IJ study archive

Обсуждая «Бесконечную шутку»: Алексей Поляринов о переводе (беседа для «Дистопии»)

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TL;DR

A December-2018 dystopia.me interview — published right as the Russian Infinite Jest (Бесконечная шутка, Астрель-СПБ) was appearing — in which two interviewers, Сергей Лебеденко and Александра Сорокина, question Алексей Поляринов, one of the novel's two Russian translators, about the ordeal of the translation and his love of Wallace's endless footnotes. It is the richest single translator-primary in the Russian cluster: a firsthand, first-person account (Karpov appears only in Polyarinov's reported speech, not as a speaker). Polyarinov is emphatic that he is self-taught — in essence, he says, not a translator — an engineer by training who translated Wallace out of love and to learn how good prose is built; that the one thing that saves a young writer or translator is stubbornness and discipline; and that the translator must move centripetally toward the author (you are not the leader, you are led; you reproduce — the closer to the author the better) — the exact inverse of writing your own novel. He describes the two-translator workflow (the disciplined Karpov slapped his hands every time Polyarinov padded the text; Polyarinov's habit is to over-explain — six words in the original, eleven from him — while he in turn de-mechanized Karpov's over-literal passages; every dispute ended in a trade: I gave you this sentence, you give me the next), notes he ended up translating more Don Gately episodes than Hal Incandenza ones despite random chapter assignment, and that he borrowed Wallace's device of the Canadians who talk as if by Google Translate (French idioms dragged word-for-word into English) for a character in his own novel Центр тяжести. On the apparatus: the abundant footnotes are deliberate, meant to break narrative linearity — Wallace's own answer in an interview, plus Polyarinov's reading that a non-utilitarian beautiful excess is real art; he relays the tennis-court reading (open the book and it is a court with a net strung inside; you bounce like a ball to the endnotes and back, constant jumps between the two halves). Wider claims: literary translation in Russia is done only out of love (nobody earned from it); the printed guide (Greg Carlisle's) flattens twenty of Wallace's pages into two and misses that a stoned, illiterate addict is the one narrating; New Sincerity has only now reached Russia (twenty years behind America); and Wallace effectively predicted streaming (he only got wrong that the cartridges would be physical). The only Wallace-voice locus is a third-hand rendering of a footnotes-interview Q&A that Polyarinov relays (paraphrase-only; the English original is not identified). No IJ passage, epigraph, or This Is Water text is quoted.

Key claims

  • Self-taught — in essence not a translator (Polyarinov). He is an engineer by training (taught to build dams, taught architecture — hence his recurring architecture metaphors); he has no linguistic or philological education («У меня его нет. Это от природы – инстинкт»), and translated Wallace because he loved the texts and wanted to understand how good prose is built. His one piece of advice to a young author or translator: «единственное, что вас спасёт – это упрямство» (the only thing that will save you is stubbornness — gloss ours), stubbornness and discipline — the reason he dragged both his own novel and the translation to the finish.

  • Translation is centripetal; writing is centrifugal. «Когда ты что-то переводишь, … ты не ведущий, ты – ведомый. Ты воспроизводишь» (when you translate, you are not the leader, you are led; you reproduce — gloss ours); you must move centripetally, toward the author at the centre of the system — «Чем ближе ты к автору, тем лучше» (the closer you are to the author, the better — gloss ours). Embellishing is taboo. Writing your own novel works the opposite way (centrifugal); his first-ever translation (David Mitchell's Black Swan Green, «Лужок Черного Лебедя») he calls monstrous precisely because he gave himself free rein. This is the firsthand statement of the translator-humility pole (compare the pervoe recap's Karpov-literalist framing).

  • The two-translator workflow: over-explainer vs. disciplinarian. Both are «самоучки и выскочки» (self-taught upstarts — gloss ours), «два фаната» (two fans) with no special training, who never once quarreled. Karpov is «невероятно дисциплинированный человек, который бил меня по рукам всякий раз, когда я наворачивал слов» (an incredibly disciplined man who slapped my hands every time I piled on words — gloss ours); Polyarinov's habit is to over-explain («переобъяснять») — six words in the original, eleven from him — «но это будет абсолютно точное попадание смысл в смысл» (but it will be an absolutely exact sense-for-sense hit — gloss ours) — and Karpov would cut four. In return Polyarinov de-mechanized Karpov's over-literal passages (which looked, he says, like a calque from English). Every dispute ended in a trade: «Я тебе отдал это предложение, ты мне отдашь следующее» (I gave you this sentence, you'll give me the next — gloss ours).

  • Gately over Hal (a concrete labor fact). «Ядро перевел Сергей» (Sergey translated the core — gloss ours) because Polyarinov kept leaving for another project; chapters were assigned at random, yet paradoxically he ended up translating «больше эпизодов с Доном Гейтли, чем с Хэлом Инканденцей» (more episodes with Don Gately than with Hal Incandenza — gloss ours).

  • He read the whole novel 2–3 times by the end — and mined its architecture. Translation, he says, is a super-useful thing for an author because you literally reconstruct the architectural constructions and come to understand why the arches hold; you first imitate, then go further. He borrowed Wallace's Canadian device — the Canadians who «говорят как будто Google translate’ом» (talk as if by Google Translate — gloss ours), translating French idioms word-for-word and crookedly — for a strangely-speaking Canadian character (Remy) in the third part of his own novel Центр тяжести (2018).

  • The footnote apparatus is deliberate — art for art's sake. Asked why the book is so hard to enter, Polyarinov: «это делается абсолютно сознательно, потому что ломается линейность повествования» (it is done entirely deliberately, because the linearity of the narrative is broken — gloss ours). He cites a Wallace interview in which Wallace was asked why so many footnotes; his summary of Wallace's answer: «Это искусство ради искусства. Чтобы сломать линейность нарратива» (art for art's sake; to break the linearity of the narrative — gloss ours). His own reading: something non-utilitarian, made as a beautiful excess, is real art — «Последнее эссе Уоллеса – «Большой красный сын»» (Big Red Son) even puts 20% of its information in footnotes.

  • The tennis-court reading (relayed). Because Wallace loved tennis, «существует отдельная теория» (there is a separate theory — gloss ours): open the book and it is itself a court with a net strung inside; reading, you bounce like a tennis ball to the back of the book, to a footnote, then back to the start and the main story, ad infinitum — «Постоянные скачки между первой и второй половиной книги» (constant jumps between the first and second halves of the book — gloss ours).

  • Literary translation in Russia is done only out of love. There will be no Russian version of the (very expensive) guide and no reader's-guide site: «Проблема такой литературы в России в том, что она делается только по любви» (the problem with such literature in Russia is that it is done only out of love — gloss ours); the best contemporary books and translations (he names Anastasia Zavozova's) are «сделано по любви. Люди на этом ничего не заработали» (done out of love; people earned nothing from it — gloss ours). His abandoned «Уоллес-вики» idea. And the printed guide (Carlisle's) is uninteresting: it retells twenty of Wallace's pages in two, flattening a scene whose whole point is that «об этом говорит обдолбанный наркоман» (a stoned addict is the one telling it — gloss ours), illiterate and unreliable.

  • New Sincerity, and Wallace-as-prophet. Sorokina frames IJ as newly timely: postmodernism ended and New Sincerity departed in America twenty years ago, but in Russia the opposite — New Sincerity is here now. Polyarinov agrees («Да, вы правы»): «Новая искренность у нас сейчас, поскольку мы отстаём на 20 лет» (New Sincerity is here now, because we lag by 20 years — gloss ours), and «Уоллес фактически и стриминговый сервис предсказал» (Wallace effectively predicted the streaming service too — gloss ours) — he only failed to foresee that the cartridges would be physical; no science-fiction writer foresaw the abandonment of physical media.

Theories & evidence

These are a translator's firsthand statements and relayed readings at a public interview, not close-argued scholarship. Graded conservatively; the endnotes-function contact is the one place the text genuinely argues a position rather than merely touching it.

CONNECTION: the abundant footnotes/endnotes are a deliberate device to break narrative linearity — a non-utilitarian beautiful excess that is itself the art

  • Crux: endnotes-function
  • Stance: endorses
  • Evidence:
    • [S — RU / P] «это делается абсолютно сознательно, потому что ломается линейность повествования» (it is done entirely deliberately, because the linearity of the narrative is broken — gloss ours). [line 225–226]
    • [S — RU / P] «Это искусство ради искусства. Чтобы сломать линейность нарратива – это его ответ» (art for art's sake; to break the linearity of the narrative — that is his answer — gloss ours). [line 232–233]
    • [S — RU / P] «когда что-то не утилитарно, но делается как красивое излишество – это настоящее искусство» (when something is not utilitarian but is made as a beautiful excess — that is real art — gloss ours), with «Большой красный сын» (Big Red Son) cited as putting 20% of its information in footnotes. [line 247–250]
  • Notes: Unlike the pervoe recap's reception-grade touches, Polyarinov here argues a reading of what the endnote/footnote apparatus is FOR — deliberate anti-linearity plus an aesthetic of non-utilitarian excess — across several turns. Part of it he attributes to Wallace («это его ответ»); the beautiful-excess-is-real-art framing and the Big Red Son datum are Polyarinov's own. Graded endorses because the reading is argued rather than merely mentioned; a conservative reading could hold it to mentions, since it is a translator's interview remark rather than a developed essay.

CONNECTION: the tennis-court reading — the book is itself a court with a net; reading bounces to the endnotes and back, constant jumps between the two halves

  • Crux: annular-structure
  • Stance: mentions
  • Evidence:
    • [S — RU / P] «если открыть книжку, она сама как корт. Внутри натянута сетка» (if you open the book, it is itself like a court; a net is strung inside — gloss ours), and «Постоянные скачки между первой и второй половиной книги» (constant jumps between the first and second halves of the book — gloss ours). [line 234–235, 237–238]
  • Notes: A relayed reading («существует отдельная теория» — there is a separate theory), not Polyarinov's own argued macro-shape claim, and it is really about the reading MOTION the endnote apparatus forces (tightly bound to the endnotes-function contact above) rather than a ring/gasket/dead-center design. Holds at mentions; do NOT upgrade to a Sierpinski/annulation claim.

CONNECTION: Wallace effectively predicted the streaming service (getting only the physical-cartridge part wrong)

  • Crux: media-prescience
  • Stance: mentions
  • Evidence:
    • [S — RU / P] «Уоллес фактически и стриминговый сервис предсказал. Он только не угадал с тем, что картриджи будут у всех» (Wallace effectively predicted the streaming service too; he only failed to guess that the cartridges would be everyone's — gloss ours), and «ни один фантаст не угадал отказ от носителей» (no science-fiction writer foresaw the abandonment of physical media — gloss ours). [line 207–209]
  • Notes: A single asserted observation in the New-Sincerity exchange, not a developed argument; holds at mentions — the predicted-streaming claim is asserted, not built out.

ADJACENCY (logged, NOT folded): the New Sincerity reception frame

  • Candidate slug: eup-connection / sincerity-definition (adjacency only)
  • Evidence: [S — RU / A] Sorokina: «Если 20 лет назад в Америке прекратился постмодернизм, ушла новая искренность, то в России – наоборот» (if twenty years ago postmodernism ended in America and New Sincerity departed, in Russia it is the reverse — gloss ours); [S — RU / P] Polyarinov agrees: «Новая искренность у нас сейчас, поскольку мы отстаём на 20 лет» (New Sincerity is here now, because we lag by 20 years — gloss ours). [line 202–204, 206–207]
  • Notes: This is cultural-RECEPTION framing (New Sincerity arriving in Russia twenty years behind America), initiated by the interviewer and merely agreed to; it is not an IJ-as-EUP-execution argument nor a definition of sincerity. Translation/ reception-scoped, with no natural home among the archive's questions — an adjacency only.

Themes

Self-taught translation as an act of love and discipline (the engineer with no philological training, for whom stubbornness is the only thing that saves you); translation as the closest reading and as architectural reconstruction (you rebuild the arches to learn why they hold); the ethics of the translator (centripetal humility — you are led, not leading; you reproduce — against the centrifugal freedom of writing your own book); the two-translator workflow as a temperamental pairing (Karpov's word-for-word discipline vs. Polyarinov's over-explaining and voice-mimicry, resolved by trades); the economics of serious literary translation in Russia (done only out of love, nobody earns); the reader's-guide question (the expensive Carlisle guide, the abandoned Wallace-wiki, the guide's flattening of Wallace's stoned-narrator scenes); the endnote apparatus as deliberate anti-linearity and beautiful excess (with the relayed tennis-court reading); Wallace's difficulty and where it lives (not what is said but the polyvocal how, e.g. the Canadians' Google-Translate idiom); and the reception frame — New Sincerity reaching Russia twenty years late, and Wallace as accidental prophet of streaming. Wallace's own words enter only once, and third-hand: a footnotes-interview Q&A that Polyarinov relays (paraphrase-only).

Cross-references

  • pervoe-polyarinov-karpov-2020 — the other Russian translator primary in the archive, a February-2020 recap of a Voznesensky Center talk-show with both Polyarinov and Karpov. This dystopia.me interview is its earlier (December 2018), fuller, single-translator companion: the same threads run through both — the fan-to-official self-taught origin, the split one-drafts-the-other-combs workflow, Polyarinov's admitted over-explaining habit against Karpov's literalism, translation done out of love because a professional would starve on such a book, and the puzzle/footnote structure. Where the recap frames the ending (the Swartz reconstruction, the half-the-plot-is-absent caution), this interview instead develops the endnote apparatus and the centripetal-translation ethic. The Chekhov-copied-Tolstoy anecdote here is Polyarinov's own image (he copies Wallace to learn the machinery), distinct from the recap's material.
  • kerline-books-2015 — Francis Kerline, the French translator (L’Infinie Comédie, 2015). Two rhymes: (a) Polyarinov's you-translate-to-reconstruct-the-architecture ethic is the constructive-humility counterpart to Kerline's account of re-breaking Wallace's deliberately broken syntax; (b) the reading-and-when motif — Polyarinov read the whole novel 2–3 times while translating, against Kerline's deliberate refusal to read it first.
  • nesi-minimaetmoralia-intervista, blumenbach-trashpool-2011 — the translator-testimony cluster. Nesi corresponded with Wallace by fax and drew out Wallace's own stance on annotation (a reader stopping to look a term up); this interview carries no Wallace contact of any kind (the pair worked from the text and guides) but reaches a kindred conclusion about the apparatus — the footnotes are deliberate anti-linearity, a beautiful excess. Blumenbach (who spent afternoons on a few lines and worked the fan newsgroup) rhymes on the sheer labor and the self-education of a translator inside Wallace's registers.
  • galindo-graca-infinita-historia-pessoal-2018, gobetti-acqua-in-bocca-2013 — the Brazilian-Portuguese and Italian translation-studies primaries; both, like this interview, treat the translation as an education in how the novel is built and how it behaves in another language, and dwell on the endnote apparatus.
  • polyarinov-lj-2014-2016 — Polyarinov's own LiveJournal record (the 2014 review-essay and the 2015/2016 release posts). Same-author corroboration for the origin story, the 600-plus margin notes traded with Karpov, and the optical-illusion author-errors observation lives there; with this interview and the pervoe recap it completes the archive's Russian cluster.

Notable passages

Reader prose leads with the English sense; the Russian span is the verbatim anchor, the English in parentheses is our gloss (paraphrase). Guillemets « » reproduced as the note's citation wrapper; where a span is itself guillemet-wrapped in the source (titles, reported speech), that is noted.

  • «единственное, что вас спасёт – это упрямство» (the only thing that will save you is stubbornness — gloss ours) — Polyarinov's one rule for a young author or translator.
  • «ты не ведущий, ты – ведомый. Ты воспроизводишь» (you are not the leader, you are led; you reproduce — gloss ours), «Чем ближе ты к автору, тем лучше» (the closer you are to the author, the better — gloss ours) — the centripetal-translation ethic.
  • «Сергей Карпов – невероятно дисциплинированный человек, который бил меня по рукам всякий раз, когда я наворачивал слов» (Sergey Karpov is an incredibly disciplined man who slapped my hands every time I piled on words — gloss ours) — the workflow; Polyarinov's own habit: «есть привычка переобъяснять» (a habit of over-explaining — gloss ours).
  • «я перевёл больше эпизодов с Доном Гейтли, чем с Хэлом Инканденцей» (I translated more episodes with Don Gately than with Hal Incandenza — gloss ours) — the concrete division-of-labor outcome.
  • «они говорят как будто Google translate’ом» (they talk as if by Google Translate — gloss ours) — Wallace's Canadians, whose crooked word-for-word French idioms Polyarinov borrowed for his own novel.
  • «Проблема такой литературы в России в том, что она делается только по любви» (the problem with such literature in Russia is that it is done only out of love — gloss ours), «сделано по любви. Люди на этом ничего не заработали» (done out of love; people earned nothing from it — gloss ours) — the economics.
  • «это делается абсолютно сознательно, потому что ломается линейность повествования» (it is done entirely deliberately, because the linearity of the narrative is broken — gloss ours), «когда что-то не утилитарно, но делается как красивое излишество – это настоящее искусство» (when something is not utilitarian but is made as a beautiful excess, that is real art — gloss ours) — the endnote-apparatus reading.
  • «если открыть книжку, она сама как корт. Внутри натянута сетка» (if you open the book, it is itself like a court; a net is strung inside — gloss ours) — the relayed tennis-court reading.
  • «Уоллес фактически и стриминговый сервис предсказал» (Wallace effectively predicted the streaming service too — gloss ours) — the media-prophecy aside.
  • Reported / relayed spans (source-wrapped « »): Karpov's «Мужик. Я всё вижу» (Man. I see everything — gloss ours), reported by Polyarinov; the guide's flattening «Здесь три наркомана пытаются ограбить мужика за библиотекой…» (Here three addicts try to rob a guy behind the library… — gloss ours); and the one Wallace-adjacent, third-hand locus — a footnotes-interview question Polyarinov relays, «Почему надо так много сносок?» (Why so many footnotes? — gloss ours) — which is the interviewer's question in that interview as Polyarinov renders it, not Wallace's own words, with Wallace's answer only paraphrased (see Accuracy notes).

Accuracy notes

  • DATE = 2018-12-10 from the raw's article:published_time (2018-12-10T17:40:00.000Z = 20:40 MSK); article:modified_time is 2026-03-08, a site rebuild (the page is a Nuxt SPA), not a content date. This places the conversation at the moment the Russian Infinite Jest was appearing at Астрель-СПБ — the piece frames the novel as «все-таки выходит» (finally coming out, line 22).
  • Karpov is not a speaker here. The co-translator appears only inside Polyarinov's reported speech (the «Мужик. Я всё вижу» manuscript comment and the workflow exchanges); the interview's voices are Polyarinov and the two interviewers.
  • Page count «1079 страниц» (line 38). The interviewer uses the English print count (1079 pp.), whereas the pervoe recap uses «1280 страниц» (the Russian АСТ edition). Reproduced as the figure this piece uses.
  • «Карлайл» / «путеводитель Карлайла» (lines 170, 181) = the reader's guide by Greg Carlisle (Elegant Complexity); the piece gives only the surname. Cite-as-written.
  • «Лужок Черного Лебедя» Дэвида Митчелла (line 132–133) = David Mitchell's Black Swan Green — Polyarinov's first-ever translation, which he disowns. Cite-as-written.
  • «Большой красный сын» (line 247–249) = Big Red Son (Wallace's AVN-awards / porn-industry essay, collected in Consider the Lobster). Polyarinov calls it «Последнее эссе Уоллеса» (Wallace's last essay) — factually loose (Big Red Son is 1998; Wallace published essays afterward). Reproduced as spoken; the last-essay claim is his.
  • «Посмотрите на омара» (line 260–261) = Consider the Lobster, which Polyarinov wants to translate.
  • «Центр тяжести» (2018) (line 62) = Polyarinov's own novel (Tsentr tyazhesti, “Center of Gravity”); Реми/Remy, the strangely-speaking Canadian, is a character in IT (the third part, about Егор/Egor) — borrowed from Wallace's Canadians, NOT an IJ character. Gloss must not read him as an IJ figure.
  • «Google translate’ом» (line 75) uses U+2019 (right single quote) as the apostrophe; reproduced byte-true. It is the only U+2019 in the file.
  • Title. The page/meta title is «Обсуждая «Бесконечную шутку»»; the on-page article header (line 16) is the shorter «Обсуждая «Шутку»». Both are printed.
  • Duplicated dek. The introductory paragraph is printed twice in the raw (lines 19–25 and 27–33) — a Nuxt render artifact, not two distinct texts.
  • The footnotes-interview (line 226–227). «Почему надо так много сносок?» is the interviewer's question in an unnamed Wallace interview, as Polyarinov renders it in Russian; Wallace's answer is only paraphrased («это его ответ»). Third-hand; paraphrase-only for Wallace's voice; the English source interview is not identified.
  • «слово в слово» appears twice, differently cased. Line 102 (the Chekhov anecdote) prints capitalized «Слово в слово»; line 157 prints lowercase «слово в слово» (Karpov's discipline); this note quotes the lowercase line-157 form.