“Baum’s innocent arrow pierced the heart of a totalitarian regime”

As I said in my last pile of reading post, I am intrigued by the alternate Oz crafted by Alexander Volkov, the Russian translator of The Wizard of Oz. Volkov titled it (in Russian) The Wizard of the Emerald City. Volkov’s Magic Land was popular throughout the Soviet bloc. Novelist and essayist Dubravka Ugresic read Wizard in a Croatian translation of Volkov’s Russian. Even at that remove, the book was easy to love, it seems.

The Wizard of Oz … was my favorite children’s book. Much later I found out that the book had traveled from the Russian to Yugoslavia and the rest of the East European world, and that it wasn’t written by a certain A. Volkov (who had ‘adapted’ it) but by the American writer Frank L. Baum. The first time I went to Moscow (way back in 1975) I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had turned up in a monochrome Oz, and that I, like Toto, just need [to] pull back the curtain to reveal a deceit masked by the special effects of totalitarianism. Baum’s innocent arrow pierced the heart of a totalitarian regime in a way the arrows of Soviet dissident literature never could.

Ugresic talks about translation as “a game of Chinese Whispers. … Every translation is not only a multiplication of misunderstandings, but also a multiplication of meanings.” In Chinese Whispers a group of people pass along a message, whispering it from ear to ear on down the line. You’re not supposed to ask for clarification, but instead pass along what you thought you heard. I remember playing this game in school. There were times the message that came out at the end sounded nothing like the message that went in at the beginning. (I remember also the times the no-repeat-whisper rule was broken and the message made it all the way unchanged.)

The paragraph quoted has its own Chinese Whispers mistakes. It’s not Frank L. Baum but L. Frank Baum. In both Baum and Volkov Toto doesn’t pull back a curtain but knocks over a screen. (Of course, with Volkov I have to rely on Peter Blystone’s translation: “a green screen that blended in with the wall.”) It’s in the 1939 MGM adaptation of Wizard that the humbug is hiding behind a curtain. (I’m sure a swirling curtain is more cinematic than a rigid screen.)

Volkov’s version of Wizard is closer to Baum than MGM was, though Volkov does make some changes, both addition (an ogre) and subtraction (dainty china country). I wonder if Dubravka Ugresic has given Baum’s original a look.  

source: Europe in Sepia

by Dubravka Ugresic

translated from the Croatian by David Williams

2013/2014. Open Letter, University of Rochester, Rochester NY