Regardless of ongoing cultural transformations around the world, a translator remains the one and only guide into the realm of foreign fiction. Their talents largely determine the fate of heroes in books that venture beyond their native country.
“Translating is a great joy. I can compare the art of translation only with musical performance. It is an interpretation.” These are the words of Lilianna Lungina, a well-known literary translator and philologist, whose 100th birthday is celebrated in Russia this year.
Lilianna Lungina was born in Smolensk on June 16, 1920. She spent her childhood with her parents in Germany and France. By the time the girl returned to Russia, she only knew how to read and write in Russian, which didn’t prevent her from successfully graduating from school and entering the Chernyshevsky Institute of Philosophy, Literature, and History in Moscow. In the institute, Lilianna studied French culture but wrote her thesis on Scandinavia. She dreamt of translations from French, but nevertheless she turned to Scandinavian children’s literature due to the lack of specialists in this field. At one time, Lungina’s attention was drawn to a book with a little man on the cover who had a propeller on his back. This is how, in 1957, Karlsson-on-the-Roof, the main character of one of the amazing fairy tales of the Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren, burst into our lives. Karlsson was Lilianna Lungina’s first success that brought a lot of joy and happiness to Soviet and Russian children. Lindgren later admitted that thanks to her talent as a translator, her characters were much more popular in the Soviet Union than in other countries, including Sweden. Up to this day, Karlsson is one of the most beloved children’s books characters, and his ironic catchphrases are quoted by many generations.
Lilianna Lungina translated works of famous French, German, Norwegian, and Danish writers: Hans Christian Andersen, Knut Hamsun, August Strindberg, Henrik Ibsen, Heinrich Böll, Michael Ende, Alexander Dumas — to name a few. Lungina said that working with prose is sometimes as difficult as translating poetry: “You must find your own, completely different idiom or word play… which will evoke the same feeling, the same association.” Indeed, her texts always have the incredible lightness and harmony, as if the Russian language is masterfully interwoven into the culture of a foreign speech.
Lilianna Lungina cherished the warmest memories of Paris, but it was only 30 years later that she managed to come back. “I really wanted to go; I wanted to link my adult life with my childhood… I feel that Paris is the place where I belong, my hometown. This is my city”. In the early nineties, Lungina’s book Les Saisons de Moscou (Moscow Seasons) was published in France. the translator wrote in French about the country that no longer existed and the generation that happened to be born and live there. Les Saisons de Moscou was named the best non-fiction book of the year by the French readers in a poll by Elle magazine.
In 1997, director Oleg Dorman and cameraman Vadim Yusov filmed Interlinear, a biographical movie that was basically a monologue of Lilianna Lungina. Interlinear is the reflection of an entire epoch and its inhabitants, Lungina is a great storyteller and a very interesting person, and her speech is the perfect example of spoken Russian, which was further proved by the book of the same name that was published two decades later.
Translators are destined to live in the author’s shadow, to speak through their heroes. Fortunately, Lilianna Lungina managed to tell us something very personal, simple and important: “Life is crazy, but still beautiful … I think that the good in it prevails over the evil…. Because people are the most important thing in life, and there are many more wonderful people around than you would think. So, after all, the good triumphs over the evil… We need to take a closer look at the people around. Maybe you will not immediately see that they are wonderful — you have to make an effort to perceive what a person carries inside.
Darya Serzhenko