The translation of vernacular in literary texts poses specific problems for the translator. If an author uses a particular vernacular, it is a literary device which must of course, in one form or the other, be reflected in the translation. While other forms of deviant language (such as the specific jargon of various professional groups, slang, youth language etc.) usually have some sort of register of their own in the target language, the regional aspect of dialects is often untranslatable.
The translation of Nikolai Gogols Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka presented me with on such a problem. In these stories, written in Russian, but situated in the Ukraine, Gogol made us of two literary devices: some of the stories or chapters open with Ukranian quotes from songs, poems, etc.; Gogol also used various Ukrainian terms, which he transcribed into Russian. For his Russian audience (which might not understand the Ukrainian words) he inserted two explanatory Ukrainian-Russian glossaries. The purely Ukrainian quotes I left in their original form in the text, and provided a translation at the bottom of the page; this is the accepted manner tot present foreign quotes in Dutch literary translations. But the case of Ukrainian terms in Russian transcription was more complicated.
For the Russian reader Ukrainian is a foreign but familiar language. Many of Gogol’s lemma’s sound familiar or are actually known to him, just as Dutch speakers/readers know certain German or Flemish words (or think they do). To tackle this problem, I first of all looked at existing translations of Dikanka to see what the other translators had done. To my surprise I found out they all had simply skiped the glossaries, omitting the ‘ukrainianisms’ as if the whole text had been written in plain Russian.
In my translation I decided to convey the ‘exotic’ Ukrainian flavour of Dikanka by making use of glossaries such as Gogol had done. In order to do so, I first of all had to find out which Ukrainian terms used by Gogol were (un)familiair to the Russian reader. So I put Gogol’s glossaries before Russian native speakers (obviously without Gogol’s translation). Some lemma’s proved to be known to everyone and appear in the standard Russian explanatory dictionaries; other terms were unknown or were misread. For instance, Gogol’s ‘lyulka’ (Russ.: люлька) meant to some Russians ‘a baby’s crib’, but Gogol translated the word as ‘tobacco pipe’. Some respondents had never heard of
‘kukhol’ (Russ.: кухоль), while for others it was ‘a kind of bird’, but according to Gogol’s translation it was ‘a ceramic cup’. The ‘elongated headdress’ referred to by Gogol as ‘korablik’ (Russ.: кораблик) was translated by most Russians as ‘a small boat’, which actually is a correct translation of the Russian word ‘korablik’, but not what the author
intended.
I then started to compose a small lexicon of ‘un-Dutch’ words, which would have a similar connotation to the Dutch reader as the Ukrainian words, used by Gogol, have for the Russian audience. I thereby relied heavily on the Flemish dialects, since they have a soft and pleasant ring to the Dutch ear, just as the Ukrainian has to the Russian ear. But since I had to avoid pinning down the stories to a particular region, I addes some Southern Dutch to the mix with here and there a touch of German or something unusual from other dialects that the Dutch audience might or might not know. In the process I derived a lot from different collections of glossaries on the internet conveying all sorts of Flemish and Dutch dialects. Sometimes illustrations on the internet proved useful. The result was as a Flemish/Limburgian/West Friesian/German/etc. — Dutch glossary from which I composed a definitive lexicon for the translation of the glossaries in Dikanka. And so, ‘yulka’ ended up as ‘smuigertje’, ‘kukhol’ became ‘tas’ and ‘korablik’ became ‘schuitje’. As it was impossible to find a satisfactory equivalent for all Gogol’s ukranianisms, I removed some of the author’s lemma’s from the glossaries. To make up for this, I ‘smuggled’ in some nice sounding findings of my own.
