I came by this exercise by way of my Syracuse colleague Brooks Haxton, a wonderful poet and translator. (I love and highly recommend his most recent book of poems, Mister Toebones.)
So: develop “your” version of the first paragraph of “My First Goose,” using the translations I’ve supplied below. The idea is to honor the basic reality of the text, but using different language – your language, language that you like/prefer.
Dralyuk Version:
Savitsky, the Sixth Division commander, rose when he saw me, and I marveled at the beauty of his gigantic body. He rose and – with the purple of his breeches, with his crimson cap tilted to one side, with the decorations hammered into his chest—cut the hut in half, as a banner cuts the sky.
McDuff Version:
Savitsky, nachdiv 6, stood up at the sight of me, and I was astonished at the beauty of his gigantic body. He stood up and with the purple of his breeches, with his little raspberry-coloured cap flicked over to one side, with the medals stuck on his chest, cut the izba in two as a standard cuts the sky.
Vinokur Version:
Savitsky, the divchief six, rose when he saw me, and I was struck by the beauty of his giant body. He rose and—with the carmine of his breeches, the raspberry of his tilted cap, the medals pressed into his chest—split the cottage in half like a standard splits the sky.
Walter Morison Version:
Savitsky, Commander of the VI Division, rose when he saw me, and I wondered at the beauty of his giant’s body. He rose, the purple of his riding breeches and the crimson of his little tilted cap and the decorations stuck on his chest cleaving the hut as a standard cleaves the sky.
Peter Constantine Version:
Savitsky, the commander of the Sixth Division, rose when he saw me, and I was taken aback by the beauty of his gigantic body. He rose — his breeches purple, his crimson cap cocked to the side, his medals pinned to his chest — splitting the hut in two like a banner splitting the sky.
For the first level of this exercise, confine yourself very tightly to the above versions, structurally. Try to get in the various actions and colors and so on. This will tell you something about the small decisions you make within the constraints - your micro-preferences.
Then, there’s a second level, if you want to give it a go: try to express the foundational idea here (someone getting an assignment from another person) but cut yourself free from the constraints created by the existing versions - riff, play, create, goof around.
Again, what we are really doing here is trying to drill down on this idea of choices, even micro-choices, which are, I’m saying, the magical basis for line editing.
Post your responses in the Comments, if you like, and it might be interesting to hear you write/talk a bit about why you made the choices you made and how it felt as you did it.
I think it’s important to underscore here that it’s actually almost impossible to articulate why we choose the way we do, and that doing so maybe isn’t really all that valuable. What’s valuable is to develop one’s ability to choose confidently – to know what you like, what you radically prefer; to get into a comfortable relation with our choosing faculty, let’s say - to get better at identifying these micro-preferences and better at honoring them (and then, of course, next pass through, being willing to overturn them and choose again).
Maybe the overarching question: what does it feel like in the instant when we’ve chosen well?
If you find this exercise intriguing, there’s an extended discussion of it in Appendix C of “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain,” using an example from a different Babel story (the amazing “In the Basement,” which I hope we’ll take up here someday).
Next post we’ll resume our discussion of “My First Goose,” by focusing on pulse #3: The Cossacks torment him, i.e., don’t accept him (rest of page 52).
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I cheated a bit for the first-level exercise, because I could translate directly from the Russian. (I'm not fluent, by any means, but I can manage literary translation if I have enough time.)
Savitsky, sixth division commander, stood when he saw me, and I was taken aback by the glory of his huge body. He stood, and with the purple of his leggings, with his raspberry-colored cap, pushed down to one side, and his medals, driven against his chest, he cleaved the hut in half like a banner cleaves the sky.
A few notes on my translation:
The word for "beauty" can also be translated as "glory," which I liked better. The cap color is literally "raspberry-colored" in Russian, so it seemed good to keep that detail, rather than take it to "carmine." The word for the cap's position comes from a root word meaning "beaten" or "knocked down," so I went for "pushed" rather than "tilted" or "cocked." And there's a second word in the phrase meaning "sideways," or "to the side." The verb for the placing of the medals is also kind of violent: hammered, beaten into, driven. So I added the word "against" to convey some force, even though this preposition does not appear in the Russian. I like "cleave" as the final verb. Again, there's a sense of force in this verb. "Split" seems like a more straightforward translation, but I liked the literary feeling of "cleave."
2. Savitsky, the Long Division Commander, sighed when he saw me, and I marveled at the beauty of his enormous chalkboard. He sighed—glasses drooping, bow tie crooked, Eagle Scout badges pinned to his lapels—and said to divide some tremendous number in two, the way my little sister divides our M&Ms.