Canadian Slavonic Papers

Waterlings by Milne Holton; Veno TauferReview by: Tom PriestlyCanadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, Vol. 43, No. 2/3 (JUNE-SEPTEMBER2001), pp. 379-380Published by: Canadian Association of SlavistsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40870363 .

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Book Reviews 379

his discussion of technical assistance rendered to Russia by international agencies such as the IMF, World Bank, USAID, and OECD has not allowed Russians themselves to propose and put into effect their own remedies of their country's institutional weaknesses. Instead, this led to policies that did not have any realistic application to Russia's varied political and legal problems and traditions.

Building the Russian State succeeds in analyzing the various crises in Russia's transitional institutions, but one is tempted to wonder if different approaches other than reference to American political institutions can offer more insight into Russia's state crisis. The classical insider-outside problem that bedevils the relations between Russia's elites can be greatly expanded by drawing on examples of rent seeking behaviour in other countries and how such deleterious behaviour was overcome. As to the growth of organized crime, the decay of the military, the weakness of the labour movement, the corruption of the courts, the challenges of international reformers, and superpresidentialism, one is left wondering to what extent the emergence of these pressing issues arises from Russian understanding of law, authority, justice, and power noted by Alexander M. Yakovlev in his memoirs Striving for Law in a Lawless Land ( 1 996). Despite these concerns, the volume offers students and scholars some insight into post-Soviet politics, Russian state building, and Russia's uneven transition to democracy.

David Rees, University of Alberta

Veno Taufer. Waterlings. Trans. Milne Holton and Veno Taufer. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000. ix, 109 pp. $22.95, cloth.

Veno Taufer (b. 1933) is one of the most prominent contemporary Slovene poets, with thirteen books of poetry to his credit, the first from 1958. This cycle of poems, under its original title Vodenjaki, was first published in 1986. Until his death in April 2000 the late [William] Milne Holton worked in the English department of Maryland University and was best known among Slavists for his translations of Serbian poetry. Vodenjaki consists of 44 poems, grouped under six headings, only two of which - "Jeziki vodenjakov" (4 poems), and "Miti in apokrifi vodenjakov" (8 poems) - have appeared in English previously. Of the 44 poems, 4 ("Jeziki") were translated (here and previously) not by Holton but by Michael Scammell, who is acknowledged as co-translator only in a footnote. Further, the earlier translation by Scammell was different and in several repects more accurate. For example, to cite but two inaccuracies, öe tece trava was "if the grass runs" and has been altered to "if the grasses wave."

Vodenjak is Taufer's invented word for neolithic sculptures discovered in excavations at Lepenski Vir on the Lower Danube, figures that look half human, half fish. While visiting an exhibition of this discovery in Ljubljana, he was (we are told by the anonymous editor) moved by the creatures' expressions and "tried to imagine what cataclysm had caused such fear and pain;" his poems treat these creatures' languages, prayers and games, cries and incantations, songs and dances, myths and legends, and finally monuments. Their "self-destructiveness led to chaos, loss of identity and extinction... [serving] as a warning to modern society." This is a

Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes Vol. XLIII, Nos. 2-3, June-September 2001

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380 Book Reviews

powerful and vital poem cycle in the original; how well it is translated for the English-reading public is a question in need of careful consideration.

This question cannot, alas, be answered very easily, for the poet himself is listed as co-translator (and indeed is known for his translations into Slovene of Eliot, Auden, Blake, and Yeats). The reader might, in a bilingual edition with original and translation side by side, find what appear to be mistranslations; however, if they are sanctioned by the poet himself, perhaps criticism should be suspended - as this reviewer himself once found, when discussing his translations of some poems with their author herself. When faced with assertions that her preferred translation into English did not correspond to the original, she several times was moved to change the original. Nevertheless, there are far, far too many instances in Holton's versions (not in Scammell's!) which surely look like serious errors. Two examples, which are very representative, are from the set "Stoki in uroki." In the first poem there is a

thrice-repeated reii nam telesa and a twice-repeated telesa naia meia. The second

verb, meia , can only be third-person singular present, in this context "it stirs." The first verb, reii, could be either third-person singular present or second-person imperative: "it saves" or "save!" Because the poetic structure suggests a parallelism, all five repetitions are probably present tense forms. Note, however, that the three instances of reii are translated as "save!" whereas meia is translated once as "it stirs" and once, inexplicably, as "stir!" (pp. 32-33). The seventh poem has four verb forms, two past (udaril sem, podaril) and two present (nosim, prosim)' Holton's translation has three present ("i break, i give, i pray") and one past ("i bore"). Not only are three of the four 'wrong,' but there is no logical consistency. Given Holton's familiarity with Serbian, these (mis)translations are very odd: are, then, these 'errors' deliberate, perhaps abetted by Täufer, and, therefore, not errors at all?

Again, as this example shows (all five verbs occur at line-end), Taufer's poetry is in several places marked by rhymes and other sound instrumentation; but Holton makes little effort to achieve similar effects in his English versions.

Two positive points are particularly noteworthy. First, there are five informative footnotes (three to Slovene folksongs, one to Bach and one to Nietzsche) added by Holton. Second, he is laudably inventive when dealing with Taufer's neologisms, e.g., in poem five of "Stoki in Uroki": Taufer's plamenkrat and valovkrat are rendered as "flametimes," "wavetimes."

Any reader with a careful eye and some knowledge of one Slavic language (it does not have to be Slovene) will surely be intrigued at the apparent mistranslations (or the deliberate ̂interpretations). If the former, we may conclude that Holton should have stuck to translating to Serbian poetry; if the latter, that investigators into Taufer's poetry here have rich material for analysis. In either case, the English-reader will finish with a good appreciation of Taufer's poetic cycle, for its power is sufficient to survive what appears to be serious mishandling.

Tom Priestly, University of Alberta

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