Translator Mikhail Vizel: “Reading with a child should be a pleasure for both the child and the parent.” Literary commentator Mikhail Vizel - about new books that are worth reading Where are we now in this abyss?

In "The Slant Book," a baby in a stroller literally rolls down a mountain. Mikhail, I’m a mother, why is it so funny to me then?

Because it's a horror comedy. No one really thinks that a baby stroller can knock down a fire hydrant and force a police officer to do a death flip. The action in the book rapidly unfolds according to the laws of an eccentric silent film comedy, that is, in essence, according to the laws of a farce. Where, too, everyone hits each other on the head with a stick and kicks them in the ass - and everyone understands that this is not petty hooliganism, but a reprise - because both the stick is fake and the boots have clown toes.

A caring parent will object to you here: “What if the child doesn’t understand and...” - then parental anxiety blooms in full bloom. What should I do? Ignore or explain to readers what and how?

‒ You need to talk with your parents - but only when it is clear that the parent is ready to talk, and not just eager to “insect” you. In particular, questions like “What if the child doesn’t understand?!” I have one answer to such questions: please, let the “caring parent” continue to read Barto to his child. Just don’t be surprised when one bad day he discovers that there is an abyss between him and his child.

- What attracted you as a translator to this book in the first place - the plot, the unusual form?

As we know, a children's book is a synthetic product. It is difficult to separate it into its components.

I saw it for the first time in a children's book store in the Italian town of Avvelino (this is not Milan or Florence, but a relatively small southern town - albeit with a two-thousand-year history) in the summer of 2012 and was simply amazed by its undoubted “vintage”, authentic style - visual and verbal - American art deco (that very “age of ragtime” glorified by Doctorow in the famous novel), and at the same time futurism, which is expressed not so much in the unprecedented diamond-shaped shape of the book, but in the very principle of constructing the narrative, which anticipated the “runaway” comedies "Buster Keaton, where the frail hero with an imperturbable look falls somewhere, capsizes, flies up, is carried away... - and all this without the slightest harm to health, his own and those around him.

I also noticed an episode in which a kid reads a special edition of a newspaper describing his own adventure. A hundred years ago this was hyperbole, but nowadays, in the era of Instagram, etc. This is almost commonplace.

My first instinct was, naturally, to buy an unusual book and show it off to my Moscow friends. But, quickly making sure that the original was American and not Italian, he refrained from spending his hard-earned €14.

And he did the right thing. Because in the fall of the same year, having talked with the director of the Samokat publishing house, Irina Balakhonova, I discovered that she was also fascinated by this book - albeit in a Dutch version. We both considered this coincidence to be no coincidence, and I began working on the translation.

- You translated the title of the book as “Book with a bias.” It seemed to me that “The Oblique Book” was both more accurate and funnier...

Indeed, literally, according to the dictionary, slant means “sloping” or “oblique.” But it seems to me that the “slanting book” leads in the wrong direction - either a “thumpy book” or a “hare book”. And “with a bias” - for me personally it evokes associations with the party “deviations” of the 1910-20s. That is, much closer in time and style to the original.

My literary institute master E.M. Solonovich kept reminding us that there are no final solutions in translation. I chose this solution - but no one is forbidden to translate the 1910 book in their own way and publish it, it has long been in the public domain.

By the way, the subtitle of the book - “The road up is hard, but down is faster than a scooter” - doesn’t it seem suspicious to you? It seems correct: in the original there is no scooter. But it goes well with the publisher’s logo!

When you took on the task of translating Newell's hooliganism, you understood that the book would be published as a children's book. I'm talking about a modern shift in norms: good old humor seems neither funny nor kind to many parents. What did the translator hope for? Wouldn't it be better, for example, to make good old children's books like adults? For those who understand?

I would not say that this book is “good old”. Not Charskaya. At one time, it was a sharp avant-garde - so sharp that it was too tough for the leaders of the pre-war DETGIZ. Yes, I’m not sure that they knew about this book - it was too ahead of its time to become widely known even in its homeland.

The translator hoped that he would be able to make the poems “sonorous” enough so that they would speak for themselves. At the same time, I set myself the task of writing as they could have been written in those very 20s, when the book theoretically could have been published by the same “DETGIS” under the leadership of Marshak, who was extremely demanding of himself and others in terms of versification.

And what does it mean to “do like adults”? The Russian edition, like all modern European editions, is an exact replica of the original 1910 edition. I know that Samokat technologists struggled for a long time to select paper and achieve accurate color rendition. How to position it is a question for marketers, not for the translator. But, again, you and I know that a children’s book is a “dual-use product”: often, under the guise of “I’ll buy it for a child,” young parents are happy to buy books for themselves. Actually, this is the only way it should be: reading to a child, reading with a child should be a pleasure for both the child and the parent, and not hard labor, the fulfillment of parental duty. Producers of full-length family cartoons have long understood this, but publishers of children's books have only just begun to understand.

- Would you read a “book with a slant” to your children? Do kids actually need all these old books? Or again, are you doing this for yourself?

The term “all those old books” does not apply to Newell. He is not an "old forgotten author", he is an overlooked author. It wasn't in Russian! Now it has appeared, and we can decide whether we “need” it or “don’t need it.” As for my own daughter, who was between five and nine years old when I was working on the book, she took the most active part in this work: I checked on her whether the stroller was rolling “smoothly” enough. And she knows this “book with a bias” quite well.

The conversation was conducted by Elena Sokoveina

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Peter Newell
Book with a slant
Author's illustrations
Translation from English by Michael Wiesel
Publishing house Samokat, 2018

On November 26, the annual feast of the spirit begins - the fair of non/fiction intellectual literature at the Central House of Artists, to which it is time to stop allowing those who never bothered to read the books bought at this fair a year ago. The Village decided to find out from the book reviewer, translator and presenter of writing courses Mikhail Wiesel what exactly is worth buying this season, who to believe when choosing a book, where modern Russian prose is moving, how the boom of the Scandinavian detective story happened and why the work of JK Rowling is realism .

About new non/fiction releases

- Please tell us about non/fiction. What's going to be exciting this year that we should all be paying attention to?

We must start with the fact that non/fiction began sixteen years ago practically in the desert. But even now it still remains an integral part of the Moscow and even Russian cultural landscape, at least as far as books are concerned. This year, as far as I know, due to the sharp cooling in the international situation (as bad as this may sound), the guests of honor - the Austrians - flew out. Year of the German language, and the Austrians flew away.

- Did you refuse?

I don’t know how it was framed, but they flew off. The curators of the children's program have also changed. Curators operate within a narrow field of possibilities. The Central House of Artists is a large and conservative structure, and what both children's and adult curators offer does not always fit into this corridor of possibilities. But despite this, as usual, foreign literary stars and intense conversations about books await us, and small publishing houses will be able to sell half or even two-thirds of their circulation on non-fiction. This, of course, is good for the fair, but it quite eloquently describes the situation with small publishing houses in Russia.

- What should I pay attention to?

This season's new product is “The Abode” by Zakhar Prilepin, which was released in the summer, is selling well and is already on the bestseller list of the Moscow store. Now Zakhar is actively active in the Donbass, and this causes mixed reactions, but spurs interest in his book. I know Zakhar a little and I can imagine that for him this is not PR, but sincere convictions. Both “The Abode” and “Telluria” by Sorokin were included in the short list of the “Big Book” award. “Telluria” will also apparently continue to gain popularity, because I don’t remember a second or third text of this size, volume and scale created by a modern Russian writer. The third important book is the novel “Return to Egypt” by Vladimir Sharov. I recommend that readers of The Village read his 1989 novel, Rehearsals. After the release of “The Day of the Oprichnik,” they began to say that we live in the paradigm described in this book, which, unfortunately, is true, but to an even greater extent we live in the paradigm described in the novel “Rehearsals.” Among foreign writers, the greatest excitement has arisen around the new, last year's novel by the American Donna Tartt, “The Goldfinch,” which has already collected a bunch of awards in the English-speaking world. This is a large-scale book, promptly translated and published by Corpus. Like all great books, it is “about everything”: about modern terrorism, about ancient painting and about impressionable young people. In addition, all major publishers have prepared a fresh set of English-language bestsellers, including a new detective story by JK Rowling, written under the pseudonym Galbraith. I myself am looking forward with great interest to the opportunity to look through the dilogy of the Italian Curzio Malaparte “Caput” and “Skin” at the stand of the publishing house Ad Marginem.

These are two huge novels about the Second World War that caused controversy, even including inclusion in the Vatican Index Librorum Prohibitorum. And also another overlooked classic, Hungarian Peter Nadas's huge 1986 novel The Book of Memories, which was once praised by the truth-teller Susan Sontag. I am also sure that on non/fiction a sea of ​​books related to history and politics awaits us: about the First World War (including a very good novel by the British Sebastian Faulks “And the Birds Sang”), and about Crimea, and about Donbass.

Trend, which
I see in Russian prose, - return of socialist realism

For personal reasons, I am looking forward to the visit of the author whom I translated, the Venetian Alberto Toso Fei. In 2000, I bought his guide to the myths and legends of Venice in Venice - and now OGI and I are finally presenting it in Russian. I will also mention “Magical Prague” by Angelo Maria Ripellino. This is a classic and fundamental book about the golem, the dybbuk, the Emperor Rudolf, which has been reaching the Russian reader for fifty years - I simply admire Olga Vasilievna, who brought this complex story to the end. If you are interested in the topic of urban legends and urbanism, I recommend paying attention to the book by the American Michael Sorkin, who walks to work every day from Greenwich Village to Tribeca and reflects on the urbanism of New York.

- Anything important from memoirs?

- Alpina Publisher has released “The Life and Vitae of Danila Zaitsev,” the memoirs of a Russian Old Believer who was born in the 1950s in Harbin, and from there migrated to Argentina. His family tried to return to Siberia, but nothing worked out for them, and he, as they say, dragged himself back to Argentina. The second is a very interesting book by Lyudmila Ulitskaya “The Poet” about her close friend Natalya Gorbanevskaya. And the third memoir-biographical book is “The Baroness” by Hannah Rothschild, a representative of the younger generation of Rothschilds, who wrote about her rebellious great-aunt, who broke up with her baron husband, abandoned her five children in France and went to New York in the fifties to hang out with jazzmen Charlie Parker and Thelonious Monk. And the fourth important non-fiction is the book “Debt: The First 5,000 Years of History” published by Ad Marginem. Its author, David Gerber, is an anthropologist, professor at the London School of Economics, and at the same time one of the anti-leaders of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

- What about our scientists? Are there any interesting popular science books?

From the humanities - “We live in Ancient Rome” by Viktor Sonkin, a children’s continuation of his book from the year before last “Rome Was Here.” It was published by the children's publishing house "Walk into History", but I am sure that parents will also read it with interest. From the natural sciences, I’ll be happy to remind you about the wonderful book by Asya Kazantseva “Who would have thought” about people and their bad habits, about why many people can’t quit smoking, why you want to sleep in the fall, why people behave so stupidly in matters of reproduction . It was published at the beginning of this year, but has just received the Enlightener Award, for which I sincerely congratulate the author. Another absolutely crazy book by Dmitry Bavilsky - “On demand. Conversations with contemporary composers." Dmitry Bavilsky is a writer, not a musicologist, and he did very heartfelt interviews with a dozen people who study academic music. This book recently received the St. Petersburg Andrei Bely Prize, the prize money of which is one apple, one ruble and a bottle of vodka.

About the new socialist realism

- Since we started talking about awards, let's look at the trends: who was given the “National Bestseller” and the “Big Book” this year.

St. Petersburg author Ksenia Buksha received “Natsbest” this year for her book “Freedom Factory”; she was also included in the short list of the “Big Book”. This was a complete surprise. This is a very interesting book, a modern industrial novel, although Ksenia herself is categorically against such a definition.

- What is happening to literature in general? What do people write today, and what are they awarded for?

I can note two trends: the first is the blurring of the boundaries between the visual and the textual. This fall, several graphic novels were released that you can’t even call comics, touching on big, important issues. For example, “The Photographer” by Guibert, Lefebvre and Lemercier is the story of a Frenchman moving from Pakistan to “dushman” Afghanistan in the eighties. Or “Logicomics” by Doxiadis and Papadimitriou - a biography of Bertrand Russell, with the participation of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Kurt Gödel. These are volumes of about five hundred pages and about a thousand rubles. Or more subtle books that touch on big, important, not at all “comics” issues, for example, “Maria and I” by Miguel Gayardo about an autistic girl. It’s too early for us to talk about it, but in Italy, a graphic novel was shortlisted for the first time this year for the prestigious Strega Prize. The second trend is the blurring of the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction. It's happening not because people have stopped being interested in big narratives, but because the world has become more documented. Any unexpected detail, any unexpected detail immediately becomes known, Hollywood buys the rights to film the “real story”, and a book is immediately written. You may remember the movie 127 Hours about mountain climber Aron Ralston, who sawed off his own hand in a canyon to free himself. It would seem like a wild story. In the last century, such a heartbreaking story would have been considered the invention of a bad novelist, but this is the true truth, you can show both a hand and a living person. Literature returns to its state from the times of Gilgamesh and Homer: the deeds of glorious men become literature, bypassing the stage of the writer’s invention.

- So the artistic treatment is no longer as important as the story?

It is important precisely as the processing of an already existing story. Although there is nothing completely new here. Leo Tolstoy, when he wrote War and Peace, also used the history of his family; the prototype of Ilya Rostov was his grandfather. That is, the penetration of non-fiction into fiction is not someone’s malicious intent, it is a natural process. The trend that I see in Russian prose is the return of socialist realism. When I looked at the short list of the “Big Book”, I found in it a book by the writer Viktor Remizov from Khabarovsk - “Free Will” about the poaching of red fish, about a truth-telling guy who fights against corrupt police officers. And this is absolute, state-of-the-art socialist realism, only instead of “Gazi cars” there are “Kruzaks”. And as if in contrast to it - “Steamboat to Argentina” by Alexei Makushinsky, an equally uncomplicated example of an irreconcilable - stylistically and ideologically - seventies "emigre", only for some reason also dated 2014.

- Is this a return of literature to the golden Soviet years or the use of technical techniques of socialist realism on today's material?

It’s hard to say, but it seems to me that our social life is losing its plasticity and regaining some rigidity, which is reflected in the demand for certain techniques and forms of literature.

About the departing detective

- We have a revival of socialist realism, of course. What about foreign literature? Now “Gone Girl” has been released, based on the book by Gillian Flynn, which everyone is delighted with, although the book is so-so. I looked at the New York Times bestseller list, and there are practically only detective stories: someone has been killed, someone has disappeared, someone is looking for someone. What is happening in America and Europe?

I can’t talk about all foreign literature, but I closely follow Italian and English literature. Generally speaking, I cannot agree that there is an invasion of detectives. Rather, after Umberto Eco, the detective story became a generally recognized technique, appropriate in any book. Previously, murder, kidnapping, some kind of theft were considered an element of a low genre, fiction. But it seems to me that the detective story is a bygone trend, and the key story is one written based on real events. For example, the book “Three Cups of Tea” by American mountaineer Greg Mortenson about how he built schools for girls in Afghanistan has been a bestseller for several years. Also, if we continue to talk about trends, the wealth of English-language literature is growing in national colonies and former outskirts.

- Do you mean that the Booker Prize this year was given to an Australian, and in general from this year they decided to give it not on the basis of nationality, but to everyone who is published in the UK?

Not only. Look, absolutely everyone writes in English: Surinamese, Haitians, Indians, Bangladeshis. I say this not with condemnation, but with admiration, because fresh blood is constantly pouring into literature. This is multiculturalism at its best. Apart from Salman Rushdie, whom we all know about, there is also Jhumpa Lahiri, a Bengali-born writer who grew up in America and won a Pulitzer Prize. You can also remember Khaled Hosseini, the Afghan who wrote The Kite Runner. Well, Mikhail Idov, by the way. "The Coffee Grinder" was written in English for the people of Greenwich Village. About him and about his peer Gary Shteyngart (born in Leningrad), the Americans themselves say in all seriousness that they brought a “Russian note” to American literature. It's a little funny to us, but for American literature this is par for the course.

- Which English-language writers can be called true classics?

- Who else, Pratchett?

Pratchett is more genre-focused. Americans also talk about Jonathan Franzen, calling him “the great writer of today.” His 2001 novel Corrections is actually very good. It went on sale on September 11, 2001, which did not have the best effect on its sales. But I read it a couple of years later in Russian and thanks to it I understood why September 11 became inevitable, although there is not a word about fundamentalism or terrorism. This is the story of a large American family in which the bonds of generations are disintegrating due to the fact that the technological process begins to outstrip the lifespan of one generation.

- Do I understand correctly that there is an emphasis on realism, and fanzines, Twilight, Harry Potter and vampires are becoming a thing of the past?

Harry Potter is realism. I read from Umberto Eco a thought that greatly amused me: that the modern world is much more magical than fifty years ago. A modern child, accustomed to a television remote control, Xbox, and touch screens, does not find anything surprising in the existence of magic wands.

About the eternal literary crisis

- What is happening with Russian book publishing? Are small publishers dying or surviving?

Of course, everyone is in panic, terrified. But, as Dmitry Bykov wittily noted, receiving the “Big Book” for Pasternak’s ZhZL, “Russian literature is always in crisis, this is its normal state, it can only exist in this state.” Such a fall into the abyss. As has been the case since the time of Dostoevsky, it still continues.

- Where are we now in this abyss?

Since this abyss is endless, it is impossible to talk about our place in it. But we are now experiencing an even more colossal, tectonic shift: the transition from the Gutenberg galaxy to the Steve Jobs universe, to electronic book publishing, which is happening before our eyes and with our participation.

- Russia is not so technically equipped that everyone would suddenly stop buying paper books and switch to electronic ones.

This is completely inevitable. I told you about the Khabarovsk author, who was initially interesting to us. This is a wild, wrong situation when 90% of composing people live in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Of the famous writers, only a few are from the regions: Yekaterinburg resident Alexey Ivanov, Zakhar Prilepin and detective writer Nikolai Svechin - both from Nizhny Novgorod, Oleg Zayonchkovsky from Kolomna. Plus Dina Rubina in Israel and Svetlana Martynchik (Max Frei), who settled in Vilnius. Our geography opens up the widest field for electronic book publishing, because a book whose paper edition arrived at a warehouse in Khabarovsk is objectively difficult to get to Moscow. In the future, paper book publishing will occupy the niche that vinyl now occupies in music. A person will have, for example, a thousand volumes on electronic readers and a dozen volumes on a shelf that he likes to leaf through from time to time.

About living classics

- As I understand it, it’s still impossible to live by writing in Russia?

There are five or six people in Russia who make a living from writing, taking into account the sale of film rights and royalties for columnism. Well, maybe a dozen. For others, from an economic point of view, this is a secondary industry from the main production. From serial scriptwriting, for example, or from PR. But I think that this is a fairly universal story, it’s just that in America this situation is more worked out, and writers are given the opportunity to live on university campuses, teach creative writing courses, and receive non-governmental grants.

- What about publishers?

Firstly, everyone is relying on the “long tail effect”, this is a marketing term: 90% of people drink Coca-Cola, and 10%, no matter what you do, will not put this Coca-Cola in their mouth. And from this 10% you can make your audience.

- Do you believe that it is still possible in Russia to write a super bestseller that will be of interest to everyone?

On the one hand, thank God that the times when everyone read the same book are over and have not returned. It is impossible to imagine that two people of the same circle, meeting, would say, instead of greeting, “Have you read it yet?” - "Read". But, being an old enough person, I understand that uniting around one book is more correct and moral than uniting around political memes like “Crimea is ours.” So I would like such a book to appear. But in general, the function of the book that everyone reads should be performed by the classics - what a person reads at school.

- What modern Russian literature would you call a classic?

If we talk about modern classics in the sense of must-read, then these are, perhaps, Generation P and Pelevin’s “Chapaev and Emptiness”. For all their prickly form and postmodernist irony, these are important books and still explain a lot in our lives. Now Vladimir Sorokin has rapidly moved from the avant-garde to the classics. And, probably, also Mikhail Shishkin and Vladimir Sharov. Yuri Mamleev is a living classic outsider like Kafka. And, of course, I can’t help but mention Andrei Bitov and Fazil Iskander. But it’s as if they are no longer quite with us, but rather somewhere with Turgenev and Bunin.

Photos: Vika Bogorodskaya