A Book and Online Translation Software

Till My Tale is Told

Simeon Vilensky, Ed.

Indiana University Press

400 pages, hardcover, $35

Commentators frequently bemoan the cynicism of our age. They tell us that nothing is sacred anymore, that cultural relativism has turned the black and white of Right and Wrong to countless shades of gray, that no one respects our leaders anymore. Idealism has been washed away by skepticism, certainty by disbelief. And it will only end badly, we are told: in anarchy, apathy and a debasement of our culture.

Some may argue with this diagnosis and many with the prognosis. But this much we know for sure: we tried the certainty thing, and it was way wrong. Idealism combined with political power, intolerance and moral certitude is the mixture responsible for most all the treacherous evil of the past century.

This evil was so huge it is monstrously incomprehensible: 6 million Jews exterminated in Nazi concentration camps, 25 million Soviets murdered in Stalin’s purges, 65 million Chinese swept away by the “people’s revolution,” 1.7 million Cambodians killed in that country’s devolution. Knowing how precious is each human life, it can be morally debilitating to try to grapple with the reality of these numbers.

One can only understand the true depth of the horror by turning away from the numbers and focusing on individuals. Till My Tale is Told, a remarkable collection of stories, allows one to do just that. Gripping and shatteringly poignant, this collection of Russian women’s tales of survival through arrest, prison, camps and exile is one of the richest, most visceral descriptions of life in Stalin’s Russia ever published.

Many of the stories in this volume were recounted years after the events, but all retain a remarkable immediacy of feeling and observation. The shock and disbelief of arrest, the naiveté of the revolutionary idealists, the inhumanity of petty bureaucrats—all this is there, just as it is in Solzhenitsyn or Razgon. But there is something more. Perhaps it is that, when we think of Stalin’s purges, we tend to think mainly of the men who were ground up by the machine, not their wives and daughters, mothers and aunts. Perhaps it is that the separation of a mother from her children is more painful to witness than the removal of the father.

In fact, it is the unique sensitivity of these women that makes these stories so important. They are indomitable storytellers. They listen to and care for those around them the way only a mother or sister can. And so they learn, and recount, the most essential stories of those with whom they shared this horror. And they teach themselves to survive in the most awful reality. As Olga Adamova-Sliozberg writes:

“In those long nights I learned that it is indeed possible to control your thoughts, to cease to remember, or regret, or tear yourself apart with guilt—on your own account, or your husband’s, or your mother’s, or because you insulted someone or didn’t love them enough or failed to show compassion. It is possible to stop feeling. But it is terribly hard.”

As Editor Simeon Vilensky writes in his preface to the English edition, “it must be hard for people raised in quite different political and social conditions to imagine or fully comprehend the surrealistic nature of our existence then.” Indeed, we cannot read these stories without a fair measure of incredulity: How could they so blindly and wholeheartedly believe in the Communist Truth? How could they not grasp the complicity of Stalin—even as they petitioned him with letters after their arrest? How could they believe that someone had all the answers, and that they did not have a right to challenge them?

Thank God for the cynicism of our age.

PROMT online translator

ProMT

www.translate.ru

The best things in life may be free, but the best translations are not.

Nonetheless, we decided to undertake a search of the Internet Bazaar, looking for a simple, fast (and free) way to translate the occasional paragraph between English and Russian.

We found several widely-promoted online translation engines (i.e. Babelfish and freetranslation.com), which were indeed free. But they restricted themselves to those staid and simple languages: French, German and Spanish. There are also plenty of Russian-English online dictionaries, but that was not what we were after.

Then we found ProMT. It is a simple yet powerful translator engine by the people who make the best English-Russian machine translation system (admittedly, that’s a bit like saying “the tastiest brand of linoleum”)—available for purchase at their website, of course. This handy site allows you to type in a paragraph or so, press a button and voila! have it translated into Russian (or visa-versa).

Of course, what we were shooting for was readable, grammatical Russian that retained the intended meaning. It would not do, for instance, to type in a short, romantic love note and have it translate to something like “My heart hemorrhages for you.” Especially since one assumes most users cannot verify the correctness of a finished translation (or why would they use this facility?).

So we tested the site with a few different types of paragraphs. Not surprisingly, with technical and legal texts it did miserably. On simple, straightforward language, chosen carefully to avoid difficult words and idiomatic phrases, the site did remarkably well.

We could not resist a more interesting test, however. Remember the game of “telephone” from grade school? You would sit in a circle and go around the room whispering what you heard in one ear into the ear of the person next to you. Then when it got back around the circle, the phrase was nothing like what it started out to be.

In a variation on this theme, we selected an appropriate quote from Voltaire: “Woe to the makers of literal translations, who by rendering every word weaken the meaning! It is indeed by so doing that we can say the letter kills and the spirit gives life.”

We punched it in and had it translated into Russian. Then we cut and paste the Russian and had it translated back to English. The result was illuminating: “To mountain to manufacturers of literal translations who, giving every word weaken value! It is valid, so doing (making), that we may speak, that the letter kills, and the spirit gives life.”

If you knew what you were looking for, you might get meaning out of this. But the poetry was clearly lost in the translation.

—Paul Richardson