Trained as a physicist, translator Natasha Randall finds the sex and mathematical subtext in Yevgeny Zamyatin's We.
How did the new translation of We come about?
I approached Modern Library with the idea, and by a happy coincidence, they were looking for someone to do a retranslation.
Had you translated a book before?
We was the first book I wanted to translate. I lived in Russia in the '90s. I translated scenarios into English for a ballet and theater company in St. Petersburg. Zamyatin was an engineer, and there are a lot of mathematical motifs in We. It is fascinating that there is a whole mathematically coded subtext to the book, even though you can read it without ever getting into that. It is a page-turner, but Zamyatin is a very literary artist, and I tried to capture some of that in the translation. He ascribed particular aesthetic qualities to letters. O, for instance, he thought of as like the sea. Zamyatin's punctuation, too, is outlandish. He uses a lot of dashes and short sentences, and tried to prevent the reader from skimming. I'm absolutely convinced that if he were writing this now, his narrator would have put the story in the form of a blog. It is a funky, punky language, and I thought a lot, while translating it, about Emily Dickinson—the way she, too, used dashes and strange punctuation marks, which was cleared away in the first editions of her poem.
The book is regarded as a Cold War relic, but it wasn't written during the Cold War, was it?
The book is so fresh and dynamic that it needn't be associated with the Stalinist Soviet Union. It was written in 1921 when the Bolshevik ideas were crystallizing into something more frightening than anyone expected. But at the time, the dystopia Zamyatin was pointing to was the industrial revolution. Zamyatin greeted the Bolshevik revolution with enthusiasm, then he was quickly disillusioned. He believed in constant revolution, eternally making energy and avoiding entropy.
The image of the book as a prophecy of totalitarianism disguises the sexual politics of the book. I was struck by the Venus in Furs subplot involving the narrator and a femme fatale.
There is an Adam and Eve story in the book, with the narrator being "seduced" by an Eve. It is a very sexy novel. Zamyatin as a man, however, was a buttoned-up figure. A dandy, but not scandalous in his private life like some other Russian novelists and poets of the time. He was an incredible prognosticator—he [foresaw] what in fact did happen. When you read We, you see how Orwell and Huxley devised their novels from Zamyatin's.
