Mark H. Teeter

If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is when J.D. Salinger was born, what his lousy childhood was like, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap.

But I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, the publishers of The Moscow News would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I did. They can be touchy as hell sometimes. Besides, I'm not going to tell you Salinger's whole goddam biography or anything. I'll just tell you what happened when his novel was translated into Russian in the Soviet period, and how last year Russians practically went crazy when this new translation of it came out. But both translations only prove one thing, if you ask me: learn English, because that's the only way you're ever going to understand a lot of Salinger's book, which is like this huge classic of world literature and all. It really is, I swear to God.

Millions of English-speakers around the world need read no further than one clause of the parody above - the first eight words - to recognize its source: the opening of J.D. Salinger's novel "The Catcher in the Rye," whose first lines are among the most famous in Anglophone literature.

How famous? Go to www.salinger.ru, copy the first sentence of the actual novel (through "born"), then Google it: you'll get an astonishing 102 million hits - many millions more than the classic biblical opening ("In the beginning was the word..."), the memorable "Call me Ishmael" (from Melville's "Moby-Dick") and even the aforementioned introductory Dickensian crap (David Copperfield's "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life...").

"Catcher" ranks among the 10 best-selling novels in the history of novels, with over 60 million copies sold in dozens of languages - of which Russian is far from the last. Indeed, the book joins "Huckleberry Finn" and "Winnie the Pooh" among a small group of English-language tales known and loved in Russia almost as much as in their homelands.

But hold on: these classics are read here largely in translation, naturally. For Salinger's "Catcher," that's some catch. A quick look tells you that reading even a single paragraph of the novel in the original English can put you miles ahead of your friends who know its hero only as Холден Колфилд (Kholden Kolfild).

The first Russian translation of "Catcher," by Rita Rait-Korolyova, appeared in 1955. What the Soviet reader actually got in it was a somewhat cleaned-up version of the young hero. The rebellious Holden's vocabulary, which had had shocked and entertained Americans in roughly equal measure in 1951, had been "harmonized" for the far less permissive Soviet literary context.
The "crap," "hell" and "goddam" [sic] of the first paragraph, for example, respectively came out муть/mut ("stuff"); до чертиков/do chyortikov ("darned"); and nothing ("goddam" was simply elided). In short, the book's famous opening lost considerable punch as it entered Russian - Holden had a noticeably sharper edge than Kholden.

What would happen, one might ask, if an even stronger obscenity occurred in a key moment of characterization? Well: "I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it'll say ‘Holden Caulfield' on it...and then right under that it'll say ‘Fuck you'. I'm positive, in fact."

The critical epithet - an intentional shock to Anglophone sensibilities and a good illustration here of both how the world works (by Holden's lights) and how rebellious he is (or likes to think he is) - in Russian comes across with no bang and very little whimper. The tombstone simply has some generic "похабщинa"/pokhabshchina scrawled on it - a collective term for obscenities, curses and non-normative speech. Bi-i-i-i-ig difference, eh?

A post-Soviet Kholden doesn't have to be so misleadingly circumspect, of course. And beyond vulgarity/obscenity issues, there are myriad cases where a sensible updating of "Catcher" is simply overdue, as translation critic Alexandra Borisenko has pointed out: thanks to McDonald's, for example, a "hamburger" doesn't have to be a "cutlet" for Russians any more. And even the book's Russian title, for that matter, can now be revised to something closer to Salinger's than Rait-Kovalyova's curious "Over the Abyss in the Rye" (where did the abyss come from - and what happened to the catcher?).

Yet when such revisions were made in the 2009 translation by Maxim Nemtsov, shouts of protest arose from Russian readers across the country, including "We don't need a new Salinger!" and "He's killing our Kholden!" Are these people serious?

If you really want to know the truth, you can forget about translations and literary arguments and all that phony intellectual crap. That stuff is boring as hell, if you ask me. Look, just keep studying English like a madman. Kholden will fade away, and pretty soon you'll meet Holden, who's a terrific guy. He really is, I swear to God.

Extreme Extra Credit. Last time: The grammatical gender of the Russian буррито [burrito] is as yet undecided: the word has appeared as both masculine and neuter - and sometimes on the same restaurant menu! Feel free to use both genders, but please check back with the regulators at Moscow's Institute of the Russian Language in a decade or so. Today: When asked the author of "The Catcher in the Rye", most Russian fans of the book answer not "J.D. Salinger" but...what? 

Mark H. Teeter is an American English teacher and translator based in Moscow