BOOK REVIEW: A successful English translation of beloved Iker (09/10/00)

BOOK REVIEW: A successful English translation of beloved Iker

"Ivan Kernytsky, Weekdays and Sunday," translation by Maxim Tarnawsky, introduction by Ostap Tarnawsky. Philadelphia: Mosty, 1999, 183 pp. Cover by Bohdan Tytla and illustration by Edward Kozak.

by Wolodymyr T. Zyla

The translation of "Weekdays and Sunday" was completed in 1988 in memory of Ivan Kernytsky on the fifth anniversary of his death and was submitted to the Ukrainian National Association (UNA) for publication because the author had long been associated with the UNA. However, financial hardships derailed the publications, and the typeset text, cover and illustrations languished for more than a decade in the offices of the UNA without any prospect of being published.

According to the translator of this volume, Ivan Kernytsky, or "Iker" - the pseudonym by which the author was known among Ukrainians - "is not an easy writer to translate, and although, he is not an outstanding writer, his depiction of the details of everyday life, attitudes, feelings, and language of the simple people who are his chosen subject gives his work strength."

Critics praised Kernytsky beginning with his first published book, a collection of short stories about life in the village under the title "Sviatoivanski Vohni" (Fireflies).

Tracing his literary ancestry to three writers, Vasyl Stefanyk, Les Martovych and Marko Cheremshyna, and to several other writers of an older generation - especially Osyp Makovei - Ivan Kernytsky, while developing his own style, soon added "the main elements of his own talent - fresh and generous humor and the ability to observe characteristics with the sharp eye of a caricaturist." This made him more original and more provocative.

While in the United States he improved his style by writing short stories and feuilletons about life in the new environment and under the new influence of the American short story writer O. Henry.

Kernytsky is known also as the author of many couplets, humorous songs, and witty epigraphs.

The last book published in his lifetime is the collection "Budni i Nedilia" (Weekdays and Sunday). The author himself selected the stories and the feuilletons for this volume, which Maxim Tarnawsky translated into English.

This is a very interesting collection that portrays many unforgettable events. Halia Horbatsch writes that here "Kernytsky depicts the life of the little people of old Lviv, the people in the camps in post-war Europe and, finally, the people in the new country across the ocean." Thus, the volume offers a chronicle of life throughout many turbulent years.

To produce an acceptable and meaningful translation of such a collection is not easy because the original texts contain many subtle puns, etymological allusions, dialectic colorings, etc., which in most cases are meaningless and inaccessible to the non-Ukrainian reader. Fortunately, the translator subscribes to the idea that no translation, no matter how scrupulously prepared or how carefully reviewed, can fully duplicate the experience of the original.

With this in mind, this writer scrutinized the translation line by line, story by story. Mr. Tarnawsky's skillful translation is to be highly appreciated. The translator preserved Kernytsky's lyrical style, kept his frequent use of indirect and oblique speech, and balanced profound differences between the Ukrainian and English languages. Here I would like to underline the translator's skills to strike a balance between readable English and faithfulness to the original.

The translator has also been careful in conveying deep sentiments, and has avoided sounding obsessive. He realizes that in the inherent differences between languages lies the success or the failure of translation from one to another. He recognizes - and accepts - that every translation is a linguistic tug-of-war between cultures, imposing many sacrificial compensations and even impossibilities. And yet, without violating its spirit in the slightest, the translator succeeded in making "Weekdays and Sunday" sound like an English collection of stories - an outstanding one.

In translation, as well as in the original, Kernytsky's narrative is essentially entertaining, for it deals with real people as well as with abstract concepts, with individual hopes and dreams as well as with societal concerns and aspirations.

A great asset of "Weekdays and Sunday" is the late Ostap Tarnawsky's introduction titled "Ivan Kernytsky." It is scholarly and contains a short but a very useful survey of the life and works of this popular Ukrainian writer and humorist. He writes: "Ivan has written a chronicle of Ukrainians in the 20th century, beginning with the hard years before the war, through the wanderings along gypsy trails, and culminating with the passage, like emigrating birds, to the new settlements across the ocean. A chronicle of life in these turbulent times is found in Kernytsky's stories, his plays and especially in his feuilletons, which were very popular with readers and won him a large audience of admiring fans."

Maxim Tarnawsky, on balance, has produced a very useful English translation of Kernytsky's "Weekdays and Sunday." It is quite obvious that no translation of a work regardless of how skillfully it is done, is a substitute for the original, but Mr. Tarnawsky's translation will certainly make its mark.

I highly recommend this publication to American readers, especially for those of Ukrainian origin.

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