What’s Different about My Translation of This Putin Speech?

First of all, read my translation of a Putin speech from last November and see if anything seems amiss about the language that I use:

Good afternoon, my esteemed friends—ladies and gentlemen. I am elated to welcome you to St. Petersburg. It is of high symbolism that of all places this city has traditionally welcomed international cultural forums. After all, our northern capital stands alone among cases of crosspollination between Russian cultures and other world cultures. St. Petersburg was conceived across centuries by outstanding architects and builders from many different countries.  Genius achievements are concentrated in Saint Petersburg—from great literary figures, musicians, scientists, actors, and thinkers, to describe them in language that’s as broad as possible, from people whose work has become integral to our world’s cultural legacy, When it comes to those who are engaged in falsifying history—and unfortunately there have always been enough of those at pivotal historical junctures, genuine art, which in other words is half-swallowed bone, prevents them from distorting world history to suit their current ideological constructs or, as we often see, gender constructs, and it prevents them from dividing people, which is why falsifiers fabricate fakes in movies, in political commentary, in PR, and in literature. 

All that said, this whole reality does not fit inside their falsification of history. Whole layers of art history from Western Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America are simply crossed out and fall silent as though they had never existed. And they have generally been trying to cancel our culture of late.  I emphasize they ar trying because by definition we realize cancellation is impossible, but nevertheless they are cancelling culture, which is based on real freedom and mercy, love for man, and spirituality.  Cancelling Russia is itself inherently anti-culture; such politics are neo-colonial and racist in their very essence. I would like for Russia, as an integral part of world culture, to continue to develop by its own power.  I say this now unfiltered with total frankness. 

That's what comes to mind: it’s at that moment that it may occur to us choose what’s best, adding greatness to world culture. Following that template, multiplying it, and moving forward and  showing leadership of our own while realizing how our partners reach extraordinary heights, Russia and our partners would quite naturally get our own  bearings with full conscientiousness. And without confusion or embarrassment Russia would orient herself while being guided by world culture’s greatest achievements so that in this symbiosis, the development of national Russian culture could continue, bearing in mind that this culture itself is essentially multifaceted and multiethnic and that deep down it primarily relies on these roots. Russia looked around and proceeded  in exemplary fashion.

In reality, we see that in order to win whatever contests are happening in Western countries, you must either tell stories, write, or show things from sexual minority, transgender, and prestidigitator perspectives—extensively from each segment of terminology. And yet and yet here’s what I'd unexpectedly like to say: I will say: not me too. These topics, these people are entitled to win, to depict, and recount their tales because what is being described is also part of society; it’s also true that people’s lives are going badly given that they are winning each competition. That is absolutely unnecessary, and yet on display was this striving for equal rights, mentioned I think by South Africa’s Minister of Culture. This equality should be omnipresent in everything, including in competitions that take place here and there within global culture.

I have had the suspicion when listening to or reading quite a few Putin speeches over the past year that there is a Russianness to Putin’s rhetoric that is often elided over when he is translated into English—a Russianness that can be preserved without making him incoherent to anglophone audiences. This has much to do with the limited scopos of much of the translation pertaining to Russian politics that is available in open-source environments. Giving a fair assessment without going overboard from the limits of a news cycle is often understood to be of paramount importance. These translations are often actually furthermore simultaneous interpretations performed orally and then transcribed, foreclosing the possibility of a different kind of artistic approach.

Simultaneously, I have to take on the one hand into consideration that Putin strives for a certain kind of formula that someone trained to understand his repertoire can to a large degree understand; the formula is not always that foreign: Putin has much rhetorically in common for instance with Americans who bemoan cancel culture. In this speech he is in fact complaining about cancel culture, which seen from his perspective as someone who incidentally believes in a very strong government, is enigmatically referred to as something more like cancellation politics. 

It is, however, true that he insists on his own nonmembership in Westernness, let alone Americanness. So much of Putin’s foreignness has to be nativized in this speech in any case precisely because his language is neither of these. This you must at the end is really more of an it is necessary to, the object being acted upon, in the dative case, has been ellipted out in a manner that is normal in Russian to such a degree that to have a denuded “need to” in there would misrepresent him insofar as the dialect of Putin should surely in English bear some resemblance to politicians in general. I would believe he would understand that he is implying a you, a folks, a one.

What is amiss about this speech? The linguistic dimension of Putin’s foreignness that I am focused on presenting today unadulterated is that I have avoided use of the words the and a, the grammatical articles that are so common in English and in rough analogues in other Western European languages and not at all in use in most other global languages. The thought came to me as though one of those middle-era Brian Eno oblique strategies that breaks a person out of a creative or analytical impassive.

Something I was reminded of while engaging with Biblical Greek a few weeks ago was the absolute clarity with which this Greek Jesus speaks of transcendental concepts, to the point of bringing to mind Platonic forms. When he says my father in English, he is generally in Greek quite enigmatically saying something much more akin to the father. A father who is perhaps in many ways not present or manifest to Jesus’s audience, who by His very absence can be sensed to be everyone’s father or something more like the Platonic idea of the paternity of the truth. “The idea of the chair” in Plato, for instance, the chair in the heaven of the realm of ideas that serves as a template for other chairs, very much depends on the celestial implications of the word the. Koine Greek has a concept analogous to the, that one, him-father. So much of English use of “the” in political theory and in other domains where it is a question of general principle may bring to mind this universalizing perspective.

Anna Gunin, an artist of a translator in her own right and a Russian tutor of mine from Bristol Translates this past summer of 2024, suggested to me that such an approach would lead to many Russianisms creeping in. Perhaps there is a strangeness to the version of Putin I have hit upon here, but the stereotypical Russian ESL character whose speech sounds denuded without articles has perhaps been somewhat avoided, as precious as my alternative may seem.  

It was a tough exercise but the result is perhaps harder to catch wise to than a Putin speech from April 2024 commemorating the construction of a major railroad line between the interior of Siberia and the Pacific Ocean (in the very act of describing it I have already used articles, haven’t I?). Something that might normally be conveyed as an example of the hard work of Russian and Azerbaijani laborers became: it exemplifies towering Russian and Azerbaijani achievements. 

The speech reproduced here was an exercise with a somewhat vaguer subject, a more conceptual and elusive subject, LGBTness and cancellation; it allowed me to concentrate on these questions: Does Putin denounce gayness, homosexuality, transgenderness in general? Does he hate the LGBT movement as a rule or does he despise a particular form of queer culture projected out into the world? The LGBT agenda throughout the world would perhaps be a curious thought for him to have: the meaning definite, as though there were one LGBT agenda. If he were to complain about an LGBT agenda, one could imagine that he imagines that there were many possible forms that favorability toward equal LGBT rights could take. 

I waited to find out with each new sentence what the real Putin was getting at: there is a certain logical connective tissue that at times is ellipted out or implied: this not me too—they have the right—also could be interpreted as meaning something quite different by a native Russian speaker as I do not agree that they are entitled to that right. What I was able to focus in on was something like: there would seem to be an enigma at the heart of the official Russian state rhetoric about queer culture. I have wondered why Russian pen pals of mine have veered from for instance noting the continued presence of gay clubs in big Russian cities into describing the moral failings of queer-positive American TV shows as some kind of general expression of their platform on the nature of LGBT rights. I in turn even tried out the idea earlier this year with a few online correspondents that some phase of bisexuality that leads to procreation is surely less offensive in Russia than other forms of queerness insofar as a character on TV who turns out to identify as straight upholds the heteronormative perspective that would seem to be important to Russian officialdom in the first place. Responses have generally been vague to such a suggestion. And they surely have a lot to do with Putin’s conviction that the Russian Federation is its own thing, as is, along with it, a ways beyond its borders, the so-called Russkiy mir, or Russian World, though here too is another instance of what is not merely Putin’s poetry of governance, but also his abiding strategic ambiguity.

The diversity of the world exists a priori in this speech; culture perhaps feels Platonic and everything else may be something more like an accidental feature of the present. He refrains from speaking too generally about LGBT culture because what he seemingly wants to be true in Russia he claims not to necessarily want to export everywhere else in the world. The demand of not giving into what might in English be called cancel culture would seem to obligate him, at least rhetorically, not to think of this LGBT culture as something eternal and fixed, something worthy of the article the. The wrinkle is something like a barrage of Netflix series with prominent queer storylines has ended up in Russian minds and he finds it imperialist. And after the Special Operation many in the West have taken a hard line against Russian cultural products. The lack of grammatical articles are only a part of how he avoids saying what should be true everywhere for everyone. 

By contrast, Russia’s Supreme Court’s decision from that same month can be rendered without articles, but a certain theness shines through all the same:

Появление в Российской Федерации сторонников и последователей Движения, формирование его структурных подразделений обусловлены внешнеполитическим воздействием, целью которого является устранение морального осуждения, традиционно сопровождающего противоестественные сексуальные отношения, и продвижение идеологии Движения и закрепление ее на государственном уровне.

Movement supporters and followers on Russian Federation territory have emerged and  structural units formed due to foreign policy influence, whose purpose is to eliminate moral condemnation that traditionally accompanies unnatural sexual relations, and to promote Movement ideology and consolidate it within government and nationwide.

Regardless of what other translators or analysts may at first glance understand this passage to be about, when one therefore asks oneself whether Putin or Russian officialdom is against the LGBT movement or simply against a particular current form of the LGBT phenomenon, which is perhaps to say against a form of queerness that takes the form of spreading awareness and hope for tolerance and openness worldwide and in particular within Russia. Much would seem to hinge on the idea that a movement agitates, sets things into movement. The question opens up the gap between what Putin and others in Russia, as Putin puts it in his address to the culture forum, currently want and the spectrum of preferences they might bring to a range of different states of play. 

With that in mind and with it not in mind that such an exercise would lead me to greatness among the successors to Oulipo’s Queneau, Perec, or Calvino’s literary constraints, I wonder how focusing on a much different one might lead to further insight into Putin and Russia.