‘Liaisons continentales’: Katherine Mansfield, S. S. Koteliansky and the Art of Modernist Translation

Abstract

This extract from Katherine Mansfield’s notebook offers one of those exquisite insights into her irreverent, self-deprecating humour, which, for all its artful triviality, is undercut by an essential seriousness. Her domestic musings while preparing rhubarb resonate between the lines with a dramatic sense of contingent history (‘our Allies’) and of suffering (‘Russians waiting in the snow’, ‘dreadful weapon’, ‘ces evenements si graves’), as well as diplomatic wrangling, and the treacherous power of words in the art of code-switching and mistranslating. If three allied nations struggle to understand each other around a niblick, her little parable seems to say, what hope is there for peace? How can language taken not as phrase book equivalents but as vivid idiomatic usage not create havoc as it travels across borders, and even continents?

But what does rather worry me, I thought, turning down the gas to a pinch as the rhubarb began to boil, is how these mighty words are to be translated so that our Allies may taste the full flavour of them. Those crowds of patient russians, waiting in the snow, perhaps, to have the speech read aloud to them — what dreadful weapon will it present to their imagination? Unless the Daily News suggest to Mr Ransome that he walk down the Nevsky Prospekt with a niblick instead of an umbrella for all the world to see. And the French — what espece de Niblickisme will they make of it? Shall we read in the french papers next week of someone qui manque de niblick. Or that ‘Au milieu de ces evenements si graves ce qu’il nous faut c’est du courage, de l’espoir et du niblick le plus ferme ——’ I wondered, taking off the rhubarb.¹