A Conversation with the Translator

MFA student Cat Hagner speaks with John Freedman about the translation of The Natasha Plays. 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 Russia director of The New Russian Drama Project.

CH: In addition to being the translator of the plays, you also brought the Natasha Monologues to the attention to the director. What is your experience with Yaroslava Pulinovich's work?

JF: It's almost impossible for me to have had much of an experience with Pulinovich's work up to now. She is 22 and, for all intents and purposes, has just appeared on the scene. That is, she started making a mark at play festivals in Yekaterinburg when she was 17 or 18. And there was a stir when she came to the New Drama Festival in Moscow in 2008. I heard her name being mentioned around. One day I was walking down the street in central Moscow and I saw Yury Klavdiev coming my way with a young woman in tow. We hailed each other and he said, "Here, John, I want you to meet the newest genius among Russian playwrights. This is Yaroslava Pulinovich."

     But it was really only late in 2009 that I had a genuine opportunity to engage, and be engaged by, Pulinovich's work. Her monologue Natasha's Dream opened in mid-November in a production at the Playwright and Director Center in Moscow and I was quite impressed. Earlier in the year I had learned that Noah Birksted-Breen was planning to include this play in his Russian Theater Festival at his Sputnik Theater in London. So these kinds of things sort of work on your mind.
    I think it was just one or two days after I attended the Moscow opener of Natasha's Dream that Stephen Nunns wrote me and said that, for various reasons, we needed to add a new piece to our Russian season. Did I have any suggestions? Well, that was easy. I said, "I just saw a really interesting piece. Why don't we try it?" Then when I contacted Pulinovich for permission, she said, "I've got this mirror-image monologue that goes along with Natasha's Dream. I just published it. Maybe you'd like to look at it, too?"
    So we did and we decided to do both. And there you have an exhaustive explanation of just about everything that connects me to Pulinovich and her work so far. I suspect the future holds plenty more encounters.

CH: In what ways does her work resonate with Russian audiences?

JF: For obvious reasons the answer to this cannot be expansive. There simply have not been many opportunities yet for audiences to respond to her. Pavel Rudnev, one of Russia's best critics and a member of the Russian board for the Towson Russian season, points to Pulinovich's light, optimistic outlook. "She fearlessly looks the world in the eyes and accepts its best and worst aspects with joy and enthusiasm,"* he wrote about her a year before her Moscow debut.
     Pulinovich herself wrote to me at one point that these are two plays "about how not to bring up young people."
    I would hazard to say that her two young heroines provide subtle but accurate portraits of many young women in Russia today. I find it interesting that in her diptych of monologues she took on two opposites - one a well-adjusted, well-off high school student; the other a kid from a failed family who now lives in an orphanage. The fact of the matter is that these vastly different young women in completely different circumstances struggle with the same demons. For all their differences, these plays are the retelling of one and the same story. The girls' culture, their society, their peers all expect them to be cool, to be on top of things, to be in control, to be nonchalant about everything, especially about those things that are closest to their hearts, and, therefore, the most unnerving.      My point is this: I suspect many young Russian women today would recognize their own lives in these portraits. They would understand the obstacles and pressures that Pulinovich's two Natashas face. I think these small plays provide accurate pictures of a troubled society and of the vulnerable young people who are growing up in it. Let's wait a few years and we'll see how close I am to being right.

CH: How do you feel the monologues will resonate with an American audience?

JF: Well, how much does what I said about Russia fit the United States? What kinds of pressures are young people, young women, put under every day, every minute in the U.S.? I think you'll find that these things are universal. Yes, Pulinovich is writing specifically about Russians. In fact, she's writing about Russians from a provincial city, a place that, by definition, is a little backward, that probably suffers from a collective inferiority complex, that doesn't offer a whole lot of opportunities. But if you look closely, you will see that the meat of these works involves what is shared by all people - the longing for love, a fear of insecurity, a desire to justify one's own view of, and place in, the world.
     These things sound banal when you list them in a sentence. But that's what artists are for. When a good artist takes them on, embroiders them in his or her own way with personal flourishes - then you reach that point when the usual becomes the uncommon, when the obvious becomes a revelation. Somehow I don't doubt that young Americans will see themselves in these plays every bit as much a Russian audience would.

CH: Did the young age of the characters present an additional challenge to translating the plays?

JF: Are you implying that many decades have passed since I was the age of these characters? If so, you would be right. But do you realize that all of us continue to see ourselves as teenagers throughout our whole lives? Or, maybe, I should speak for myself. Whatever the case, as I have said already, these plays, in essence, are about things that every human being knows and has experienced. As a translator, I felt as though I slipped under the skin of the two young women fairly easily. By saying that I'm not providing a value judgment of my work, I am merely saying I felt entirely comfortable existing inside the heads and the worlds of the two Natashas. I have no mirrors in my study, so there was nothing to remind me that I was really stretching it to feel that way.

CH: Do male and female teenagers differ in their language choices in Russian?

JF: Yes, of course. I don't think that will come of much surprise to anyone. I would say this, however, that young Russian women have begun taking on some of the mannerisms, linguistic and behavioral, of their male counterparts. It's not that big a deal (not all that big, anyway) to hear young Russian women cussing, as Russians might say, "like shoemakers." I have a "friend" on Facebook, a young Russian woman, whose choice of words and topics would probably have been the exclusive domain of a young man 20 or so years ago, when she was born. These things are undergoing major changes right now.      A sign of this merging of the two voices, male and female, is contained in the first lines of "Natasha's Dream." Natasha aggressively addresses the audience with a rather vulgar, shall we say, obscene suggestion. That isn't, to use an old-fashioned phrase, proper talk for a young lady. In her situation, however, she sees nothing wrong with it. She even feels compelled to set any doubters straight - "I'm not cussing," she says. "Those are regular words."
     That said, however, the twain has not yet met between the languages spoken by young Russian women and young Russian men. These plays are not nearly as "rude" as they might be if they were written by males about males. You can feel the Natashas - and some of the other female characters - appropriating "male" language in an attempt to be tough or particularly expressive. But when left to their own devices, they are more likely than not to avoid violating certain linguistic taboos.

CH: How did you address the challenge of understanding the Russian teenage slang and finding the US equivalent

JF: On one level you are posing a simple question about what I do and do not know. On another level, you are addressing a problem that has a very technical solution.
      What I know, I know by force of having lived in Russia for over 20 years, by hearing people (young and old) speak next to me in the subway, in theaters, on park benches, on my own sofa in my living room, in the editorial offices of the newspaper where I work, on television, in movies. It's amazing what you acquire in situations like that. Your passive knowledge is exponentially greater than your active knowledge. So it isn't all that often that a playwright can throw a phrase at me that I haven't heard and haven't had an opportunity to think about. Not that it doesn't happen. But when it does - and here we come to the second aspect of your question - you simply go to the source. And that is what I did with Pulinovich. After achieving rough drafts of each play, I sent her emails, each containing about 20 requests for clarification. Many of them involved the characters' speech patterns and choices. Yaroslava provided excellent, explanatory answers and then I went to work looking for American English equivalents.
     I had the luxury of being present with Stephen Nunns, Julia M. Smith and Sarah Lloyd at their first readings of the plays in December. I came in with questions about phrases I was unsure of and I asked them to weigh in. When we came to trouble spots, I asked the actors, "What would you say in this situation?" They had some very good ideas - very funny ones - and several of their responses went into the final texts. When you get to "purple nurple" in "Natasha's Dream," for example, you can thank Julia for the laughs that's bound to get. Stephen and I cracked up at that one. It blew away all the competition for that phrase!

  *Rudnev quote taken from internet journal Topos at: http://topos.ru/article/6707 - the article's title is "New Drama No. 8. Natasha's Dream. Yaroslava Pulinovich."

Translator John Freedman (left) in rehearsal with company of The Natasha Plays. Towson University. December 2009. Photo: Robyn Quick