A Conversation with
the Translator

Dramaturg Robyn Quick conducts a transatlantic email interview with John Freedman about the translation of Frozen in Time. John Freedman, theater critic of The Moscow Times, has published nine books on Russian theater. His play translations have been performed in the United States, Australia and Canada. He is the Russian director of The New Russian Drama Project.

Frozen in Time was commissioned for the Russian Season at the Towson University Department of Theatre Arts, developed with the Center for International Theatre Development.

RQ: How did you start translating plays for performance?

JF: If the truth is to be told, I starting translating plays merely because I wanted to. I had vague hopes that whatever I did would find its way into theaters, but, frankly, I wasn't thinking that far ahead. These first translations were begun in the late 1980s when I was writing my PhD dissertation on the playwright Nikolai Erdman. I didn't like any of the existing translations of his plays and so I went that age-old route – "If I don't do it, who’ll do it right?" There's hubris in that, of course, but who would ever do anything without hubris? Translation became serious for me in the early 1990s when I was named editor of a book series called the Russian Theater Archive. I translated and edited numerous plays for slim anthologies in the series. By then I was clearly thinking about theaters, not libraries or classrooms. My first translations of Olga Mukhina grew out of this period. Then in 2001 Olga and I spent a week at the Lark Theater in New York, workshopping my published version of her play YoU. In the early 2000s I translated Oleg Bogaev's The Russian National Postal Service for the Studio Theater in Washington, D.C., for a Russian season that theater conducted in 2004-05. Throughout the 2000s I continued translating the occasional play, but there was usually something haphazard about it. Towson’s New Russian Drama project gave me an opportunity to expand and focus my efforts. I'm thrilled to have helped make Vyacheslav Durnenkov, Maksym Kurochkin, Yury Klavdiev, Olga Mukhina and Yaroslava Pulinovich accessible to Americans. Be that as it may, I must say that my most "popular" translation continues to be Erdman's The Suicide. This year alone it is being performed in three cities in the U.S. and England. 

RQ: How do you select plays that you would like to translate?

JF: "All You Need is Love" is not one of my favorite songs, but it sure fits here. I can't imagine translating a play I didn't love. Sure, love comes in varying degrees, but without commitment and faith, I would never translate a word. The vast majority of my translations are plays I fell for when seeing them on stage or, at least, at readings. I see something I connect with it, something I can get inside of. I almost wanted to write, "something I can make my own," but I hesitated. It's true that at some point I make a play "mine" in translation, but that's the final step. The first 47 or 48 steps are to reveal the original playwright as fully as you possibly can. Of the two dozen or so plays I have translated, I think I have only done three on the suggestion of someone else. Two of those were done at the request of authors. I have lots of requests from authors to translate plays, but I almost always turn them down. In a couple of instances I have taken a liking to the plays offered me and I’ve gone ahead and done them. In one case a theater wanted a play translated and I did it. But that was easy because I loved the play – Bogaev's The Russian National Postal Service. 

RQ: Can you describe your process? Since you know many of the playwrights whose work you translate, how do your interactions with them figure into your translation process?

JF: This is a particularly interesting question for me. It’s shrouded in mystery. Indeed, I become extremely close to every writer I translate. Please note that I say, I become close to them. I have no idea what they think about me. That’s something else entirely different! But as I work on a play, the author – or, at least, the author I imagine – becomes a part of me. I begin to feel as though I think, feel and react as he or she might in specific situations. When I see an author I have translated, I can be extremely familiar and informal, perhaps even impolitely so. I wouldn’t be surprised to hear one say sometime that Freedman is very strange and rude. “I hardly know him at all,” I can imagine them saying, “and he acts like we’re old friends.” But, you see, from my point of view, we are. We’re more than that. I have become them in a certain small way. They have nothing to do with that and they know nothing of it. It would probably irritate the hell out of them to hear that. It makes for a potentially weird and awkward situation, although I frankly don’t worry much about it. It is what I do in order to get the best possible translation. I have to worm my way under the author’s skin, find ways to wriggle into their brains. In a sense, it’s like being an actor. Actors put on different masks for as long as it takes to rehearse and perform a role. I do something similar with my authors. I inhabit them. They become very close to me and I love them all.

What perhaps isn’t clear is that in most cases everything I have mentioned happens before I get to know the authors in a real, “life” sense. Ninety percent of the time I make my connection with the play first, create my early drafts as a translator, and only afterwards build some sort of personal relationship. What this means is that my real connection is with the work, not with the person. When I now sit down to talk with Slava Durnenkov, I know almost nothing about his real biography – I have to go to the Internet to find out where he was born, grew up, what jobs he worked at before he started writing. But his play Frozen in Time is there with me word-for-word. I hear echoes of his characters in his speech patterns, see shadows of their movements in his gestures. I see justifications for their actions in the way he comments on politics or sports. The relationship of a translator and an author – or, at least, such relationships in my experience – are very unorthodox and quite stimulating.

RQ: How did you work with Durnenkov on this play?

JF: We met twice when the work was still fresh in my mind and in my computer. Then, after I had polished the work to some degree, we met again to discuss questions I had not been able to answer on my own. Of the first two meetings, one was also attended by Peter Wray. Peter came to Moscow with one of Philip Arnoult’s groups in order to meet Slava and familiarize himself with the background of the work. That was a very interesting meeting for me. I was a passive player, usually just translating for Slava and Peter, sometimes just listening as Yury Urnov translated. But the questions Peter asked and the descriptions Slava offered were quite revealing. They got to talking about the tone of the work as it might look on stage, and that helped bring the play into better focus for me. Even more than Slava’s specific answers, I was impressed by his manner of speech, his diction, his sense of wise nonchalance that buried any sense of urgency that one might expect from an author talking about a play that is as dramatic and full of conflict as Frozen in Time. That told me a lot about the characters. I could see the way things smolder in them, only rarely bursting out in open flames.

RQ: This play brings together two entrepreneurs from the city with inhabitants of a small provincial town. How does the language of the original text help to distinguish between these two populations? How did you work to make this distinction in your text?

JF: I’ll give you a roundabout, but quite clear, answer on this one. I recently translated Maksym Kurochkin’s Kitchen. It’s a play I had put off doing for a decade, because I wasn’t sure I was up to it. Kitchen mixes all kinds of styles and voices. Most daunting to me were the sections in verse, written by Maksym in a kind of Shakespearean manner. I called him and asked how to go about doing this. Were there any specific Shakespeare plays I should read? Were there any that particularly influenced him, etc.? Very heavy, serious questions. Max simply said, “I wouldn’t worry about it. The lexical elements will take care of it themselves.” I trusted the author – that’s a key moment for any translator – and I set to work. To my amazement, Max was right. Any author’s word choices are a major limiting factor already. They create a narrow circle of possibilities for a translator, whose job it is then to choose the ones that work best in the given situation. This is an oversimplification, of course, but not by much. The fact of the matter is this: The author has already determined what roads you will go down as a translator. Your job – my job – is not to find new roads, but to navigate the one that’s there.

My story about working on Kitchen fits my work on Frozen in Time. It would have been impossible to translate the Moscow city slickers so that they sounded like the rough types from the town where the play is set. Vyacheslav determined that already. He gave all of them – the city slickers, the drunks, the thugs, the romantic boy, the tough-minded girl – he gave them all their own words, their own way of speaking. He gave them their own hesitations and doubts. By trusting Vyacheslav and following him, I almost automatically arrived at a similar place, with similar mannerisms, for the English-language versions of his characters.

As always, a caveat is necessary here. I am not saying I did this well. What I am saying is that I did it as I did it, and that I arrived at the result you will hear in the theater tonight. But any translator, including those who are better than I, will be subject to the same forces and laws as I was.

The harder work happens in another place – in making it sound natural in American English. I’m constantly on the lookout for turns of phrases or intonations or lexical elements that irritate or sound “foreign.” Those have to go. I might end up changing a phrase drastically; I might use completely new references, in order to have that phrase go down smooth in “American.” Still, the choices I have in making that change are predetermined by the author.

RQ: I know you played with a few different options for the title in English. What considerations did you make in settling upon your final choice?

JF: This was a pretty technical thing. I didn’t feel that the original title of Exhibits said much in English. In Russian it’s obvious that the title refers to people who are being dehumanized and turned into objects against their will. I didn’t, and still don’t, think that comes out in an English title of Exhibits. So I wanted to find something that pointed to the predicament facing the people of this town. During one of my trips to Towson I floated a couple of variants and asked people for suggestions. I was never quite satisfied with any of them until Frozen in Time popped into my head totally unexpectedly. This does not express the same thing that the Russian title does. But this is part of translation – you don’t translate word-for-word, you seek parallels that are capable of having a similar impact. My feeling is that Frozen in Time is an evocative title that gives an audience the feeling of a place trapped in a time warp. It is important to me that this title seems to promise a big event. We all know by our life experience that when anything or anyone is trapped, an explosion or rebellion is bound to occur soon. So this title not only describes the situation of the play, it hints at what is to come. There is danger lurking in this title, just as the peril of dehumanization lurks in the Russian title. That is a connection I am pleased with.

Russian artists speak with students during “Pizza with the Playwrights” at Towson University. From left, Yur Urnov, Yury Klavdiev, Vyacheslav Durnenkov, John Freedman and Robyn Quick.

From left, playwright Vyacheslav Durnenkov, director Peter Wray, and translator John Freedman. May 2010. Photo: Julia M. Smith