Last week, the play A Marathon of Russian Roulette by Kateryna Penkova claimed the top spot in the prestigious Ukrainian drama competition “Drama.ua”. On December 4, 2023, the play made its mark at the bilingual readings of documentary plays, featuring works by Penkova and Kosodii, held at the Camden People’s Theatre in London. Following the readings, an engaging discussion took place with the playwrights and esteemed Ukrainian theatre specialist Molly Flynn, who curated the project. In an exclusive interview with Ukrainian Drama Translations, we had the pleasure of speaking with Helena Kernan, the talented translator behind Penkova’s award-winning play, to gain insights into her experience translating I Don’t Remember the Name by Kateryna Penkova into English.
What led you to embark on your journey as a translator of Ukrainian drama?
I first became interested in contemporary Ukrainian drama in 2018 while living in Kyiv, where I was involved in a couple of theatre projects. Since then, I’ve been fortunate enough to translate several plays from Ukrainian into English, as well as non-fiction pieces, poetry and documentary film footage, as part of my work as a freelance translator. In the midst of the full-scale war, this work feels more important than ever; I was especially moved and honoured to translate several short documentary plays on the war for the Royal Court Theatre in London and two pieces by Anastasiia Kosodii and Kateryna Penkova for the Women and War project at Birkbeck University.
When you first encountered Penkova’s play I Don’t Remember the Name, what were your initial impressions and expectations?
Reading Penkova’s play for the first time, I was struck by the sense of nostalgia and yearning for an inaccessible past that it evoked. Even as someone who has never been to Donetsk, I could feel the playwright’s aching for the hometown of her youth, now occupied by russians, in an embodied, visceral way. The playful agility of Penkova’s language was also immediately apparent and gave me the urge to begin translating right away. I really relished the opportunity to translate the very first scene of the play – in which Penkova herself struggles to express herself in Polish to a customs official on the Polish-Ukrainian border – and imagine how the sense of being lost in translation could be rendered with a blend of English and Polish phrases. Scenes such as this one demand a kind of linguistic creativity and playfulness that makes the translation process a pleasure.
Could you discuss the most challenging aspects you encountered during the translation process?
One of the text’s most obvious difficulties is that it is made up of a mixture of Ukrainian and russian, each deployed in specific contexts and bearing the weight of centuries of imperialism, occupation and suppression. Speaking one or the other language often has nuanced implications of geography, background or political stance that are instantly recognisable to Ukrainians but difficult to reproduce in foreign contexts. I tried to distinguish between the languages by changing the register, tone and frequency of idioms in the English version, but also added stage directions to make the shifts explicit. I would love to see how a director would interpret these junctures between languages when staging the play, and have the impression that a lot could be done with gesture, pace and stagecraft – tools which are not available to a translator working purely with text – to render the linguistic tension visible.
On a similar note, the potential for swearing creatively in Ukrainian and russian is much greater. Both languages boast a vast array of obscenities to adapt to any situation, while, as a rule, English offers much less variety. This sometimes meant resorting to lesser-used swearwords and unusual combinations of profanities (e.g. ‘What is this fuckery?’) in order to convey a similar effect in spite of the comparative lack of linguistic flexibility in English.
Ukrainian authors often face criticism for being too focused on local themes, which may not be easily understood by international audiences. Did you encounter such challenges, and how did you overcome them?
I see the self-referential nature of much Ukrainian writing as a strength rather than a deficiency, in that it allows for a rich tapestry of nuance and cultural references and a very dry, quick-witted sense of humour. It is the specificity of Penkova’s play that anchors the sense of nostalgia and draws us into the complex emotional world of its characters. I was in contact with the playwright throughout the translation process and asked multiple questions in order to clarify the many details of the text, from technical information about urban planning and Soviet construction in Donetsk to the schedule of the Viktyuk Theatre tour and how social security structures functioned following the collapse of the USSR.
There were moments in the play where I decided that a couple of extra words to clarify the reference would be helpful. For example, a reference to the famous moment (which has since become a meme) when former Ukrainian president Yanukovych forgot the Ukrainian word for Christmas tree and paused for ten seconds before pronouncing the word in russian. Or ‘the months when the heating’s switched off’, a concept most likely unfamiliar to people in the UK, where central heating is controlled by the consumer rather than by city authorities. In other places I decided to leave the references without further embellishment, in the hope of retaining the local colour of the text and perhaps sparking the audience’s curiosity to find out more (e.g. references to Soviet partisan Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya and the karbovanets currency used in Ukraine in the 1990s to replace the Soviet ruble).
Do British translators see themselves as working for a global readership or primarily for British readers?
I Don’t Remember the Name features a lot of idiomatic expressions, slang and colloquial speech. My translation is very much informed by the environment in which I grew up, which was saturated with British idioms and turns of phrase. A lot of the nuances of mood and dialogue in the text are rendered through subtle shifts in register and voice, which are most clearly identifiable by those familiar with UK English. I am glad that the text could retain much of its character through this idiom-informed approach, especially as so-called ‘international English’ sometimes lacks the vitality and complexity of regionally-rooted variants of the language. At the same time, I very much hope that the English translation will make the play accessible to a wider audience. I also hope that it will lead to translations into other languages and dialects, so that readers and theatregoers can get an intimate feel for the text in whichever form of expression speaks most directly to them.
Does the reception of your translation change after a performance/staged reading?
Performances and staged readings are a real gift for the translator, as they open up a whole spectrum of feedback from audience members. Ordinarily the translator will only receive direct, explicit feedback from editors, critics or colleagues. Reading the words on the page is worlds apart from seeing a translated text made tangible on stage, which is a true test of the translation in its entirety. My perception of a text will also change after seeing a performance or staged reading. I can evaluate in real time whether the translation works when it is embodied by real, flesh-and-blood people, whether the humour lands in certain contexts, and what kind of emotional effect the words have on an audience.
After a text has been translated, what are the next steps? Does the translator participate in these stages?
Publication and/or production are of course always the end goal when translating a piece of theatre. If you are lucky enough to find a publisher who is interested, an editor will usually read over the text with a fine-toothed comb and make detailed notes before coming back to the translator and initiating a dialogue about any potential changes to be made. This usually involves ironing out some of the more awkward or difficult moments of a translation and paying particular attention to translating the cultural context. Sometimes editors do not read the language of origin, which makes them a useful yardstick for ascertaining which parts of the text are too obscure or unclear for the target audience. In terms of production, translators are not usually involved in preparing a text for the stage – this task is reserved for directors, actors and theatre companies. Having said that, I had a wonderful experience at the Royal Court Theatre last April, where translators of the texts for the ‘On the War’ staged readings were invited to work alongside the actors and directors during rehearsals. The creative exchange between literary and theatre specialists drew out the nuances of the texts in a very special way and is something I would love to see happening more often.
In your opinion, how does translation facilitate understanding between Britain and Ukraine?
I think that people often underestimate the impact of translating a text into truly idiomatic and organic English. Rendering Penkova’s play – a brilliant piece that explores what it means to be human and grapple with memory – into a kind of language that speaks to people, the language of everyday life and everyday thoughts, makes the humanity of Ukrainian people much more present and material. Stilted translations can make a people and a culture seem even more ‘foreign’, even more other, and stand in the way of compassion and engagement. If a translation can show that Ukrainians navigate many of the same issues that we do, that they struggle with many of the same existential questions with humour, grace, melancholy and thoughtfulness, then it goes some way towards successfully bridging the cultural gap. I believe that this is more important than ever now, as the russian war of aggression grinds on and continues to cause so much suffering for the people of Ukraine. The more the British public identifies with Ukrainian people and Ukrainian culture, the more support there will be for Ukraine’s fight for its existence, autonomy and identity.
Interviewed by Anna Halas