Translating the Russian Historic Present Tense

One morning before dawn reddens the sky I wake up and reread the first page of an advanced Russian textbook for undergraduate and graduate English speakers: what gets me going is their description of the Russian “historic present.” In play is something I know from teaching comparative literature and ESL and developing a language curriculum. Nearly any oversimplification in a language textbook can be attributed to scaffolding, the process of showing students the very set of things that will create the infrastructure to move onto learning something more complicated. Scaffolding so often comes in the form of an incomplete truth. It moreover occurs within a pedagogical context in which nonlinguists are ready to balk and depart upon reaching a description that’s too complicated. 

The oversimplification that I see on the page perhaps lies in there being no fewer than two very different phenomena that could be described as the Russian historic present tense. Very different translations are called for for these different types.

We know from this first chapter of the textbook that the present tense sometimes breaks out within the matrix of Russian fiction that is being narrated in the past. There is an artistic logic to it whereby the novelist or other creator is attempting to convey immediacy, an exciting moment. It is often for “dramatic effect.” They are often trying to convey something explosive that corresponds to a jagged literary device like a sentence fragment, it being borne in mind that pronouns are often dropped as a matter of course in normal Russian sentences as well in which this dynamic is not even at play. That latter technique feels perhaps more in play for me as a writer in English than it may seem for a Russophone who may gravitate toward the historic present.

Consider this passage from a tale by A. Afanasyev:

На море на океане, на острове на Буяне стояла небольшая ветхая избушка; в той избушке жили старик да старуха. Жили они в великой бедности; старик сделал сеть и стал ходить на море  да ловить рыбу; тем только и добывал себе дневное пропитание. Раз как-то закинул старик свою сеть, начал тянуть, и показалось ему так тяжело, как доселева никогда не бывало: еле-еле вытянул. Смотрит, а сеть пуста.

In a bilingual edition, Sergey Levchin translates this as:

In the sea, in the Nile, on Stormy Isle stood a little old rickety cabin: in that cabin lived an old man and an old woman. The two of them lived in great need; so the old man made a net and went down to the sea to fish: and that was all he could do to earn his daily livelihood. One time the old man cast his net, and as he drew it back, it seemed to him heavier than it had ever been before; he barely got it out. Only the net was empty. (From Russian Folktales from the Collection of A. Afanasyev, Dover, 2014)

At the risk of creating a blog post with multiple layers of argumentation, there is incidentally something funny here about the historic present breaking through at the end of quite a bit of past tense in this story that is generally told in the past; Levchin does not translate this one instance in a way that necessarily allows us to feel the historic present as it might be felt by a Russian speaker. (This translation is far from literal in many other ways; the rhyme at the beginning, for instance, is not about the Nile in the original—this is just a way to get at the mystery of the Stormy Isle that is the magic isle of Russian lore, Buyan.) Levchin’s Afanasyev does not try the literal translation that is “He looks: the net was empty.” This verb in the present tense is nowhere to be seen; this only in the last sentence is perhaps this immediacy breaking through instead of the bafflingly and awkwardly literal “He looks” or the pro-drop “Looks at it” or even the pronounless “Looked at it: the net was empty” in all its dashed-off immediacy. Perhaps I am looking at this wrong and only is the one transposed marker that preserves a vestige of the linguistic operation that the linguist Bondarko referred to in the 1970s as “transposition” of tense from the past into the present that as a rule occurs with the historic present in Russian.

At the risk of violating a commonplace dictum of translators to the effect that the length of an original is sacrosanct, can we not see how something like unattributed speech of the sort found in a nineteenth-century novel like Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and its more recent successors would work here? This passage could end with: “Well, would you look at that? The net was empty.” That is to say that rather than transposing this third-person narration into the present, as occurs in Russian in this particular kind of historical present, we embrace the immediacy of a Flaubertian elision between perspectives that does not quite qualify as free indirect discourse. It is to be expected to parse that breakthrough of everyday language as though we are hearing direct speech, something uttered as though it were taking place in the present; however, in the name of fidelity to the original, I will say that the person saying “Well, would you look at that” is also really an utterance of me the upstart translator in the present teleported to the fairytale past who is constructing this English in analogy with a Russian original that is third-person narration.

Or an alternative solution could be an interjection of suddenness and surprise, something perhaps more antiquated than a wow—something like a ho!

There are at least two different pasts possible with the so-called Russian historic present: this type of sudden shift I am describing, which often feels like a kind of hierophanic present that is breaking through; another is a crypto past from beginning to end. When an entire work of fiction is narrated in the present, some kind of spatiotemporal imperative tells us that an author is generally prone to speaking about events that have already happened. This present does not break out in the past. It simply is everywhere in this other use of the historic present. The present tense can also be used for an ambient implicit past that is not acknowledged as such. Maybe it would seem that historic present is exactly what is being described by the latter case. But the term narrative present gets at the fact that in something like a novel it may not be clear that what is being described is the past. 

One may grasp that a novel like nineteenth-century English novelist Charles Dickens’s Bleak House is narrated in the present tense but the effect is obviously that of the past felt with immediacy:

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats… 

Туман везде. Туман в верховьях Темзы, где он плывет над зелеными островками и лугами; туман в низовьях Темзы, где он, утратив свою чистоту, клубится между лесом мачт и прибрежными отбросами большого (и грязного) города. Туман на Эссекских болотах, туман на Кентских возвышенностях. Туман ползает в камбузы угольных бригов; туман лежит на реях и плывет сквозь снасти больших кораблей; туман оседает на бортах баржей и шлюпок… (translation, Melitina Klyagina-Kondrat’evna) 

Partout du brouillard : sur les marais d’Essex et les hauteurs du Kent ; en amont de la Tamise, où il s’étend sur les îlots et les prairies ; en aval, où il se déploie au milieu des navires qu’il enveloppe, et se souille au contact des ordures que déposent sur la rive les égouts d’une ville immense et fangeuse. Il s’insinue dans la cambuse des bricks, s’enroule aux vergues et plane au-dessus des grands mâts ; il pèse sur le plat-bord des barques… (translation, H. Loreau, ed. Paul Lorain, 1896)

Now that is an historic present as smooth as a river approaching the sea.

Scaffolding gets us this far in and with the historic present as it overshoots that one page that I see on my lap.

The upshot of this series of observations is that I hope it raises awareness of underexplored translation options that perhaps you have not thought about. I am thinking about my own work as well—and I am sensitive enough to the demands of literary publishing not to excerpt what I am working on myself such that I can describe certain texts in the future as not having been published yet in any form.