy Porter and G. S. Rousseau’s Gout, a book I haven’t read but always wanted to, for $27.50, and Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825-1861, a book I leaf through often, for $14.98. (With Yale, the secret code to enter is “YSALE”.) Finally, Labyrinth Books is offering many, many not-quite-new Library of America volumes for about $16 each. (These are the only sale books in my list that aren’t in fact brand-new.)

Pattern in Material Book Culture

I’ve threatened, at various times, to say unkind words about book design. But I realized recently that it would be better for my karma to say a few kind ones. In fact, there’s a lot of book design that I like, and it isn’t easy to choose which book to praise. It occurred to me that the purest selection would be of a book I haven’t actually read, so that any fondness I might have for content would be neutralized. And I haven’t actually read (not every page, anyway) Henry Glassie’s Pattern in the Material Folk Culture of the Eastern United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968), which, according to the back flap of the dust jacket, was designed by someone named Bud Jacobs.

As a rule I’m not wild about typographic covers, but I like this one, because the wood-block lettering nods to the book’s theme of handmade culture and to its time period. You know at once that this is a book about America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, and that it’s a little nostalgic, but not fussily so. This is going to be a kind of playful remix. The size of the words corresponds to their importance: in descending order, Folk, Culture, United States, and Pattern. Also, no computer went near this cover. Every letter on it was manifestly kerned by eye and hand.

The page design for Pattern is a scholarly kind of beautiful. It geeks out, and it makes geeking out look lovely. The footnotes are at the feet of the pages, for one thing—not banished to the book’s end. This is important, because the notes are designed, as the author explains in his “Apology and Acknowledgment,” to “provide a loose bibliographical essay.” They’re a kind of anchor to the book’s text, which the author describes as an “impressionistic introduction.” The text meanders, while the footnotes march on, beneath, in an orderly regiment.

As a third design component, the book has many illustrations, one on nearly every other page, each of which comes with a leisurely caption, which in some cases amounts to a free-standing essay. In the layout above, for example, the caption discusses variations in stone walls, from New England to Kentucky, while the text focuses on the dogtrot house typical of farms in the Deep South, and a footnote directs the reader to descriptions of Alabama dogtrots in Evans and Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, among other sources.

Glassie’s book isn’t merely bibliography and synthesis, however. Some of the information comes from his own field work. He presents a photograph of a rabbit gum, a wooden box trap to catch rabbits. And he prints an interview with a man who used to “sting” fish as a boy; when he saw a fish swimming just under the ice of a creek, he would hit the ice with a mallet to stun the fish beneath, and then cut the ice and take the stunned fish out. An illustration displays the man’s sketch, from memory, of his fish stinging mallet, and a footnote assures the reader that “stinging fish is not a tall tale” by pointing to a similar recollection in print elsewhere. But I’m becoming distracted from pure design, so here’s another layout, which mixes line drawings, a photograph, and a caption to show you how to make a slingshot out of a coathanger, West Philadelphia-style.

There’s an index of fearful completeness, of everything from bacon-grease salad dressing to lobster pots. And one more clever touch worth mentioning, the book’s spine:

It’s a little hard to read, because the technology was no longer really up to spec for machine-made books in 1968, but Bud Jacobs seems to have tried to gild the book’s spine in the style of American books of the mid-nineteenth century. Jacobs stamped the spine with an indicator hand, the book’s title, and the press’s insignia. Back in the day, gilded spines were even more elaborate, in many cases, and the gilding was applied by hand. To the right are a few samples from the 1840s and 1850s, featuring a philanthropess, a waif, and a den of iniquity; a conductor; floral bouquets; the scales of justice; and an all-seeing eye.

Ghastly Sights

Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights: A History is the subject of a lovely, insightful review by Gary J. Bass in the 7 May 2007 issue of The New Republic. Last month I wrote about Gordon Wood’s New York Times review of the book, because I was taken with Hunt’s suggestion, as relayed by Wood, that novels, by teaching empathy, fostered the development of human rights. Wood was skeptical of the link, but Bass thinks it reasonable:

The point that literature has been a cause of empathy is not a new one, but it is still a good one. . . . [T]his closing of the distance between people represented, in Hunt’s view, a huge leap of the moral imagination—the sort of leap without which the idea of human rights would not have been possible.

Bass has high praise for Hunt’s book, but he notes that she hurries through the history of human rights in the nineteenth century, and therefore provides his own capsule summary of the missing years. His survey ends with the observation that a liberal reader might look back “with a certain sense of satisfaction” at the progress made between the sixteenth century and now. “Human rights is not triumphant, to be sure; but the idea is holding its own.” But then he adds a note of concern:

Yet there is one element of this era of human rights that is in retreat: print capitalism, and thus foreign press coverage. Print and capitalism are not getting along. . . . Under heavy pressure from investors, some of the country’s best newspapers have decided to go local. . . . When the suits decide to shut those [foreign] bureaus, they fritter away a hard-won achievement of centuries. They are reversing the moral gains of modern empathy.

This adds a new wrinkle to the speculation that has been worrying me, namely, that as novel reading gives way to the enjoyment of streaming, visual media, we may no longer be able to take for granted that people will feel the kinds of empathy they used to. Newspaper executives shut their foreign bureaus, of course, for the same reason they shut down their papers’ book-review sections: they have to cut something, because profits are down, and they suspect their readers won’t mind their absence.

Bass’s review provoked another speculation in me. In passing, he jokes that public executions and public state-administered torture were the eighteenth-century equivalent of “the slasher movies of our time” in their capacity to draw an audience. He writes that Declaration of Independence-signer Benjamin Rush

denounced public punishment for its attempt to block the public from empathizing with the sufferer. For Rush, it was crucial to realize that even convicts “possess souls and bodies composed of the same materials as those of our friends and relations.”

It’s intriguing that an eighteenth-century human rights activist (to describe Rush loosely) was concerned that the spectacle of punishment would deter empathy. Rush, a doctor, thought and wrote about the human nervous system, so his interest in the problem is understandable. Rush’s comment reminds me of Charles Dickens’s famous description of the “wickedness and levity” of the London crowd that gathered to watch the 13 November 1849 hanging of the husband-and-wife murderer team Frederick and Maria Manning:

Fightings, faintings, whistlings, imitations of Punch, brutal jokes, tumultuous demonstrations of indecent delight when swooning women were dragged out of the crowd by the police, with their dresses disordered, gave a new zest to the general entertainment. When the sun rose brightly—as it did—it gilded thousands upon thousands of upturned faces, so inexpressibly odious in their brutal mirth or callousness, that a man had cause to feel ashamed of the shape he wore, and to shrink from himself, as fashioned in the image of the Devil. When the two miserable creatures who attracted all this ghastly sight about them were turned quivering into the air, there was no more emotion, no more pity, no more thought that two immortal souls had gone to judgement, no more restraint in any of the previous obscenities, than if the name of Christ had never been heard in this world.

The novelist, too, worried about the moral effects that such a spectacle had on its observers. (Herman Melville, as it happens, was also watching that day, and wrote in his journal, more laconically, that “The mob was brutish.”) I’m wondering, I suppose, whether, having been taught by novels to value empathy, reformers recognized such spectacles as enemies of empathy and therefore sought to quarantine them, and whether we risk something in allowing them to multiply.

While on the subject, I ought to correct a misstatement. I wrote, a couple of weeks ago, that David Griffith’s A Good War Is Hard to Find “starts by comparing the novel and movie versions of the torture scenes in Deliverance.” Not so; that was my misunderstanding of an email from its publisher, Richard Nash of Soft Skull Press, who was kind enough to send me a copy. Now that I’ve read it, I can say that Griffith does compare the novel and movie versions of Deliverance, but his comparison is in chapter 4, not chapter 1:

In the film, the scene lasts only a few minutes, whereas in the book, narrated in the first person, the whole episode lasts for nearly thirty pages. . . . Dickey’s book forces us to meditate on the ugliness of violence through images that are not neutral and objective but that call attention to the way violence, as Simone Weil argues in her revolutionary essay on The Iliad, can make a human being into an object. . . . Dickey captures the language of empathy that compels us to see the violence as despicable, not funny. . . . There is no way to flinch, to turn away, or close our eyes to it; there is no soundtrack to dull the senses.

Griffith doesn’t think the movie of Deliverance irresponsible in its handling of violence; his implied comparison here is actually between both versions of Deliverance and Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, which he finds “ultimately destructive.”

The distinction between novelistic description and filmed depiction of torture is not, however, Griffith’s main concern. What he’s after is the distinction between representations of evil that are merely entertaining and those that allow the reader or viewer to understand his own complicity—his sin, actually, because Griffith is a Catholic, and his book is not only a meditation on the roots of the Abu Ghraib scandal in American culture but also an essay in theology. It’s an idiosyncratic, highly personal essay in theology, written with an appealingly broad yet lightly worn erudition, citing sources as disparate as Flannery O’Connor and Wayne Koestenbaum, but it is theology nonetheless. I was reminded, in reading it, of how rich the vocabulary of serious theology is, and how infrequently it is spoken in the public sphere on such topics, about which it has much to say. As a lapsed believer, I couldn’t follow Griffith in all of his arguments. I agree, for example, that American culture is evasive on the subject of its own potential for evil, but I’m not sure that an awareness of one’s potential for evil is necessarily salutary for the soul. I also don’t think that the best way to re-introduce moral questions into the legal sphere is by a turn to religion, and I’m not convinced that an improved understanding of what it means to be a Christian nation would bring about the outrage and energy for reform needed in America on the subject of torture—though of course I’d be very happy if it did. Griffith’s is nonetheless a tremendously likable book, and it was uncanny how often I agreed with his aesthetic judgments—thumbs up for Blue Velvet, and down for Andy Warhol. I found myself wanting to push Muriel Spark on him, if by some chance he hadn’t already read her.

A final, utterly miscellaneous, but not altogether unrelated note: While reading J. Gabriel Boylan’s brilliant and quirky essay on Vangelis’s soundtrack to Blade Runner in a new journal called The Crier—an essay that prompted me to wonder, “If you Googled for William Blake, Isaac Asimov, and Frank Lloyd Wright, would you land on the Wikipedia page for Blade Runner?” only to discover, no, you land on Boylan’s essay—I found myself recalling the machine in the movie that distinguishes humans from replicants through a series of questions about empathy—in one case, empathy for an animal in pain—as if it were the most distinctive trait in human nature.

Are you aware how fast your vehicle was going, sir?

If you have read, over at Paul Collins’s Weekend Stubble, that in 1903 the speed of thirty miles per hour earned a car the epithet “scorcher” in the New York Times, and that the speed limit in Long Branch, New Jersey, was in that year six miles per hour, you may have wondered how, in the time before radar, such laws were enforced.

As it happens, that question was still novel enough in 1926 for Upton Sinclair to put the answer in the opening pages of his novel Oil!. It is 1912, and the hero, Bunny Ross, age thirteen, is being driven through southern California by his father, who is going fifty miles per hour in a thirty-mile-per-hour zone. Suddenly they fall into “A speed-trap!”:

Oho! An adventure to make a boy’s heart jump! . . . It must be a dreadful thing to be a “speed-cop”, and have the whole human race for your enemy! To stoop to disreputable actions—hiding yourself in bushes, holding a stop-watch in hand, and with a confederate at a certain measured distance down the road, also holding a stop-watch, and with a telephone line connecting the two of them, so they could keep tab on motorists who passed! They had even invented a device of mirrors, which could be set up by the roadside, so that one man could get the flash of a car as it passed, and keep the time. This was a trouble the motorist had to keep incessant watch for; at the slightest sign of anything suspicious, he must slow up quickly—and yet not too quickly—no, just a natural slowing, such as any man would employ if he should discover that he had accidentally, for the briefest moment, exceeded ever so slightly the limits of complete safety in driving.

The technology of speed traps may have changed, but it seems that the psychology of the driver suddenly aware that he is under surveillance is one of the eternal and unchanging verities of the universe.

Turgenev: The Translation Game

Over the winter, Peter and I attended all three installments of Tom Stoppard’s Coast of Utopia, in the course of which I learned a great deal about the literary history of 19th-century Russia and international anarchism, and came to the realization that what I really want to do with my life is dress like Ivan Turgenev.

Despairing of that, however, I have settled for reading some of his books. At the Strand I happened onto a $10 Cresset Library edition of A Sportsman’s Notebook from 1950, in Charles and Natasha Hepburn’s translation, which I enjoyed, even in its occasional lushness:

It was a marvellous picture: around the fires a circle of reddish, reflected light trembled and seemed to die away into the darkness; at times the flame blazed up and scattered swift gleams beyond the edges of the circle; a thin tongue of light licked the bare willow-twigs and disappeared in a flash— long, sharp shadows, bursting in for a moment in their turn, ran right up to the fires: it was the war of darkness with light.

There are many such passages, and for them to work, there has to be a consistency of tone. My sense was that they did work, that the Hepburns’ intermittent florid touches did not damage the essential delicacy of the prose. I moved on to a Novel Library edition of First Love and Rudin, also from 1950, mostly because I’m the sort of book-collecting aesthete who likes the dainty Novel Library editions, but also because Isaiah Berlin had translated First Love. Alec Brown did Rudin, and I liked his translation even better than Berlin’s, if that’s possible. To be honest, though, I was only reading for pleasure, and wasn’t too worried about translations.

But then I came to Fathers and Sons, and for some reason, I grew fussy. You would think that determining which is the best translation of a foreign-language classic would be the sort of task the internet would be good at. But it isn’t, really; there’s no such category at Metacritic. Not even searching a scholarly archive like JSTOR helped, because the academics make a point of not knowing about translations, lest anyone think they read foreign-language books in anything but the original. So I stayed up late one night, consulting various versions of the opening page of Fathers and Sons, by means of Amazon’s Search Inside function and Google Books, trying to figure out which translation I wanted to read. By now I knew what I liked about Turgenev — the unobtrusively telling detail, the mild irony, the as-if-overheard quality of the dialogue. I liked Constance Garnett’s version of the opening page, but for some reason I had it in my head that since this was Turgenev’s best-known work, there had to have been some improvement in the translation of it since hers. I ended up choosing Bernard Guilbert Guerney’s, which the Modern Library published in 1961.

Now I should say up front that this is not a tale with a villain. Guerney’s is by no means a poor translation. But it’s sort of a loud one, by which I mean that the reader is often made aware that a translator has translated it. This began to bother me in chapter 6, in an exchange between the hero’s uncle, Pavel Petrovich Kirsanov, and the nihilist Bazarov about science:

“Physics is your particular study, isn’t that so?” Pavel Petrovich inquired in his turn.

“Physics, yes; and natural sciences in general.”

“They say the Germans have achieved great success in that field of late.”

“Yes, we could go to school to the Nemtzi for such things.”

Pavel Petrovich had used the term Germans in lieu of the common Nemtzi [tongue-tied ones] out of irony which, however, had been entirely wasted. (Trans. Guerney)

I found this unwieldy, not least because of the bracketed annotation “[tongue-tied ones],” whose relevance I couldn’t quite see. If Nemtzi was the common word for “Germans,” why hadn’t it been translated as “Germans”? Guerney’s rendering required the reader to pause and re-read the dialogue, replacing the word “Germans” with some sort of mental notation along the lines of ironic term for Germans that might be used by a proud dandy who’s been living too long in the provinces. Unfair to the reader! I went online and consulted Garnett. Her version:

“Is your special study physics?” Pavel Petrovitch in his turn inquired.

“Physics, yes; and natural science in general.”

“They say the Teutons of late have had great success in that line.”

“Yes; the Germans are our teachers in it,” Bazarov answered carelessly.

The word Teutons instead of Germans Pavel Petrovitch had used with ironical intention; none noticed it, however. (Trans. Garnett)

Teutons! Of course! English already has an ironic term for Germans that might be used by a proud dandy who’s been living too long in the provinces. Why hadn’t Guerney used it? My suspicion: he wanted to show off that he knew that “Nemtzi” literally meant “tongue-tied ones,” and to suggest that this etymology contributed to the Turgenev’s irony in the scene. But a translator’s showing off shouldn’t interrupt the flow of a scene. I ordered a copy of Garnett’s Fathers and Sons, also published by Modern Library, at once.

But before it could arrive, I discovered that the Novel Library also had an edition of the novel. Powerless against my bibliophilia, and having happy memories of Isaiah Berlin and Alec Brown, I ordered it, too. It turned out to have been translated by someone named George Reavey, who translated the dialogue thus:

‘Is physics your chief occupation then?’ Paul Petrovich inquired in turn.

‘Physics, yes; and the natural sciences in general.’

‘They say that the Teutons, of late, have done wonders in this domain.’

‘Yes, the Germans are our masters there,’ Bazarov replied casually.

Paul Petrovich had used the word ‘Teutons’ instead of ‘Germans’ with ironical intent, but this had passed unnoticed. (Trans. Reavey)

I liked this even better. There was no nonsense about “Nemtzi,” and the dialogue had a natural air that it didn’t in Garnett. To some extent this is a matter of taste, and also of one’s theory of translation. I happen to think that it’s not only fair play but necessary to re-order the words of a sentence when translating, particularly when translating from a language with genders and cases, such as Russian, to one without them, such as English. But such things give people like Milan Kundera the heebie-jeebies, FYI. (I wrote an article on this once, for Lingua Franca.)

Philistine that I am, I was entirely capable of choosing to read George Reavey’s version because the Novel Library edition was cuter than the others, even if I hadn’t thought the translation was better, too. In any case, I started the novel over, from the beginning, and read happily away in Reavey’s Turgenev, about the poignant-because-a-bit-ridiculous affection of Nicholas Petrovich for his son Arcady, about Arcady’s hero-worship of the somewhat brutish Bazarov, about the impossible dignity of Arcady’s uncle Pavel Petrovitch. And all was well, I was very happy, until I came to Madame Odintzov.

Madame Odintzov was a little older than Arcady; she had turned twenty-nine, but in her presence he felt himself a schoolboy, a young student, as though the difference of years between them were much greater. . . . Her nose, like that of most Russians, was a trifle thick, and her complexion matt; for all that, Arcady decided that he had never met such an entrancing woman. (Trans. Reavey)

“Matt”? As a surface texture for a photograph, yes, but as a complexion on a human being, I couldn’t even picture it. But in a proximity dangerous for a compulsive like me, I now had two other translations for comparison.

Madame Odintsov was a little older than Arkady— she was twenty-nine— but in her presence he felt himself a schoolboy, a little student, so that the difference in age between them seemed of more consequence. . . . Her nose— like almost all Russian noses— was a little thick; and her complexion was not perfectly clear; Arkady made up his mind, for all that, that he had never before met such an attractive woman. (Trans. Garnett)

She was but a little older than Arcadii— going on twenty-nine— yet he felt like a schoolboy, like a freshman in her presence, just as if the difference in their ages were far more considerable. . . . Her nose— like the noses of almost all Russians— was a trifle bulbous, and her complexion was not altogether clear; for all that Arcadii decided that he had never encountered a woman so alluring. (Trans. Guerney)

I didn’t like “bulbous” at all, and I didn’t think Madame Odintsov would, either. Nor did I like “freshman,” because the word seemed too specific to American society. And how old was she, anyway— twenty-nine or almost twenty-nine? But “not perfectly clear” seemed a more plausible adjective for a woman’s complexion than “matt”; in the suggestion of a flaw in Madame Odintsov’s beauty, Turgenev might have intended a touch of pathos. And to say that the difference in their ages seemed of more consequence was subtler than to say that it seemed greater. So perhaps Reavey’s wasn’t the platonic ideal of translation after all.

I went back to it nonetheless, though saddled, now, with the knowledge that I could at any time compare versions. Which I did. Here, for example, is another problematic passage, involving a colloquial phrase, in a discussion that Bazarov and Arcady have about Madame Odintsov:

   ‘A certain gentleman was just telling me that the lady in question was— “quite hot” but he looks a fool. Well? What is your opinion? Is she really— “quite hot?” ‘
   ‘I completely fail to grasp the allusion,’ Arcady replied.
   ‘Come, come! What innocence!’
   . . . ‘Well?’ he asked when they were out in the street. ‘Are you still of the opinion that she is— “quite hot?” ‘
   ‘One can never tell! Just look at the way she has put herself on ice!’ Bazarov retorted . . . (Trans. Reavey)

   “A gentleman has just been talking to me about that lady; he said, ‘She’s— oh, fie! fie!’ but I fancy the fellow was a fool. What do you think, what is she!— oh, fie! fie!”
   “I don’t quite understand that definition,” answered Arkady.
   “Oh, my! What innocence!”
   . . . “Well?” he said to him in the street; “are you still of the same opinion— that she’s . . .”
   “Who can tell? See how correct she is!” retorted Bazarov . . . (Trans. Garnett)

   “A certain high-born gent was telling me just now that this lady is ‘My-my-my!’ But then the gentleman himself seems to be a nincompoop. Well, is she truly ‘My-my-my!’ in your opinion?”
   “I don’t fully understand that definition,” Arcadii retorted.
   “Come, now! What an innocent fellow!”
  . . . “Well?” Arcadii questioned him when they were outside. “Is it still your opinion that she’s ‘My-my-my’?”
   “Really, who knows what she’s like! Just see what an icicle she has turned herself into!” Bazarov retorted . . . (Trans. Guerney)

There’s no way to win, in translating a colloquialism. A rendering that sounds successfully up-to-date now may sound like, well, “fie, fie,” a century later. But I think Reavey has the best of it here, because he’s the only one whose rendering of Arcady’s indignant retort (“I completely fail to grasp the allusion”) conveys that he of course does grasp it but is rebuking Bazarov’s vulgarity, and because Reavey manages to save the specificity of the ice imagery in the last line (Guerney’s icicle doesn’t quite sound idiomatic to me). Here’s another:

Madame Odintzov continued to treat him like a younger brother: she seemed to appreciate his good qualities and youthful simplicity— and no more. (Trans. Reavey)

Madame Odintsov treated him as though he were a younger brother; she seemed to appreciate his good-nature and youthful simplicity and that was all. (Trans. Garnett)

Odintsova was still treating him as a younger brother: apparently what she appreciated about him was the geniality and simpleheartedness of youth— and that was all. (Trans. Guerney)

Reavey seems to have fallen into an error: if Mme. Odintsov appreciates Arcady’s good qualities, there can’t be anything worth appreciating that she has overlooked. No doubt Garnett’s “good-nature” and Guerney’s “geniality” are closer to what Turgenev meant. (Let me confess here that I can neither speak nor read Russian; all of my inferences about accuracy are just that, inferences, made by parallax.) And for the sake of justice, here’s a round that Guerney seems to win. Bazarov is falling into cynicism about the supposed improvement in the lives of serfs:

‘As I was walking yesterday by the side of a fence, I heard some local lads bawling, instead of some old song, this new refrain: The appointed hour is drawing nigh,
And love comes welling to the heart. . . . That’s progress for you.’ (Trans. Reavey)

“Yesterday I was walking under the fence, and I heard the peasant boys here, instead of some old ballad, bawling a street song. That’s what progress is. (Trans. Garnett)

“I was going past a fence yesterday and I heard some of the local peasant boys, but instead of singing some old song they were bawling the latest cheap hit: ‘Now the faithful time is coming, the heart feels it is in love.’ Well, there’s your progress. (Trans. Guerney)

When I read this sentence in Reavey’s version, I was baffled. I couldn’t figure out why Bazarov was mocking the song he heard. The lyrics were mediocre, but it wasn’t at all clear why they served as an occasion for an ironic remark on progress. Garnett provides the necessary cultural information— namely, that the boys are singing a trashy pop song, instead of a traditional folk ballad— but she leaves the song itself out, and its words matter, because Bazarov, given his plight at this stage in the story, probably found in them a further reason for cynicism. Of the three translators, here only Guerney fulfills all his duties, sketching out enough of the cultural context for us to understand the point of Bazarov’s sarcasm, and giving us a version of the jingle itself. But since, in the end, I did like Reavey’s version the best, I want to end on one of his triumphs. Katya and Arcady are discussing poetry:

   ‘I don’t like Heine,’ Katya said, with her eyes indicating the book in Arcady’s hands, ‘when he is either sarcastic or plaintive. I prefer his pensive and nostalgic moods.’
   ‘And I prefer his gibing tone,’ Arcady remarked.
   ‘That’s the residue of your sardonic turn of mind.’
   (‘Residue!’ Arcady thought. ‘If only Bazarov could hear that!’) (Trans. Reavey)

   “I don’t like Heine,” said Katya, glancing towards the book which Arkady was holding in his hands, “either when he laughs or when he weeps; I like him when he’s thoughtful and melancholy.”
   “And I like him when he laughs,” remarked Arkady.
   “That’s the relics left in you of your old satirical tendencies.” (“Relics!” thought Arkady— “if Bazarov had heard that?”) (Trans. Garnett)

   “I have no love for Heine,” Katya spoke up, indicating with her eyes the book Arcadii was holding, “either when he laughs or when he weeps; I like him when he’s pensive and melancholy.”
   “But I like him when he laughs,” Arcadii remarked.
   “That’s because of the persistent old traces of the satirical tendencies in you.” (“Old traces!” Arcadii reflected. If Bazarov were to hear that!) (Trans. Guerney)

“Residue” is a brilliant choice, because it has a little frisson of the chemistry lab to it, which would indeed have impressed the scientific Bazarov, and it suggests that Arcady is one of Katya’s experiments, a pleasantly ironic attitude for her to have toward him, who is only just beginning to take her seriously.