Russian translation analysis: The Little Prince
Note: this analysis is incomplete; it has lived in its incomplete state for two years and I am now committing to it remaining incomplete. The following are a few thoughts about the beginning parts of one passage.
One of the passages in Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince I’m fondest of is the laughing stars passage near the end of the book:
– Justement ce sera mon cadeau… ce sera comme pour l’eau
– Que veux-tu dire ?
– Les gens ont des étoiles qui ne sont pas les mêmes. Pour les uns, qui voyagent, les étoiles sont des guides. Pour d’autres elles ne sont rien que de petites lumières. Pour d’autres, qui sont savants, elles sont des problèmes. Pour mon businessman elles étaient de l’or. Mais toutes ces étoiles-là se taisent. Toi, tu auras des étoiles comme personne n’en a…
– Que veux-tu dire ?
– Quand tu regarderas le ciel, la nuit, puisque j’habiterai dans l’une d’elles, puisque je rirai dans l’une d’elles, alors ce sera pour toi comme si riaient toutes les étoiles. Tu auras, toi, des étoiles qui savent rire !
Et il rit encore.
I was introduced to it first through its Russian translation, along the lines of (not my translation):
Вот это и есть мой подарок… это будет, как с водой…
— Как так?
— У каждого человека свои звезды. Одним — тем, кто странствует, — они указывают путь. Для других это просто маленькие огоньки. Для ученых они — как задача, которую надо решить. Для моего дельца они — золото. Но для всех этих людей звезды — немые. А у тебя будут совсем особенные звезды…
— Как так?
— Ты посмотришь ночью на небо, а ведь там будет такая звезда, где я живу, где я смеюсь, — и ты услышишь, что все звезды смеются. У тебя будут звезды, которые умеют смеяться!
И он сам засмеялся.
To provide some context in English, here is a fairly literal translation of the above Russian:
This is it, my present… this will be like with the water…
— How so?
— Every person has their own stars. For some - those, who travel - they show the way. For others they are just small lights. For scholars they are like a scientific question that one needs to solve. For my businessman they are gold. But for all of these people stars are mute. But you will have completely special stars…
— How so?
— You will look at night at the sky, and after all there will be such a star, where I live, where I laugh - and you will hear that all the stars are laughing. You will have stars that know how to laugh!
And he himself started laughing.
This passage has comparable English translations that are less literal to the Russian than the one provided above, but I want to talk here specifically about the relationship between the Russian translation and the original text.
Russian literature, due in part to the structure of the Russian language itself, is prone to being poetic. Where the structure of English depends on the order of words in relation to one another, Russian sentence structure is almost entirely irrelevant to the ‘correctness’ of the grammar. By that I mean the words in a sentence are almost entirely interchangeable. In English the sentence “she ran to meet her sister” can only be arranged one way, while its counterpart in Russian can have at least four permutations - she ran to meet her sister, she (her) sister ran to meet, ran she to meet her sister, she to meet her sister ran - that are not only grammatically sound but would pass as normal conversational usage. The barebones factual meaning of a sentence is not conveyed in its structure as much as it is conveyed within the words themselves, in the conjugations and declinations. This leaves room for the sentence structure choices to convey nuance and emotional information. The placement of words in relation to one another signifies a relative importance, a sort of sentence-level stress, which effectively adds a layer of meaning onto the sentence. And that’s just one of the ways in which Russian is a beautifully nuanced language that takes well to writing. I’ve written a little about this same concept here.
Anyway, I wanted to pick apart the specific translation decisions here because this book and in particular its Russian translation was such a fond part of my formative years. This particular Russian translation can be found at https://online-knigi.com/page/159?page=10 - I wouldn’t know which would have been the first translation I read anyway, and this serves as just as good a jumping-off point for this conversation as would a different translation, I think. I don’t mean to pass judgment on whether I think this translation is “good” or not - it’s only interesting to me to examine how different decisions in translation capture or transmit meaning differently.
Starting at the beginning, there’s a tense choice that’s not literal. “Ce sera mon cadeau” would be the future tense, “this will be my present [to you].” The translator chose “Вот это и есть,” which is the present tense form of the verb. Interesting side note, the standalone verb for ‘to be’ in Russian doesn’t really exist in most cases - it’s omitted in sentences like “she is sad” or “that is a tractor.” This is one common usage for it, this declarative use that reinforces something’s existence or points directly to something being explicitly true when it was previously in doubt. You can omit it entirely from the excerpted sentence and it would become “this is my present [to you]” - however, adding in that reinforcing verb makes it “this is it, my present [to you].” Which is the type of minute difference we’re going to be having fun with here (or at least I’m going to be having fun with it). That reinforcing ‘to be’ actually serves a similar purpose as does “justement” in the French.
We are summarily skipping the end of the line (the water reference) because it’s a thematic callback that I’m not ready to discuss at length and speaking in any perfunctory way would not do it justice re: this exercise.
“Как так?” is interesting because of its idiomatic tint. You’re not asking literally “what do you want to say” or even a little less literally “what are you trying to say,” you’re asking “how is that, that way?” Why this seems like a conscious choice is because the French “que veux-tu dire” takes a very simple, common phrasing invoking the desire verb vouloir. Vouloir is to want, so this is very simply “what do you want to say?” But, of course, things are not necessarily simple like that - Russian doesn’t use the desire verb in this context often unless it’s in the sense of giving someone permission to say something. Similarly, a close English translation from the veux-tu wording of “what are you trying to say” would be taken in Russian as either someone not being able to find words for what they’re saying (‘you’ve been stammering for a couple of minutes now - just tell me, what are you trying to say?’) or with an almost accusatory tint (‘you’ve said three times now that my car’s nice and it would be a shame if someone stole it. What are you trying to say?’). Given that we neither want to accuse the Prince nor is he having trouble getting his point across, there needs to be a third option. That third option is the English “what are you saying?,” which is this Russian “как так?” They have (from my perspective) almost exactly the same connotation of curiosity or incomprehension or slight desperation. You’re not just asking what they’re literally saying, you’re asking why they’re saying it, or what their meaning is. And that’s (I assume) why the original French was not just the appropriate form of the verb dire (to say). Only using dire would make it literally only ‘what is the meaning of the words that are coming out of your mouth,’ and not this nuanced suggestion of incomprehension. In French the desire verb makes sense, as it doesn’t have the same ‘permission’ connotation as in Russian (I think), and so the Russian translation here is more idiomatic.
Last update: 14 April 2023