Soul

In 2004 the American Association of Teachers of Slavonic and East European Languages awarded their annual translation prize to our translation of SOUL, the title novella of this collection. The citation reads as follows: 'The Harvill Press translation of Platonov's Soul - a collaborative effort - accomplishes the seemingly impossible in bringing the notoriously idiosyncratic language of this talented writer to English-language readers. The superb yet compact apparatus includes an essay on "Platonov and Central Asia," an introduction explicitly treating the challenges of translating Platonov, a map, a pronunciation and meaning guide to names, and endnotes. This translation and accompanying material will be invaluable in bringing Platonov into the English-language classroom and making his work accessible to our students

Not of this earth (3/3 people found this helpful)

Russians can't believe it when you tell them Andrei Platonov gets translated into English. He was a true innovator with language, deliberately writing awkward, clunky, childlike sentences. His stories are peopled with gentle, poetic souls, who often have no idea why they do what they do, repeating utopian socialist rhetoric in confused, perfunctory fashion amidst lives of dread poverty, which got up the noses of Stalin and his minions and led to him being censored. But Platonov, a working-class writer, started off as a hopeful communist. It was after his work as an engineer in the far-flung places of the Soviet Union, where he saw the crushing grind of daily life amongst "Stalin's children" that he first became disappointed. Such a terrain inspires "Soul," about a young engineer who after graduating goes back in search of the Dzhan, his people, marsh-dwelling peasants dying in the wastes around the Aral Sea, having been instructed by the Party to bring communism to them. It is a desolate, beguiling, comical and absurd tale and Platonov is arguably the strangest writer to have ever lived on this planet. There is a needling sense of eternity to what he writes, and he often seems (annoyingly to some) more concerned with tone and experimentation than with characters and plot. You feel like you have dipped into a substance when you read his work rather than a narrative structure. It's alien and otherworldly and plaintive, with a great tenderness for the natural world. And the characters are frequently ridiculous, and, well... there's no other word for it - cute! Robert Chandler is the best translator.

Andrey Platonov

Reader Reviews:

Contains a number of wise and witty masterpieces by Russia's greatest writer of the twentieth century (0/0 people found this helpful)

Not of this earth (3/3 people found this helpful)

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