True or false: yesterday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said he had done everything in his power so that “Russian can be an independent, sovereign state”? I’ll simplify this question: did Putin use the word state in this response to Rosenberg from the BBC? In truth, Putin said держава.

The article “Presentist Anachronism and Ironic Humour in Period Screen Drama” appeared in the journal Research in Film and History in 2022. It has illuminated for me some of the stakes of my own translation of the novel Dolbreuse. I quite simply do not want to create a product of period literature with the feel of The Great or Bridgerton, two gleefully anachronistic television products.

When I tell clients both real and prospective I see eight different philosophies for doing a translation and weigh all of them in my final choice, I really mean that a translation comes together through a kind of multivariable calculus.

Two Russian adjectives translate as deep. A method to explain the difference surfaced for me the week after a set of Ukrainian strikes on targets in Russian-held territory in what is internationally understood to be the Kursk province in Russia.

What gets me about this novella about a tryst is that the title could have been brought into English in a funny alternate way.

The oversimplification that I see on this page of this textbook perhaps lies in there being no fewer than two very different phenomena that could be described as the Russian historic present tense.

So why does the official Nobel translation say: “Bring about a moral rapprochement between peoples”? The consistency in tone is impressive and even beautiful, but I find the placement of a French word in an English sentence a problematic instance of franglais.

When you accept that no obviously English word can replace it, you are perhaps explaining the nature of rapprochement itself according to one reading—that there is some mystical divide between peoples such that the French, for instance, can be quoted but not quite approximated..

There’s a phrase I encountered recently in my messages that set me off so thoroughly I understand why I decided to make self-help one of my translation specialties from both French and Russian into English.

A friend in Russia who is also a self-help guru left me a voice memo that included this line: “Ты можешь заниматься, чем угодно.” (Ty mozhesh’ zanimat’sya, chem ugodno.)