In 1995, this blogger traveled to Usbekistan at the invitation of his daughter who was a Peace Corps Volunteer with the second group of PCVs to work in that former Soviet republic. Uzbekistan had been a part of the Soviet Union from 1924 (as the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic) until 1991, following the breakup of the Soviet Union, it declared independence as the Republic of Uzbekistan. So, for the last two weeks of 1995, this blogger saw the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union. For that reason, "The Americans" had resonance with this blogger in the series' portrayal of the end of the Soviet Union that was remindful of the newly independent Republic of Uzbekistan. And, this blogger's humble opinion, Masha Gessen's obersations are spot on. In fact, you can ride to the river with Masha Gessen when it comes to end of the Soviet Union and the impact of that event on the United States. IF this is a (fair & balanced) demonstration of cultural sensitivity, so be it.
[x The New Yorker]
Translating “The Americans,” And Seeing A Mirror Of My Own American Experience
By Maria (Masha) Gessen
TagCrowd Cloud of the following piece of writing
(This piece contains spoilers for the series finale of “The Americans.”)
My life prepared me to do one job, and this job was translating for “The Americans,” the FX show that wrapped up on Wednesday after six seasons. Most of the episodes contained at least a few scenes in Russian, and “The Americans” was the first show I’d encountered whose creators cared to insure that the dialogue was scripted and spoken in actual, idiomatic, living Russian. For the last three seasons, it was my job to translate these scenes, scripted in English, into Russian.
It wasn’t just any Russian, either. The show begins in 1981 and ends in 1987, just before the language began to follow, and to facilitate, the country’s transformation by absorbing hundreds of words from foreign languages—office, bucks, management, and so many others that capitalism brought with it, but also electoral’niy, exit poll, and more to describe the mechanics of democracy—and by creating brand-new slang. When I went back to the Soviet Union, in 1991, after a ten-year absence, I had to learn a slate of slang terms, get comfortable with the use of newly absorbed foreign terms, and, more subtly, note that cognates had migrated to include meanings that they had in other languages. (For example, the Russian detali now meant not only small parts of a physical structure but also details of an event, or of anything else.)
This experience meant I was perfectly situated to translate into a Russian of the early nineteen-eighties. My language wasn’t exactly frozen in time—I ended up living and working in Moscow for more than twenty years after my 1991 return—but I did remember the words and expressions I had to learn anew. I tried to make the Russian dialogue free of such anachronisms. Beautifully and strangely, the creators of “The Americans” indulged and even encouraged this quest for quality in a near-vacuum: only a tiny fraction of viewers could understand Russian at all, and a disappearingly small portion of this fraction would notice the Soviet-era purity of the Russian-language dialogue.
The circumstances that gave me my peculiar expertise in the Russian language bound me to the show in another way, too: I immigrated to the United States with my parents in 1981, the year the show begins. Its central couple, Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, are Russian spies who have spent fifteen years in the United States blending in, and are faced with a series of choices that test their loyalty to the cause and to each other. Philip has weaknesses: he has grown to love America and the wife who is his partner in spying and part of his cover. He is tempted to defect and live the life he has been living, but for real—to become an American. By the end of the first season, the Jenningses do trade in their fake, arranged, cynical Soviet marriage for a real American one. They become the roles they’ve been playing. It’s not just that they adopt a psychotherapy-infused, stylistically American way of conducting a relationship; it’s that they opt to create an island of truth, and true love, in the midst of a world in which nothing is true—except their two children, who don’t know that their parents are Soviet spies [in the earliest seasons of the series.]
The underlying assumption of the Jenningses’ arrangement—of their very lives—is that nothing is true except that the USSR will last forever. My parents, who were the same age as the Jenningses when they emigrated, based their decisions on the same premise. My mother told me as much when we prepared to leave Moscow: the Soviet regime was there for eternity, and my parents were opting to live their finite human lives elsewhere, even if that meant never seeing their mothers again. They hardly looked back, but in 1987, as soon as the opportunity presented itself, they decided to travel there. They had never imagined that they would be able to visit so soon. The trip was both exhilarating and heartbreaking. My mother fantasized about what would have happened if she had stayed: she, a translator, would be working on classic, brilliant texts that censorship had kept out of the Soviet Union. My father, on the other hand, seemed immune to this wistfulness. He embraced his American life the way Philip Jennings longed to. He loved his car, his split-level house in a Boston suburb, and even, I suspect, the suit he had to wear to work.
Like my parents, the Jenningses return to the Soviet Union in 1987 as Americans. Caught up in a power struggle that will ultimately bring down the Soviet Union—though no one can conceive of this yet—they have been cornered and forced to go back. “We’ll get used to it,” Elizabeth says. She has no idea what she is talking about. Eternity has already cracked and is raining chunks of plaster on an unsuspecting world. Elizabeth and Philip—Nadezhda and Mikhail—are about to have to learn a slew of new words, and this is the least of their problems.
The first quasi-private businesses are about to open in Russia. In two years, the Eastern Bloc will disintegrate in a quick succession of velvet and not-so-velvet revolutions. In another two years, the Soviet Union itself will collapse following a failed and fumbling hard-line coup. In the year in between the collapses, thousands of people will line up to eat at the first McDonald’s in Moscow.
Philip and Elizabeth will be in demand. As KGB agents with excellent knowledge of English, they can get jobs at any number of new companies that are trying both to do business with foreigners and to stay out of the way of the secret police. They might become heads of security for one of the companies that will grow very large in the coming years; their experience in assassinations may also come in handy. They could also become biznesmeny and launch an enterprise of their own—their connections and their English will be a great asset. Hell, they could build a travel empire. (Back in Washington, they ran a small travel agency.)
They cannot imagine it now, but they will probably succeed. They will succeed on Russia’s emergent new terms, by emulating the lives of the Americans they once were: by calling their place of work office, wearing American clothes, and driving everywhere, through traffic that will soon become gridlock. Like my mother, they will wonder about the people they might have been and the things they might have done if they had chosen differently. What was the point of risking their lives, taking the lives of others, and sacrificing their children’s trust for a cause that Mikhail Gorbachev and the whole Soviet empire seemed to give up so easily? In its quest for uncanny accuracy, “The Americans” was full of lessons about Russia, spies, the Cold War, and life. The most important of these, surely, is that eternity will come crashing down when you least expect it to. # # #
[Maria Alexandrovna (Masha) Gessen is a Russian and US journalist, author, translator, and LBGT activist who has been an outspoken critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin and US President Donald Trump. She won the National Book Award for The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (2017). See her other books here. Gessen also writes primarily in English but also in her native Russian She also has been a prolific contributor to such publications as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New Republic, New Statesman, Granta, Slate, Vanity Fair, Harper's Magazine, and US News & World Report. Gessen also was the Russian translator of the TV show "The Americans." In 2004-2005, she was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.]
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