The translators of Alindarka’s Children, our May Book Club selection, had good reason to think of the text as an enormous challenge. Alherd Bacharevič’s subversive take on Hansel and Gretel is written in a musical tangle of two languages: Russian and Belarusian, addressing the conflict of Belarus’ languages in a powerful tale of intimidation, suppression, and postcolonial linguistics. Now released in a brilliant medley of English and Scots, the Anglophone edition adds new dynamism to the politics and cultures at work, immersing the reader in the complexities of what language tells and what it holds back. In the following transcription of a live interview, translators Jim Dingley and Petra Reid discuss their process, the pitfalls of classifying a language as “vulnerable”, and the creative potentials of dissonance.
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Daljinder Johal (DJ): What were your first impressions of Alindarka’s Children? And what did you consider when making your respective decisions to work on its translation?
Jim Dingley (JD): Alindarka’s Children was published in 2014, I first read it in 2015, and my immediate reaction was: how on earth could anybody even begin to translate this? Then, when I was in Edinburgh with Petra, another Belarusian author began talking about this book with great enthusiasm. It suddenly occurred to me then that there is much being said about Scots being a language—distinct from English—and therefore a source of real national identity. With Scotland’s movement towards independence, it seemed to me that we could try to do something by contrasting English with Scots. I found working with Petra very rewarding as well, because she had an innate feeling for what we were trying to do, putting Scots up against “standard” English.
I think this adds a whole new dimension to the book, which is what any translator does when the process is not purely technical. You’re trying to get the sense of something. When you’re translating a book written in two languages, you can only get to the dynamic between them by introducing some realia from a country where another two languages are spoken. That’s why, in Alindarka’s Children, you feel as though you’re both in Scotland and Belarus at times.
Actually, I hope people experience some confusion with this book. It sounds very strange to say, but I think a lot of language is about dissimulation, confusion, leaving the reader to work it out at every stage.
Petra Reid (PR): Jim and I had very different experiences, because he speaks and writes Belarusian, while I have no knowledge of that language. So when I was reading the novel, I was reading Jim’s translation—that was the first time I’d heard of the novel or the author. In a way, I was reading it through Jim’s filter, and in that, it gained the context of a relationship between the English and the Belarusian.
I also came to it as a third party, as a Scot who doesn’t speak Scots—I was frank with everybody from the beginning, I warned them! I’ve got a strong accent, but I don’t speak Scots. The translation, and my work on it, is a personal explanation of my attitude towards Scots.
DJ: Could you expand on how that exploration went and what you got from it?
PR: What I like to do when I’m reading a translation is to try and imagine how the original sounds in my head, so even if you don’t have the exact vocabulary, you can approach the rhythm of it, and different nuances become available.
That’s what I found interesting about Jim’s translation; I was beginning to feel the Belarusian nuances through Jim. It was a two-way mirror, because Jim and I have our own dynamics in terms of how we speak English, and Jim has his own dynamic in terms of how he speaks Belarusian. It was a multidisciplinary, 3-D process, holding all these nuances in your head and trying to find a way to express that on the page.
DJ: Alindarka’s Children is politically, culturally, and linguistically challenging, and presumably quite fascinating to translate in that way. But reading it aloud and paying attention to words, flow, and rhythm—was there anything about the style that drew your interest and challenged you as a translator?
JD: Very much so. The author starts from the sounds you can hear every day on the streets of Minsk, or any other place where everybody speaks Russian—but most of them have a funny accent. There are very few people who speak pure Belarusian; most of the country speaks this mixture between the two, and Alhierd Bacharevič tries to reflect those variances of speech in the text. That was very difficult to capture, and I think ultimately impossible because of the tools of English itself. No matter what, the words will be heard in a different way.
DJ: Jim, I want to return to what you said about wanting the reader to be confused. In one of your previous interviews about what you like most in the translation, you said it was “perfect readability.” Could you expand on what you meant by this? And did you seek to achieve that in your translation?
JD: I define perfect readability as a text you can read, but always with an awareness that something is going to be odd throughout. You will discover odd things as you proceed because they are part of the book’s content. I can refer to two particular moments in the novel when it feels very strange relegated in English or Scots. When you go to a hotel, for example, you have to pay extra for loo paper; that’s unheard of here, but it’s a normal practice in what used to be the Soviet Union. Also, there aren’t any squares in Scotland—to my knowledge—that are adorned with a statue of Lenin. But you have to ascribe that because it’s in the book. So, people immediately get a dissonance between what the book is saying and the language they’re reading it in—it’s unavoidable.
But perfect readability doesn’t mean a lack of effort on the part of the reader; readers have to make an effort with any translation. We did try to add words in a glossary, but it’s by no means complete, and sometimes you have to guess or be comfortable with not knowing. That’s what a Russian reader would have to do with the original when getting through the Belarusian parts. Perfect readability is providing the same experience, getting the reader to make the same efforts.
PR: I actually didn’t set out to confuse or challenge the reader; primarily, I wanted to colour in and to entertain. My hope is that, for an English reader—for any reader—if something is not immediately apparent, you can just to keep going. Then, you can go back if there’s been a particular word that’s really bothering you, like houghmagandie [fornication]—pretty sure that one is in the glossary, it is quite a juicy one.
The glossary is quite entertaining in itself. In fact, the dissonance between the Scots word and its English equivalent is already entertaining. I’m not setting out to trip somebody up, because this distance is enjoyable. I’m happy with it being quite surreal.
DJ: I’m interested in the power dynamics within language and how that elicits certain emotions. In the novel’s introduction, you state that English and Scots are chosen for this novel based on the UNESCO Atlas of Endangered Languages, where both Belarusian and Scots are classified as vulnerable. What do you both think of the word ‘vulnerable’ to describe these languages in relation to their dominant languages?
JD: It’s very easy to talk about Belarusian as vulnerable, but it raises a number of questions about what language is and its significance to people. At my most cynical, I tend to question this connection between language and the heart of a people. I have no idea what that means really. It’s also part of the relationship between colonised and coloniser. I’m sure we’re all aware that people advocate the use of Belarusian to demonstrate that they are not Russians—that is a feeling that has been suppressed for decades, but it has been getting stronger since Belarus gained independence in 1991.
But now, Belarus is properly occupied by Russia, and I can’t imagine that there are any legal ways of promoting Belarusian; it survives on the margins. Then, along comes a novel like this, where, as the first article that was written about it states: “No one comes away from this novel uninsulted.” Bacharevič aims his barbs at everybody—the Belarusian nationalists as well as Russian ones. It’s a very specific, personal situation, and one that’s fascinated me since 1966.
PR: To go back to the UNESCO definition of a vulnerable language, who chose that word—vulnerable? They have chosen to describe it as vulnerable. So there is a whole political decision made in the use of that word, because it’s an emotive word, inciting a protective instinct.
Well, what is Scots vulnerable to? It’s not active repression, because we’ve got a specific TV channel in Scotland, Alba, devoted to it. When I was young, Scots was marginalised, but something similar occurs in nearly every language: you have one for the playground, and another for the home when your parents tell you to speak properly. But now, Scots or Gaelic are being positively promoted by the authorities—so they are not vulnerable in that sense.
I’m going to have to say the unsayable: perhaps they are vulnerable to people just not being that interested. Like Jim, I have cynical feelings about how people treat language as definitively good. It’s good to speak your language, it’s good to keep preserve the traditions, but is it realistic?
DJ: I understand that you used Jim’s translation of Russian and Belarusian literary references to explore Scots poetry in different cultural contexts. Could you share a little bit about your process of selecting the poems and songs?
PR: I went quite deep actually, and it was an immersive experience. The amount of research I did ranged from Gavin Douglas to Irvine Welsh—the full gamut of what has been spoken and written in Scotland over the past six hundred years.
It took me a while to crank up because I was feeling around in the dark. Jim did give me some tips, and then I just read everything that I could. There’s a big Scottish section in the jaws of the central library in Edinburgh, and I revisited that quite extensively, I dipped into everything and I honed in. It was a queer kind of research, conducted in tandem with the novel.
As I was reading, the novel was in my head all the time, and I just had to trust that at some point, bits were going to collide. That’s how I matched the different periods of Scottish literature to different chapters, trying to give each chapter its own fuel from a certain period, or a certain writer.
After the research, more Scots words were popping into my head, like a simultaneous translation going on all the time. It just goes to show that if you have enough contact with a language, you grow into it. It was quite pleasurable and amusing, but now, I feel I’ve moved on from that immediate immersive experience, and am no longer simply invested in the purity of the vocabulary. That’s not a bad thing, because there’s so much happening in language all the time; the Scots I have in me now is developing in my own writing, in my own usage of these words.
DJ: Jim, going through this experience with Petra, were there elements that took you on a similarly personal journey?
JD: The journey was very personal—and I still haven’t finished it. Only a couple of days ago, the author put up a Facebook post regarding the US release of Alindarka’s Children, stating that he’s no longer the author of Sia, but he’s got Alicia. I think he’s a little hurt at the fact that the characters have been renamed, but it made me think again about the whole nature of translation.
The translator transforms the text into what they feel to be most suitable within the context of the target language, and if that involves translating the names to make them more appropriate to the people who are going to read the book, then—good. The journey of working on this text has led me to look at the whole field of literary translation much more widely than I ever had before. I’ve never really thought about the question of how English books are translated into Russian, and I now find myself reading into it—for example, how Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses was translated into Russian. I saw to my relief that it was translated with an enormous number of footnotes, something equivalent to what I’ve produced with Petra. It’s opened up my mind to the whole question of translation and how other people are going to perceive the culture of the original.
DJ: Based on what you’ve both said, it’s a responsibility. Does that feel fair?
JD: Oh, yes. I think any translator has a responsibility to the author, but also a responsibility to the people who are going to read the book. The different responsibilities just have to be somehow reconciled.
PR: I would hesitate to say anything, because unlike Jim, I don’t know enough about Belarus, but emotionally, it weighed on me all the time. I put in all the work because I really wanted to give credence to what Alhierd had done and what he’s been through as an author, as well as what the country’s going through.
Jim Dingley is a researcher and promoter of Belarusian culture in the UK as well as a translator of Belarusian literature.
Petra Reid is a translator and the author of MacSonnetries.
Daljinder Johal is an assistant managing editor at Asymptote, in addition to being Head of Community at Boundless Theatre. She works across production, marketing, journalism, and curation in addition to being a writer, to create joyful and thoughtful work that shares nuanced perspectives from voices often underrepresented in the arts and film industry. She has a particular passion for highlighting the creativity of regions outside of London primarily across theatre, film, festivals, and audio.
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