To the best of my knowledge, my Russian translation will be the fifth to be published officially. That’s a lot of translations, even for so famous a literary work.īut they’re all different, and not just because rendering Orwell’s newspeak into Russian, along with his descriptions of life on Airstrip One, formerly known as Britain, requires difficult linguistic choices. The novel came out in English in 1949, but was banned in the Soviet Union in any language until 1988. I felt sorry for Winston, but I knew I was feeling sorry for myself. I never thought it would be back, not with such force. I remember the same feeling from school during the Brezhnev years. Most of all, Winston Smith’s world is enclosing, hermetic, stifling.
JUST TRANSLATE RUSSIAN FULL
Like my Soviet birth country and Russia today, Winston Smith’s world is both lawless and full of rules, incomprehensible from a human point of view but perfectly logical as a system, indiscriminately cruel and privately lyrical or even heroic. Reading “1984” closely - as a Russian, a journalist, and a believer in Russia’s potential to overcome Putinist despotism just as it defeated the Communist variety - is both sickening and cathartic because so much is instantly recognizable. It’s a poisoned book, perhaps because Orwell himself was sick when he wrote it.” “But there’s some contamination in this thing.
“Nothing serious, just a runny nose,” Golyshev, who is 82 now, told me. He remembers being chronically sick for a year after finishing it. It’s not just me. The eminent translator Viktor Golyshev, whose Russian version of “1984” has won the most acclaim, spent a year on it in the late 1980s. Vanity was part of the reason, but I did feel that “1984” had grown relevant to Russians, again. This year, I spent a suffocating four months living inside George Orwell’s “1984.” I didn’t know what I was getting into when a Moscow publisher suggested that I translate the classic dystopian novel into Russian, so I agreed too lightly.
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