If you really want to hear about it ...
By Nikola Krastev
The seminal coming-of-age novel, The Catcher in the Rye, came out in
1951 during a time of anxious, Cold War conformity. The book by J D Salinger,
the reclusive American author who died last week at the age of 91, featured its
immortal teenage protagonist - the anguished, rebellious Holden Caulfield.
The book struck a chord with American teenagers who identified with the novel's
themes of alienation, innocence and rebellion.
But when the novel was translated into Russian during the "Khrushchev thaw",
its anti-hero's tormented soul-searching also reverberated among admirers
throughout the Soviet bloc.
Nad propastyu vo rzhi was first published in the Soviet Union in
the November 1960 issue of the popular literary magazine Inostrannaya
Literatura (Overseas Literature). The translation became an instant sensation,
and dog-eared copies of the magazine were passed from reader to reader.
Boris Paramonov, a Russian philosopher and contributor to RFE/RL's Russian
Service, says he and his Russian friends and colleagues instantly recognized
that it was a book that would endure.
``Soviet readers back then were identifying themselves of course not with the
American teenager [Caulfield], but they took close to their hearts his
rebellion against the conventionalism of the society, against the alienation of
people and the artificial social values which one had to follow in their social
lives,’’ Paramonov says. ``The rebellion was against the society in general,
against its hypocritical norms of behavior.’’
A literary staple
More than 60 million copies of the novel have been sold worldwide since its
publication in 1951.
It's no coincidence that the publication of the novel in the Soviet Union came
in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when an easing of Joseph Stalin-era controls
was boosting cultural and other contacts with the outside world.
The Russian translation by Rita Rait-Kovaleva became a fixture in the library
of virtually every Soviet intellectual.
"Of course the idiomatic expressions of the American adolescents did not
correspond to the language of their Russian, Soviet counterparts in those
classical Soviet times," Paramonov says. "Back then the genre of street
language literature was not at all cultivated in the Soviet Union, as opposed
to today when the slang is given the green light and is prominently present in
the media and literature."
But Paramonov says Rait-Kovaleva captured the street slang of Caulfield without
losing the sharpness and wit of the original version. The feat was especially
notable since when she translated Salinger's quintessential American story,
Rait-Kovaleva had never even been to the United States.
In the 1960s, The Catcher in the Rye could even be found in the literary
curriculum of elite Moscow high schools. A favorable review was published in
1961 in the highly influential Novyi Mir literary magazine under the editorship
of Aleksander Tvardovsky.
'Revolting' development
Anthony Georgiev, publisher of the English-language Vagabond magazine in
Bulgaria and the author of two novels, was first exposed to The Catcher in
1977, when as a 13-year-old he smuggled an English-language copy back to
communist Bulgaria from his first trip to Istanbul. He recalls the book cast a
spell over him and his friends.
"It appealed to our sense of adolescence, to our sense of being teenagers at
the time, teenage boys and girls," Georgiev says. "We were rebelling against
our parents just like Caulfield did. We were critical of the system, we were
critical about our school system and our educational system just like Caulfield
was. That was what mattered, we identified with Caulfield.
Particularly thrilling, he says, was knowing the slang in which Caulfield
spoke.
For well-read Bulgarian teenagers, Georgiev says the novel was a fascinating
window into contemporary American culture, with all its inadequacies and
shortcomings.
"It wasn't until a few years [later] that I realized that the Soviets had been
publishing this book because they considered it to be critical of the American
society and of Western values written by an American," Georgiev says.
Like her Russian counterpart, Bulgarian translator Nadya Sotirova accurately
captured the teenager's voice and eloquence without having ever stepped foot on
American soil.
Somehow, Salinger had written a character that people around the world
instinctively understood.
Shunning attention
Jerome David Salinger had lived in a life of profound privacy since 1953 in the
small town of Cornish, New Hampshire. Over the years, he became as famous for
his reclusive ways - he never attended literary events or gave interviews and
was said to flee if anyone recognized him on the street - as he was for penning The
Catcher In The Rye.
It is difficult to overstate Salinger's impact on the landscape of American
literature and culture.
Through anti-hero Caulfield and a few other characters in stories he published
before 1965, Salinger tapped into a universal experience of adolescent angst
that transcended geographic borders and political ideologies.
"[Salinger's] significance is that he was a new voice, the new sensibility in
the American literature," Ross Posnock, a professor of American literature at
New York's Columbia University, says. "You can define it as precocious, Jewish,
urban aesthete, and that really had never been heard before. It's a kind of a
brilliant adolescent voice that's very different than his contemporaries like
John Updike and Philip Roth, Jack Kerouac, for instance."
In Caulfield, Salinger created a 16-year-old character who is about to be
kicked out of boarding school and decides to run away to New York City. For
three days, Caulfield roams the city, encountering a cast of bizarre
characters, including a prostitute, a former teacher and an elevator operator.
His experience leaves him convinced that the world is run by "phonies".
His solo adventure triggers struggles of self-identity and a search for the
true meaning of love and sex. Ultimately, he finds salvation in the form of his
younger sister, Phoebe.
Salinger's last published work was a prose piece titled "Hapworth 16, 1924"
that was published in the June 19, 1965 issue of New Yorker magazine.
Posnock says Salinger’s characters caught the imagination of readers.
"He wrote about very precocious, precious, highly sensitive, gifted people who
were tormented by their existence," Posnock says. "He made it very funny and
witty and amusing, but they weren't people who had a great deal of durability,
and that was part of their charm."
Copyright (c) 2010, RFE/RL Inc. Reprinted with the permission of
Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington DC
20036
(To view the original article, please click
here.)
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
