The Rascally Romance (in a single helluva-long letter about a flicking-short life) - Сергей Николаевич Огольцов

The Godfather, a novel by Mario Puzo was stolen not out of idle curiosity (would or wouldn't the action set my fingers a-shaking?), neither for upgrading my door-kicking skills, but just to translate it into Russian. The novel, as well as its author, happened to be rather thick, about 400 pages. With regard to the way of its acquisition, Konotop was a more suitable place for plunging into the translation work.

It took several months of intent labor efforts to render the book turned out at the Penguin Publishing House into a weighty pile of numbered thick notebooks filled with my handwriting, in ink of various hues of the blue. The whole bunch comprising The Godfather I passed to Lyalka and his wife Valentina for reading, of the subsequent movements and general fate thereof I am aware no more than of where swam and how fared the cannibal shark from The Jaws, also in my Russian handwriting.

In the course of the second translation, about halfway thru towards the completion, my father cooperated by sharing his critical remarks… It happened when working about the passage that described a party in the Hollywood club designed and equipped for the recreational activities of Hollywood movie stars, I experienced certain problems with the rendering of the American English collocation "blow job" into Russian. The descriptive variants seemed over-lengthy, while the shorter options looked outrageously obscene. When in labor pains, I tore another unsuccessful attempt at translation out from the notebook and shoved it into the kitchen stove to be used for kindling.

On coming from work, my father opened the cast-iron door to fill the stove firebox with wood, picked the crushed sheet of paper, smoothed it out and studied the lines before asking, "What fucking hooey is this?"

I did not object to his instant estimation for 2 reasons. Firstly, I knew that passages perceived in the form of printed text as eroticism did look vulgar porn when presented in handwriting. It suffices to recall the thin notebook with a handwritten story, circulating among the senior students at School 13, which contained a passage running as follows "…she threw her legs in fishnet lace up over his collar-bones…" It’s hard to say why, but those fishnet legs were immediately and inseparably associated by me with the Parisian Eiffel Tower. Some pretty uphill job it would be to have a sex (as well as to defend erotica) with the Eiffel Tower bestriding you. On the other hand, who knows how those same legs would sway me if met in the orderly line of typographic set. Appearances influence our judgments.

Secondly, I always respected the subtle literary instinct of my father. Thus, from the newspaper Trood, he read only the TV program and, with a fleeting glance at the rest of the headlines, announced his exhaustive conclusion, "Neither rhyme nor reason – kiss a flea in the brick." And he never mistook, crisp and to the point. Besides, he possessed some amazing linguistic ingenuity. Perhaps, because of his Ryazan roots; the land of Ryazan always lay at the crossroads of language contacts.

Well, for example: seated at the kitchen table, with his gray brows taunted strenuously above the plastic rim of his glasses, he's busy a-tinkering to insert some hooey into another one. I cracked along, between the table and the stove, from the door to the window only to take an abrupt turn back to the door. Without taking his eyes from the hooeys in his hands, the father inquires, "Why tyrtyrting?"

No dictionary would present an entry for the word, yet what a juicy verb it is! Brimming with immensely elastic plasticity! Its sound form alone will let you grasp with utmost precision the action's quintessence, as well as the tense inner state of the poor asshole all in a dither. And—most importantly—the word got born spontaneously, right now, while this fickle hooey doesn't want to enter into the other fucker.

"But could one keep back tyrtyrting when the treppa has pibzed already?!."

Both workpieces drop from his hands onto the table, the father gives me a hard look from over the black plastic rim of the glasses slid halfway down his nose, then he says, "pfui!"

And here lies, by the way, the exhaustive key to the muchly discussed "fathers-and-children" controversy – they reproduce their likes only to pooh-pooh or pfui-pfui when it's too late.

(…coming back to The Godfather…

Unfortunately, there remained no writers in the American literature – Pearson, Salinger, Pynchon and you're plumb at the list bottom. All the rest are scribbling away with their both eyes on selling their production to Hollywood, compilers of cartoon stories and soap opera dialogues.

No! I'm far from blaming them! Not me, not in the least. Basically, we all are like each other and differ in only how deep we manage to keep hidden our hunger to sell us individually. And though being nothing of a Christian, I cannot but admire Mr. J. Christ’s instruction, “Let him who never sinned trigger off the slaughter of the slut,” by which he wholesomely absolved the motley team of the human race for infinite millenniums to come.

Is there any alternative? Absolutely, yes, and it’s all contained in the approbation by which the writer rewards his own efforts in the self-appraisal, “Damn nice artifact! At times, it did amuse me and helped to kill twelve years of my stretch!” which surely won't keep your pot boiling. That’s why I’d better head back from so high a curve and once again pick up the literature for a subject.

Look at the Briton Maugham, the very first paragraph in a story by him is a chord, a fugue tuning up. In his first paragraph, among the surface details, he scatters nodules, which will develop and reach their prime in the following narrative and flow into the denouement containing a flutter of echoes from the first paragraph. That's real craftsmanship. Exactly what the Hollywood jacklegs are lacking. My father would say, "Pfui!"

Puzo is the role model