12.05.05

Il'f and Petrov - The Golden Calf

The cold and dark has arrived, and to fill the gaps between paintings I've started working on a translation project with my friend Peter Gadjokov. When we lived together last year, Peter had yelled at me for not reading Il'f and Petrov's The Golden Calf, a book that had been gathering dust on my shelf, and it brightened many a morning on my way to the Mellon coal mines before Peter liberated it into the New York subway system.

The Golden Calf is the kind of book you don't expect to exist. It's funny, irreverent, deeply subversive, beautifully written and somehow got itself officialy published in the Soviet Union just as the rest of Russian literature was going into the Stalinist deep freeze. Even more remarkable, it's a joint effort by two authors whose working method was to sit at a typewriter together, smoke, and argue over each sentence as they wrote it (XP programmers take note). Both men were good writers, but when they joined forces they transformed into a comedy Voltron. Many of the catchphrases in The Golden Calf and its prequel, The Twelve Chairs have entered the vernacular language, and both books remain massively popular seventy five years after their publication.

The Twelve Chairs is freely available in English translation (including a free online version), but for some reason The Golden Calf, an even funnier book, is not. Peter and I thought this was a shame, and operating on the theory that even a rough English translation would be better than none, we decided to give it a shot.

I studied Russian in college and can read it reasonably well; Peter (in a tour de force of ethnicity) is a California Austrian from Bulgaria who grew up speaking Russian at home. When neither he nor I can figure out what is going on in the text, we post questions to a LiveJournal (or zhivoj zhurnal, as the locals call it) that has proven enormously helpful. The Russians are skeptical of our ability to do the text justice, but in the hopes that anything is better than nothing, we're making our initial draft available online as we proceed. For the moment, I've set up a homepage for the novel and put up a rough draft of the first three chapters:

1. How Panikovski Broke the Treaty
2. Lieutenant Schmidt's Thirty Sons
3. Your Gas — Our Ideas

Other chapters will go up as we machete our way further into the text. Right now we are in the vicinity of chapter 19; the procedure is that I do a very rough cut, Peter fills in the major potholes, the LiveJournalers clear up areas of serious doubt and argue with each other, and we make an initial attempt to make the writing sound like English. When we've gotten a rough draft of the whole book, we'll go back and edit for style and flow; you'll find the text in this rough draft a little foreign sounding, but hopefully accurate.

Please feel free to write in if you find any major solecisms. I will post links here to new chapters as they go up, and hope you end up enjoying this book as much as I did. You may also get a kick out of the great online exhibition (in English) from Il'f and Petrov's 1936 trip through America.

Because the work is so time-consuming, I've also set up a little donations link on the homepage. I don't normally like to put the hat out, but any money interested readers donate will allow us to spend more time on the book and less time hacking and painting.

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