Things Worth Remembering: The Extraordinary Courage of Tatiana Gnedich Condemned to ten years in the gulag, the scholar sat in her cell and translated an epic poem—all 16,000 lines—from memory. Douglas Murray
https://www.thefp.com/p/douglas-murray-tatiana-gnedich?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Here I am going to break one of my own rules, and dedicate a column to a translator of a poet, rather than an actual poet. I cannot stop myself from doing so. For it is necessary to pause and to say the name of Tatiana Gnedich.
I started this series talking about the significance of one act of memory—that of Boris Pasternak and the thousands of Russian writers in 1937 who knew Pasternak’s translation of Shakespeare by heart. Pasternak was then, as now, a famous writer. His own act of translation and memory cannot be diminished. But if it could ever have been superseded, then it is by a woman who almost nobody in the English-speaking world has heard of.
One of Gnedich’s ancestors had translated The Iliad into Russian, and in the 1930s she looked set to follow in his footsteps. She was studying seventeenth-century English literature at Leningrad State University when the purges began, and the universities were among the institutions trying to oust all enemies of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinism for crimes that shifted by the day.
At a meeting at the university (which she was not at), Gnedich was denounced for having noble ancestry and, what is more, of hiding it. She was indignant at the claim—indignant that she should be shamed into hiding ancestors of whom she was proud.
So she was thrown out of the university for “boasting about her noble ancestry.” The madness of those days was such that even someone who simply wanted to study the Elizabethan poets could not avoid politics.
At some point, Gnedich was allowed back into the university. With her mother, she moved into a small wooden house in Leningrad. During the siege of the city, from late 1941 to early 1944, her mother died and their house burned down.
In December 1944, she got it in her head that even entertaining a desire to go to Britain was an act of sedition. She confessed to this, was duly put on trial, and sentenced to ten years in the Gulag.
While in jail awaiting transfer to a faraway Gulag camp, an interrogator asked her why she didn’t use any of the books that she was entitled to in the holding cell. She replied: “I’m busy. I don’t have the time.”
Busy with what, the interrogator asked.
“I’m translating Byron’s ‘Don Juan,’ ” she told him.
The interrogator realized that she was doing it from memory.
“But how do you remember your final version?” he asked her.
Gnedich agreed that this was the hardest part, “especially now that I’m approaching the end. My head is too full to remember anything new.”
Before leaving for the evening, the interrogator gave her a piece of paper. It came with the heading “Statement of the accused,” and it was meant for confessing one’s crimes against the revolution. The interrogator thought Gnedich might use it to write down her translation—which she did.
The next morning, a guard, noticing the piece of paper, asked her to read what she had written. Beneath “Statement of the accused,” Gnedich had managed to squeeze in every stanza of the ninth canto of “Don Juan”—one thousand lines of verse—in which Byron recounts Don Juan’s trip to Russia.
For two years, Gnedich stayed in her jail cell with barely any light. She worked on her translation, spoke to no one, and hardly went outside. When she finished translating the seventeenth and last canto, she was summoned to the guard’s office and told she would not be transferred to the Gulag until the manuscript had been typed out. Three copies were made, of which she was allowed one.
She was then transported to the Gulag, and for the next eight years, she held on to her typescript, correcting and redoing sections. Bunkmates apparently complained, saying, “There you go, rustling your damn papers again!”
When she was released from the Gulag, ten years after first being sent to jail, she immediately decamped, with her translation of “Don Juan,” to the communal apartment of her friend Efim Etkind, in Leningrad. Although five people already lived in this one cramped room, they let her in. The clothes she wore and the manuscript that she carried all reeked of the camps.
But there, in that room, she began to type up the whole thing again, incorporating the improvements she had made to her typescript over her eight years in the Gulag. (I am relying here on Jane Bugaeva’s translation of Etkind’s account, in “The Translator,” published in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 56, Issue 1, in the spring of 2015.)
The translation was published, and in 1957, the Soviet Writers Union organized a theatrical performance of the poem, at the Comedy Theater in Leningrad. The reception was rapturous.
The actors and director were all onstage when someone in the audience cried out “Author!” Wearing a long black dress, Gnedich rose. She reportedly looked like a nun and “hopelessly tired,” with rounded shoulders. All 700 people in the theater gave her a standing ovation. Apparently overwhelmed, Gnedich fell, was caught by the director, and carried offstage. She had suffered a heart attack.
Fortunately, Gnedich survived, as she had survived her two years of prison isolation and her eight years in the Gulag. The theatrical production of her “Don Juan” ran for years; countless copies of her translation were sold across the Soviet Union.
Today, her translation is still the most widely read in Russia. It is said to be unsurpassable. She had rendered, in her head, every canto, every stanza. All 16,000 lines. What a feat, what a price—and what a gift.
I wonder what she thought as she worked on lines like these, from Canto III:
Must we but weep o’er days more blest?
Must we but blush?—Our fathers bled.
Earth! render back from out thy breast
A remnant of our Spartan dead!
Of the three hundred grant but three,
To make a new Thermopylæ!
What, silent still? and silent all?
Ah! no;—the voices of the dead
Sound like a distant torrent’s fall,
And answer, ‘Let one living head,
But one arise,—we come, we come!’
’Tis but the living who are dumb.
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