Translator Robert Chandler reflects on translating Vasily Grossman's Life and Fate

I first heard of Vasily Grossman nearly thirty years ago. I went to see my friend Igor Golomstock, an émigré Russian art critic. He held out a large volume – the first, Swiss-published edition of the Russian text of Life and Fate – and said, ‘Robert, if you want to establish yourself as a translator, you should translate this!’ In reply I simply laughed and said, ‘Igor, I don’t even read books as long as that in Russian, let alone translate them!’ Igor, however, is not someone easily deflected. A few weeks later he sent me the transcripts of four half-hour programmes about Life and Fate that he had done for the BBC Russian Service. I read these transcripts and was gripped. I quickly discovered, as many other people have done since, that once I began reading Life and Fate – instead of just worrying about its length – I found the book surprisingly hard to put down. Grossman’s descriptions of the fighting at Stalingrad seemed extraordinarily vivid. I could sense a bold and powerful intelligence behind the passages comparing Nazism and Stalinism. And the last letter written by the hero’s mother from a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Ukraine, before her death in one of the massacres that were the first stage of the Shoah, was as moving as anything I had ever read. Somehow I ended up doing as Igor suggested… Now, decades after Igor first introduced me to Grossman, I am more grateful to him than I can say. 

To translate a writer means to live in their world for a long time. There are fine writers – Isaac Babel is one – whose world I find so disturbing that I do not want to inhabit it again. There are other writers whose company, no matter what subjects they write about, is always a joy. Translating Alexander Pushkin always leaves me feeling clearer-headed, deeply refreshed. Translating Andrey Platonov – the only one of his contemporaries, incidentally, whom Grossman whole-heartedly admired – jolts me into glimpsing whole new worlds of thought and feeling. As for Vasily Grossman himself, I think of him as a supremely trustworthy guide. There is an integrity in him that enables him to write about the most terrible matters – the Gulag, the Shoah, the Terror Famine in the Ukraine – without making the reader feel violated. Many writers write about these horrors because they are in pain and they imagine that their own pain will lesson if they manage to hurt their readers. Other writers are like prosecuting lawyers. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, for example, sometimes appears to seize on each new horror with delight – as if he looks on some terrible evil simply as a piece of evidence, as a weapon that will help him to make his case. Grossman, in contrast, seems uncommonly pure. He appears to write simply because he knows that a particular story needs to be told, that it is man’s duty to remember the dead. His chapters about the Shoah and the Terror Famine have the healing power of ritual lament, of the finest passages of Dante or the Bible. After a French-language staging of ‘The Last Letter’, a play based on the famous chapter from Life and Fate, a Jewish member of the audience said to the director, ‘I never received a last letter from my mother. Now it feels as if I did.’ It is hard to imagine a more moving tribute – to the director, to the actor and to Grossman himself.

The French poet Eugene Guillevic, whose ‘Charnel Houses’ (1947) is one of the first, and finest, poetic responses to the Shoah, once wrote, ‘Yes, even horror can be lived out in poetry. This is not to say that poetry weakens or diminishes horror – what it perhaps means is that poetry translates horror to that level where, lived out through poetry, it is no longer degrading.’ These words seem more applicable to Grossman’s sober, factual, yet strangely luminous prose than to any other literature that I know.

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