Posts by Sam Bowden

Ukraine’s Linguistic Front: A Review of Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns by Artem Chapeye

By focusing on the ambiguity of his new life at war, Chapeye resists Russia’s invasion on a psychological level.

Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns by Artem Chapeye, translated from the Ukrainian by Zenia Tompkins, Penguin Random House, April 2025

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of their country, Ukrainian writers have brought the resistance into their language. Some who once worked in Russian have switched to Ukrainian; others stopped capitalizing the invader’s name, rendering it as puny russia (росія). This is about reducing Russia, ejecting it from a language it has tried to claim as its own, as if in anticipation of Moscow’s physical expulsion. In his latest book—equal parts memoir, treatise, and document of the first three years of the invasion—Artem Chapeye rejects not only Russia, but the cruel logic of war. Throughout Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns, Russia—and the grief, fear, uncertainty, guilt, and shame its war brought upon Ukrainians—is referred to as “Gloom.” It is Gloom that encroaches upon Ukraine, Gloom against which Chapeye, who joined the military shortly after Russia invaded, takes up arms alongside his countrymen. Gloom is both Russia’s literal tanks and missiles and the psychological conditions Russia’s invasion forces upon Chapeye—at once the monster and the terror it inspires. Yet Ordinary People does more than chase Russia from its language. Chapeye, rendered in affable English by Zenia Tompkins, resists the affect of war itself. Through Tompkins’s frank translation, which favors a colloquial, musing style, Chapeye remains irrepressibly human as Gloom tries to change him. The result is a surprisingly warm and compelling text that insists on rising above Russia’s war, even as it acknowledges the urgency of the real-world struggle to end it. READ MORE…

Life is Like a Box of Golgappas: On Transcultural Translations

“Universality,” for interpretations of US products around the world, may also mean “unavoidable.”

Translators tend to like puzzles. Problem solving between languages is the definition of the trade, but what of the deeper, more invisible quandaries of culture and context? In this essay, Sam Bowden takes a look at two works that seem inextricable from the cultures of their origin—Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton and Rober Zemeckis’s 1994 dramedy, Forrest Gump—as well as their respective international adaptations into German and Hindi, to investigate the various methodologies and techniques utilized in fitting these quintessentially US productions for new audiences.

One of the translator’s greatest challenges lies at a level deeper than language: instead, it is rooted in the countless cultural and historical contexts which consciously and unconsciously inform a given work. Since language is inextricable from the culture and history within which it is made, translational processes often prove more complex than simply replacing words, rhymes, characters, and themes. Source-cultural conditions and consciousnesses can shape a text in structurally embedded ways that go far beyond its linguistic surface.

Speaking from the United States, I am well aware of the extent to which my country’s culture and history—one could even call it mythology—have deeply shaped the literary narratives it produces and exports on a massive scale. When American stories circulate through the world-system, the result can be curious to study: these are narratives visibly shaped by a suddenly-invisible context. How do translators maneuver around this? READ MORE…