Artifacts and Illuminations: Critical Essays on Loren Eiseley

14. From the American Great Plains to the Steppes of Russia

14 From the American Great Plains to the Steppes of Russia Loren Eiseley Transplanted dimitri n. breschinsky Please, never despise the translator. He is the mailman of human civilization. aleksandr pushkin 295 loren eiseley and literary translation in russia Loren Eiseley was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, under the open skies of the Great Plains, and except for a brief business trip to England in 1951, never left the American mainland (see Christianson, Fox 298). Had he traveled to the steppes of southern Russia, he would probably not have felt out of place, recognizing in the gently rolling hills of the countryside the flat, treeless terrain of his childhood. The difference between the Plains and the steppes is to a large extent linguistic. The reference to transplantation in the title of this essay is, of course, a metaphor for literary translation, which for centuries has served as a beneficent link between Russia and the West. Even after the Iron Curtain came down on Eastern Europe following World War II, the country was not totally isolated. A great deal of contemporary American literature was translated into Russian during the Cold War, which overlapped with Eiseley’s most productive years. Thanks to a well-organized and highly professional translating industry that for years operated in the former Soviet Union, Russian readers were well acquainted with the works of such diverse writers as J. D. Salinger and John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway and Arthur Hailey (the latter’s Airport was also a Russian best seller), but until recently Loren Eiseley was not among them. Eiseley has been hailed as the Thoreau of the twentieth century, and his works have helped to inspire the environmental movement of our day. As was Thoreau, Eiseley was more interested in humanity’s place in the universe than in partisan politics. Why then was he not translated into Russian, along with Salinger, Hailey, and others? Why did the Soviet literary establishment completely overlook him? It is an interesting question, and I shall return to it later. What concerns me more at this point is how that lacuna was ultimately filled. From the Great Plains to the Steppes 296 initial publications in periodicals and the first book My report will of necessity be personal, because it traces my particular journey into Eiseley’s universe and my fitful attempts at cross-cultural pollination. A bilingual who teaches Russian at Purdue University, I have for some time now been translating my favorite Eiseley pieces into my first language. It all began some twenty-five years ago, when I happened to come across Time magazine’s 1962 special edition of Eiseley’s first book, The Immense Journey. The essays it contains were so compelling that I resolved to search for other works by the author and soon had a virtually complete collection, including many first editions. At about the same time, while discussing American nature writing with a Russian friend in Moscow who knew no English and had never heard of that literary mode, I got the urge to share with him an Eiseley essay and set about translating “The Flow of the River.” Why did I choose Loren Eiseley and not, say, Peter Matthiessen, Annie Dillard, Barry Lopez, David Quammen, or any number of other outstanding American nature writers, nottomentionAldoLeopoldandRachelCarson?Withthesingleexception of Leopold’s Sand County Almanac (Kalendar’ peschanogo grafstva), which appeared in the Soviet Union in 1980, thirty years after its publication in the United States, none of these authors’ works had been translated into Russian either. But because Eiseley’s literary sensibilities and perception of the natural world were in many ways congruent with mine, he had a particular appeal to me. What started out as a desire to share the writer with a few Russian friends grew into an all-out effort, supported by several grants from Purdue, to introduce him to the Russian-speaking world. Between 1988 and 1993 nine works by Eiseley (transliterated Ayzli) in my translation appeared in such Russian periodicals as the Moscow literary journals Smena (The rising generation) and Lepta (Offerings), as well as in the weekly Knizhnoye obozreniye (Book review), the Russian equivalent of the homonymous New York Times Book Review. The fact that these translations originated abroad was not, in the era of glasnost and geopolitical disintegration, an dimitri n. breschinsky 297 impediment to their publication. The Russian writer Yury Nagibin, who had a developed a keen appreciation of Eiseley, was...