Translating is perhaps the most intensive of all forms of reading. During the last year, together with my wife, Elizabeth Chandler, and Olga Meerson, I have been retranslating one of the greatest of all Russian novels: Andrey Platonov’s The Foundation Pit. In that time, I have been through the text in every possible way: straight through in Russian, straight through in English, and reading each sentence first in one language and then in the other. I have read entire drafts out loud to my wife at least twice, stopping to discuss any words that felt wrong to either of us. I have exchanged many hundreds of email messages with Olga Meerson, who has compared every sentence of our drafts with the Russian and who told me she saw it as her role to make life harder for me and Elizabeth?not to let us get away with any compromises. This intensity of involvement with a text is exhilarating. A price, however, I pay for the privilege of this close involvement with such great work as Platonov’s is that I seldom, except on holiday, have the time to read a long novel. More often I read poetry and short works of fiction.

Fables by Jean de La Fontaine; trans. Gordon Pirie

‘You sang, you say? How very charming!
Well, summer days are fled,
And since your talents aren’t for farming,
You’d better dance instead!’

La Fontaine’s ant and grasshopper are entirely at home in English; these four lines are both perfect and natural – one can learn them by heart just like that. To get a sense of how hard it is to achieve such grace one need only look at other translations of the same passage. All seem strained, as if still struggling to leave French behind them and be reborn in English. . . It was under Gordon Pirie’s guidance that I made my first attempts at translating poetry, and it was in his English classes that I first learned to read with anything approaching true attention. Nearly 25 years after his tragic death I have at last managed to persuade a publisher (the admirable Hesperus) to bring out his versions of La Fontaine.

Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin; trans. Stanley Mitchell

No Russian doubts that Pushkin is Russia’s greatest writer. He is, however, far harder to translate than Tolstoy, Chekhov or Dostoevsky. His charm, wit and elegance have long been thought impossible to reproduce. Now, however, we have a translation of his masterpiece, Eugene Onegin, that reads as fluently as the original, that sings and dances as gracefully as a ballerina Pushkin describes in the first chapter:

‘…… one foot supporting her,

She circles slowly with the other,

And lo! a leap, and lo! she flies,

Flies off like fluff across the skies,

By Aeolus wafted hither thither;

Her waist she twists, untwists; her feet

Against each other swiftly beat.’

It is hard to describe this ‘novel in verse,’ as Pushkin called it, except through paradox. The sparkling levity proves able to incorporate tragedy, and the simple plot has room for the wildest digressions. For all the artifice, there is a density of realistic detail that has led critics to see Onegin as the beginning of Russian realism. And for all the realism, there is a delight in sound and rhythm, a high-spirited playfulness, that has led others to see Pushkin as a believer in ‘art for art’s sake.’ I recently read the whole of Mitchell’s translation out loud to my wife. It is entirely convincing in tone and rhythm and – like any great translation – it enabled me to appreciate aspects of the original that I had previously failed to see.

The Year is ’42 by Nella Bielski, trans. John Berger and Lisa Appignanesi

This novel is set against the background of a terrible time, but it is imbued with tenderness and hope. Bielski addresses the most serious of themes, but she is modest in her recognition of the limits of art. The entire novel is, in a way, about the Shoah, but Bielski writes about it only obliquely. The heroine of the last part, a Ukrainian doctor called Katia, can say nothing about the many horrors she has lived through except ‘Words are poor and we are poorer still’; this admission of poverty, paradoxically, is a source of great strength. Katia is a gifted healer – and so, in a way, is Bielski. Love and healing, Bielski seems to be saying, can take place in unlikely ways, and in unlikely situations. The novel follows a surprising trajectory. In the first chapter we see Karl Bazinger, an aristocratic German officer, dissatisfied with his privileged life in Nazi-occupied Paris and ‘in the claws of a French teenager’; in the final chapter, we see him on the Eastern Front, finding an expected peace of spirit in the healing hands of the middle-aged Katia. I reread this during a recent trip to Petersburg. A week in Russia often leaves me disorientated; my body flies back to London but, intellectually and emotionally, I remain in Moscow or Petersburg. This time I was completely caught up in the world created by Nella Bielski; it took me longer than ever to return to my own life.

The Fifty Minute Mermaid by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill; trans. Paul Muldoon.

Every language embodies a particular view of the world; every language, probably, is better equipped to describe some aspects of reality and worse equipped to describe others. A good translator is always hoping to expand the possibilities of his own language, to find a way to embody in his own language forms of experience that do not easily find a home in it. This book is a meditation on everything that is most elusive, everything that is most remote from our adult, rational consciousness. Originally written in Irish Gaelic – a language with only 20,000 to 30,000 native speakers – the poems purport to be an account of the narrator’s meetings with the surviving members of a group of ‘merfolk’ who, for some reason chose – or perhaps were forced – to make their home on dry land some two hundred years before. Much of the time, rather than telling us about the merfolk, the narrator is lamenting the difficulty of understanding their beliefs and way of being. For the main part, the merfolk deny their past:

She hates nothing so much

as being reminded of the underwater life that she led

before she turned over a new leaf on dry land.

Only occasionally does the narrator get a clear glimpse of their past ways. Once, for example, he overhears a mermaid ‘baptising’ a premature baby that seems likely to die. Desperate, and unaware of the narrator’s presence, she throws handfuls of water over her shoulder and chants. This is one of only a few occasions where Paul Muldoon, the translator, abandons the hesitancy of free verse and, as if stepping back into an earlier age, slips into fluent rhyme:

A wavelet for your lovely form,

A wavelet for your voice so warm […]

A wavelet for your throat.

A wavelet to help you float

effortlessly and with ease,

effortlessly and with the greatest ease.

For all its apparent lightness, the collection is imbued with a deep pain, with a deep regret for the many ways we fail to remember, the many ways we fail to speak and to listen. One of the saddest of all is ‘Mermaid and Parish Priest’. When, many years after being sexually abused, the mermaid finally tells her mother about it,

the response

she got from her was ‘Oh, the poor priest, isn’t he a man

like any other?’ ‘Well,’ said the mermaid inwardly,

‘that’s the last thing I’ll ever tell you.’

And, as it happens, it was.’

A Scattering by Christopher Reid

I have admired Christopher Reid’s work for a long time. He has always written wittily and interestingly and shown an unusual ability to follow a thought in an unexpected direction. A Scattering, however, is marked by a new depth of feeling. A tribute to his wife, Lucinda, who died in late 2005, it consists of four sequences, the first written during her final illness, and the other three after her death.

Reid writes with great clarity. I read this book for the first time at one sitting, which I almost never do with poetry. At the same time, it is so intense that I find myself wanting to learn some passages by heart. The title poem is one of the finest elegies I have ever read. Reid knows how to use words to express what seems to lie too deep for words. His appeal to the spirit of the elephants to help him in his grief is remarkable:

A SCATTERING

I expect you’ve seen the footage: elephants,
finding the bones of one of their own kind
dropped by the wayside, picked clean by scavengers
and the sun, then untidily left there,
decide to do something about it.

But what, exactly? They can’t, of course,
reassemble the old elephant magnificence;
they can’t even make a tidier heap. But they can
hook up bones with their trunks and chuck them
this way and that way. So they do.

And their scattering has an air
of deliberate ritual, ancient and necessary.
Their great size, too, makes them the very
embodiment of grief, while the play of their trunks
lends sprezzatura.

Elephants puzzling out
the anagram of their own anatomy,
elephants at their abstracted lamentations –
may their spirit guide me as I place
my own sad thoughts in new, hopeful arrangements.

Robert Chandler’s translations from Russian include Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, Aleksander Pushkin’s The Captain’s Daughter, Hamid Ismailov’s The Railway, and the complete works of Andrey Platonov. Chandler, with Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson, has just retranslated Andrey Platonov’s The Foundation Pit for NYRB Classics.