Platonov and Grossman, in the translator's own terms
Robert Chandler has spent more than two decades working on the two Russian writers most notorious for resisting English — Andrei Platonov and Vasily Grossman — and his published introductions and translator's notes are among the most candid accounts of craft difficulty in the field.
The problems are different in each case, and Chandler has been precise about the difference.
Platonov: the wrong Russian on purpose
Platonov writes a Russian that is itself broken — a language distorted by Soviet bureaucratic abstraction, by peasant syntax colliding with Marxist vocabulary, by characters who cannot quite grasp the concepts they are required to voice. The wrongness is the meaning. Chandler, whose translations of The Foundation Pit and Happy Moscow appeared from NYRB Classics, has described the central dilemma plainly in his introductions: a fluent English version would iron out precisely what makes Platonov Platonov. The solution he and his co-translators have pursued is to replicate, as far as English allows, the syntactic and lexical dislocation of the original — to produce prose that a native English speaker will feel as slightly off, without the specific offness becoming mere noise.
In Chandler's notes to The Foundation Pit — his translation co-produced with Elizabeth Chandler and Olga Meerson, published by NYRB Classics — he gives examples of phrases where Platonov uses a word in a context that is not quite grammatically licensed, or applies an abstraction to a physical object in a way that is ideologically legible in Russian but has no equivalent English register to land in. The translator's task is to manufacture a landing spot that doesn't exist in the target language: not a mistranslation, but a performed estrangement. The charge of register literalism — reproducing source-language structure at the cost of natural idiom — is one Chandler has addressed directly, arguing that with Platonov, register literalism is not a failure but the only honest method.
Grossman: precision in a voice under pressure
Vasily Grossman poses a problem of a different order. His Russian is not distorted — it is controlled, documentary, pressing hard on the weight of individual words. The difficulty in Life and Fate, which Chandler translated, and which NYRB Classics published in a revised edition prepared with Elizabeth Chandler, is one of staying entirely inside Grossman's restraint. Grossman's sentences are long and accumulative; the danger is over-clarifying — supplying connective tissue the original deliberately withholds, or smoothing a transition Grossman left rough to convey the friction of thought under totalitarian conditions.
Chandler has noted in his introduction to Life and Fate that Grossman's book was microfilmed and smuggled to the West, published in Lausanne in 1980 — decades after the KGB had confiscated the manuscript — and that the novel's transmission history is itself a pressure on translation: the text arrives weighted with everything that was done to suppress it. The translator's obligation is to none of that drama, only to the sentences. What Chandler describes in practical terms is a discipline of refusal: refusing to improve, refusing to explain, refusing the temptation to make a spare passage fuller than Grossman wrote it.
The common ground
Both writers demand that the translator accept a form of productive failure. With Platonov, full success in English would be a betrayal; the translation should remain foreign. With Grossman, success means almost disappearing — Chandler's translations of Grossman have received substantial attention precisely because the prose does not announce its own difficulty. The two projects together represent the range of what literary translation from Russian actually involves: not one set of skills, but several, calibrated writer by writer and sentence by sentence. Chandler has made that calibration visible in his published commentary in a way few working translators have bothered to do.
