"Let this 'We' be the title of my records."

Most of my memories of my brother J growing up involve literature in some way or another. He's ten years older than me, and I was always sort of struck with awe at that things that he did. He ran an underground newspaper with his friends in high school. He wrote poetry, and printed and distributed collections of his works with titles like, "The Pot of Goldfish at the End of the Rainbow." Each stapled-together book would come with a hand-drawn cover illustration (by the author, of course), done in pastel crayons, and coated with hair-spray, so that the pigment wouldn't rub off on whatever it touched. He has an advanced degree in poetry (I was there in Amherst for his graduation), and has been working on a novel for the last few years. Most of the gifts that he gives to other people are books. Probably my favorite one that he's given me has been The Manual of Detection, by Jedediah Berry (who, presumably, was a prospector who turned to writing as a way to support himself after realizing he could no longer make it panning for gold, the rivers having been depleted). He's turned me on to other books that I've loved, too; Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and American Gods are the two that stand out sharpest in my mind.

For reasons I won't get into, I found myself today looking for a Christmas present for J. I had an hour to kill at the local thriftstore, and was browsing through the mass of books people have discarded over the years. For the most part, the books were arranged by binding rather than subject matter, so you'd see books on how to become a millionaire next to the fourth book in the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants series, which was just a few books down from a pulpy sci-fi book with a scantily clad cyborg on the cover and a young-adult historical fiction novel with the unsettling title, My Brother Sam Is Dead. (I've given instructions that this book will be delivered to my surviving siblings upon my death, preferably early enough that it will inform them of my passing.) Unsurprisingly, I didn't find anything there that I felt Joe would appreciate. The book I was looking for, I explained to V, would need to be considered a work of classic literature that is all but completely unknown. 

While searching through the thrift store, something triggered a memory of a book I read and loved once, during my senior year of high school. I had come across it while reading the book Science Fiction: History—Science—Vision by Rabkin and Scholes. I find myself coming back to that book a lot, thinking over my personal reading history. It put me on to my favorite author, Karel Čapek, and inspired me to read a greater range of science fiction starting with Frankenstein and moving on to H.G. Welles and Poe, then on to John W. Campbell and the authors he cultivated. It also lead me to the book We by Yevgeny Zamyatin. 

History described We as the prototypical dystopian novel, that would go on to directly inspire 1984 and foreshadow Brave New World. I found the book profound when I read it, so much so that I decided to perform it for speech and debate competitions. This involved trying to condense the book's plot down to ten minutes while still maintaining the soul of the book. It was my first attempt to do such a thing, and it didn't go over well. I could never stay within the ten minutes. Key sections of the plot were missing, and I stuck in poetic passages that didn't make sense out of context. My inexperienced performance and inability to create distinct voices for several characters* mashed all of these problems together into an unstoppable boulder of mediocrity, rolling downhill and picking up speed as it heads towards elimination from the tournament. But I digress. 

While pasting the speech together, I would usually have the book pressed down flat to the page that I wanted as I copied the words to a computer. Between this and frequent re-readings, the cover fell off of my first copy of the book within a year. After this happened, I kept that book bound together with rubber bands for sentimental reasons, and decided to get a more durable edition. I found a used library-bound edition from the late '80s, and figures that it would be a good replacement. It was only after the book arrived that I realized I had overlooked a crucial factor: the translation was grating compared to the version I had spent six months memorizing. The first copy I owned was a reprint of Clarence Brown's 1993 translation; this new copy was from Mira Ginsburg's 1972 translation. I don't have either book in front of me now; they're both boxed up in the basement of my parents' house, if I'm not mistaken. And I can't remember why it is that I disliked Ginsburg's translation so much. But I know that I thought it made the book weaker than Brown's version.

Getting back to today, I called up the largest used book store in the county to see if they have a copy of the book. After some confusion over the author (Yevgeny can be anglicized to Eugene, and Zamyatin could be spelled Zamiatin), they informed me that they did indeed have a copy, with a translation by Gregory Zilboorg. To my recollection, I'd never heard the name before, so I decided to go in to check it out. When I got to the store, I skipped to my favorite chapter in the book, the one whose opening lines I had forcibly kept in my speech even though it didn't advance the plot whatsoever. From memory, Brown's Record 32 begins, 

     "Do you believe that you will die? Yes; man is mortal, I am a man, ergo...No, that's not what I mean. I know that you know that. What I'm asking is: have you ever actually believed it? Believed it completely? Believed not with your mind, but with your body? Actually felt that the very fingers holding this page will one day be yellow, and icy?... 
     "No, of course not. And that is why, up to now, you haven't thrown yourself from the tenth floor to the pavement. It's why you've gone on eating, turning pages, shaving, smiling, writing.
     "It is the same—yes, exactly the same—with me today."

Eighteen-year-old Sam found these lines incredibly profound, so much so that 26-year-old Sam can remember them with ease, despite having not read the book in at least seven years. The same passage from Zilboorg's translation (you can see it in it's entirety here) reads, 

     "Do you believe that you will die? Oh, yes, "Man is mortal; I am a man; consequently .. ," No, not that; .I know that; you know it. But I ask: Has it ever happened that· you actually believed it? Believed definitely, believed not with your reason but with your body, that you actually felt that someday those fingers which now hold this page will become yellow, icy? ...
     "No, of course you cannot believe this. That is why you haven't jumped from the tenth floor to the pavement before now; that is why you eat, turn over these pages, shave, smile, write.
     "This very thing, yes, exactly this is alive in me today."

Looking at the two side by side, I will admit that I like the the "alive in me today" better than "we me today" in the concluding line of the passage. On the whole, though, I think that Brown's translation has a number of advantages; most notably that having the five activities in the second paragraph as active verbs ("eating, turning pages, shaving, smiling, writing.") makes them feel more immediate, which underscores the point of the passage. Another thing came to mind a while ago, just before I started writing this post. Zilboorg has the narrator responds to the flippant answer that "I know that; you know it," which is quite different from Brown's "I know that you know that." On a whim, I checked the original Russian text. (I took Russian classes in college, in large part because of this book.) Sure enough, the original line is «я знаю, что вы это знаете». Word-for-word, this translates to "I know, that you it know;" more fluidly, it translates to "I know that you know that." Zilboorg misses the meaning on a rather straightforward phrase. 

I can't really say how well his translation compares to the original text beyond this; I've forgotten enough Russian that a sentence more complex or advanced than "I know that you know that" (one standard verb with two declinations, and a handful of pronouns) completely baffles me. I will say one more thing about Zilboorg's translation: the omnipresent, oppressive government that dystopias love so much is called, in We, "One State." Or, at least it was in Brown's and Ginsburg's translation (I think Brown may have actually called it "OneState"). Zilboorg calls it "United State." This is closer to the original Russian (at least according to my favorite Russian-to-English translation site; again, I've forgotten nearly everything), but has the connotation of being one letter away from the United States, which completely changes the feel of the book. This is a pretty big thing. Big enough that I might not want to give J this copy of the book.

Yikes. Looking over Zilboorg's translation just now to make sure I got "United State" right, I saw that he calls the head of the United State "the Well-Doer." Ginsburg and Brown have enough sense to call him "the Benefactor," which has the advantage of not sounding silly. Dictators cannot have silly names in dystopias. It just cannot be done. 

*Actually, I think I may have narrowed it down to three. I couldn't come up with three separate voices.