FIRST AND ONLY

Taira Djafarova is the first and only Azerbaijani to have dedicated her life to translating from Finnish into Russian. She is among the acknowledged masters of translation and is a member of the European Council of Literary Translators' Associations. She lives in Finland and believes that the most important thing in life is to find one's niche and stay in it.

- You graduated with honours from the S.M. Kirov Azerbaijani State University and did a sponsored post-graduate course at the M.V. Lomonosov Moscow State University, but then decided to change your profession and dedicate your life to languages and literature. Tell me, is there really anything in common between such diverse fields as physics and poetry?

- There probably isn't much in common between physics and poetry. There maybe something between theoretical physics, as in my case, and abstract, pure poetry. The world of mathematics and the language of physics are abstract from real life. It is like being locked in a world of figures and formulae. Theoretical physicists are basically loners; they rarely have much regard for the theatre or the arts. If you invite a physicist to the theatre, he will tell you that he gets backache sitting in a theatre or, better still, he will sleep through the whole performance.

To me, who grew up in a family where preference was given to languages, literature and the arts and music, the world of physics of Einstein and Landau, which I had seen, seemed alien although I admired the intellect and talent of the young scientists who could explain the most complex things with the minimum of effort. In all those years when I was studying theoretical physics my thought processes began to change and became more logical and mathematical. And when I started going back to my circle of literature and the arts, I had to alter and restructure my way of thinking and my perception of the world to some extent. I had to transfer from mathematical to creative thinking, from high abstractions to the sounds, words and colours of real life.

So you can see there is a substantial difference between physics and poetry. And at the same time, there is a well-known aphorism that imagination is necessary in mathematics just as much as it is in poetry. After all, Landau, as we know, composed verse for his lovers. And the path from physics to literature is not such a rarity. You could, for example, name that foremost translator of English poetry and multi prize-winner, Grigoriy Kruzhkov, who was at one time a post-graduate student of the Institute of High Energy Physics. So, my path from physics to poetry is nothing exceptional.

And in my view there is more of a similarity between physics and the study of foreign languages. That is why a number of physicists from Moscow State University had a decent command of languages, without having studied in foreign language institutes. And my memory, trained by complex mathematical calculations, was somehow strengthened during my years of training, and it became easier to study languages.

- You had an excellent knowledge of English. What made you choose Finnish? As far as I am aware, it is one of the most difficult languages to study, bearing in mind the number of cases, the length of each sound, and so on.

- I have studied English since I was a child, but I have always tried to learn French and German too, which were spoken in our family. The sounds of the main European languages have been familiar to me since childhood. But the first time I heard the Finnish language it seemed to me especially melodious and unique, unlike any I had heard before. It may also be because my future Finnish husband spoke it… I straightaway decided to study this language at all costs, not knowing at first about its 16 cases or other difficulties and nuances.

- Where did you study Finnish?

- At first, I taught myself. I visited beautiful Karelia, about which in those days they used to sing "Long will we dream of Karelia with its blue eyes of lakes…" I would get hold of text books, meet the local people, walk to my heart's content in dreamy, romantic woods, bathe in the lambushki - that was what they called the small forest lakes - and fall completely in love with its nature, and on my return to Moscow I would grind away at my studies. Then I continued my education at my local literary institute where, it seemed to me, once in every five years they recruited a group of Finnish translators, or "Finniks", as they jokingly called them. These groups were run by my esteemed teacher, Vladimir Nikolayevich Bogachev, a celebrated translator and polyglot, who knew over 25 languages.

- Do you remember your first translation?

- I'll never forget my first translation, which took me a long time. It was a love story called "She and I" by the Finnish classical author and aristocrat, Arvid Jarnefelt. It is a strong story, written in the spirit of [Norwegian author Knut] Hamsun. It was published in the Literaturnaya Rossiya newspaper in the foreign stories feature. It was run at the time by Yuriy Gribachev, the son of the well-known editor-in-chief of Sovetskiy Soyuz magazine. When he was young Yuriy was one of the "golden youths" of Moscow. He was a well educated man, who reminded one physically of the heroes of Jack London, smoking a pipe like a true Englishman.

- What criterion do you have when choosing a book to be translated?

- Of course, I had to read a lot of books - both by classical authors and modern Finnish writers - before choosing what I think were the closest and most interesting for Russian-speaking readers, because I was translating from Finnish into Russian.

As well as that, in those years the "Fiction" publishing house in Moscow used to publish from year to year an impressive series called "Library of Finnish Literature" and from time to time I would get commissions for a translation. For this series I translated such Finnish classical authors as Finland's only Nobel Prize winner Frans Eemil Sillanpaa, Mika Toimi Waltari, who is well-known in Europe, and other outstanding writers. I also translated modern writers for the "Modern Finnish Literature" collections. I was also involved in translating books published by the "Raduga" ["Rainbow"] publishing house. I would particularly like to mention the first book I translated, which was published by the "Library of Foreign Literature" - "One-dollar Dinner", by the Finnish classical writer Veijo Meri. This writer visited Moscow several times at the invitation of the USSR Writers' Union and my tutor, Vladimir Bogachev, and I had the honour of meeting and getting to know him.

My personal relationship with authors, their charisma and their magnetism have sometimes played a part when choosing a book for translation. For example, I became friends with the writer Anita Konkka, who seemed to me a sorceress and an enchantress, and with her lover at that time, the sculptor Heikki Virolainen, the chairman of the Finnish Sculptors' Union. I knew all about their romance, and once, when Anita wrote the book "A Fool's Paradise", for which, incidentally, she was awarded a prestigious prize, I met quite accidentally in the street Heikki who told me: "Anita has written a book. The fool, of course, is me. Do please translate this book."

- What distinguishes prose translation from poetry translation?

- If you had seen my book "Modern Finnish Poetry" (Moscow, "Krug", 2010), I'm sure you would have noticed that I have mainly translated Finnish poets, starting from the 1950s, when the current of modernism began in Finnish literature. The founder of modernist poetry in Finland was the amazing Edith Sodergran and my anthology begins with a translation of her poetry. The modernist poets wrote mainly in vers libre, or free verse. Vers libre is similar to rhythmic prose, and yet it is not prose; each line carries a poetic thought and lives by association and lyrical tension. In some aspects translating free verse is more difficult than translating rhymed verse because the verse must remain verse. All the more so as rhythm has not always accompanied verse; it spread in European poetry only under the influence of the medieval troubadours, and they borrowed it from the Arab lyric poets.

Of course, translating prose is different from translating poetry. But in the translation of prose rhythm plays a big part. Every author has his or her own rhythm, which must be felt and conveyed in the other language. I remember this being discussed at one translation seminar. One of the translators played a joke on one of the Finnish translators: "But [Jyrki] Vainonen always has one and the same rhythm, and whoever he translates - Lorca or Shakespeare's sonnets - it's always Vainonen in the translation."

But in general, I agree with the old idea that in translating poetry the translator is the rival of the author, but in prose he is his slave. But, of course, in translation both rivalry and slavery are relative, and both prose and poetry demand not just creative ability and skill but a lot of work as well.

- Do you translate every day?

- No, not every day, of course, because translation is rather a complex thing. It was not for nothing that [prominent Soviet poet and translator] Arseniy Tarkovskiy said: "Oh, these oriental translations, how they give you a headache…" I get just as much a headache from western translations. But at the very beginning of my career as a translator, when I was working flat out, I often had to sit not just for days, but nights, too, if the deadline for handing in the manuscript was getting tight. In those cases I would go back to the text and look at it again "with fresh eyes".

- Does the ambiance of a translated work affect you?

- Yes, it does. And sometimes even something described in a translated book has suddenly occurred in my life. That may sound a bit spooky, but it has. For example, in Vuokko Tolonen's book "The Tampere Climate", she writes how the heroine, who is of a nervous disposition, has a strange attack and is rescued by a friend who unexpectedly appears. He grabs an empty bag, hands it to her and says: "Breathe into the bag". Some time later, the same thing happened to a close relative of mine. But I already knew what it was and how to deal with it.

- Which of the authors you have translated is closest to you?

- I couldn't single out any particular author. Translations are my babies and they are all dear to me, albeit in different ways.

- Do you ever go back to your translations after a while?

- That usually happens if the translation is being published and there is an opportunity to revise the text. When I suddenly discover that something in it could be improved, made more expressive or precise, then I try to do it. As they say, there is always room for improvement, but one must strive for perfection.

- A translator is always in the shadows. Readers usually rave about an author and virtually never think about how well a work has been translated. Doesn't that upset you?

- Yes, a translator is not an author. But if readers rave about a translated work it means they are delighted not just with the writer, but also the translator, whether they have noticed his name or not. This also, of course, depends on how qualified a reader is, how educated he is, how much he understands the art of translation and what the role of the translator is. But a really cultured reader always takes note of the translators and knows their names. So, I don't think translators have any serious reason to be upset.

- You are also a writer. Which of your works have been published and where?

- My first stories and tales were published in Baku in the "Literary Azerbaijan" and "Azerbaijan" magazines. My first book of prose "Nigar", translated into Azerbaijani, was published by the "Ganclik" publishing house in 1976. A collection of short stories and tales called "Yellow Jeans" was published in Russian by the "Yazici" publishing house in 1978. But the muse of translation is also a jealous one, and the more translation work I did the less time and strength I had for my own creative work. But now I am hoping to once again give the reader something of my own…

- What are you working on right now?

- I'm working on a book about the Baku of my childhood and youth, and in it I am trying to write about the remarkable people who have meant a lot to me in my life, about my family and my roots connected with Azerbaijan's history, past and recent.

- I know you have an affluent pedigree. Would you tell us a little about it?

- You could say I have been lucky as regards my background. In my childhood I was surrounded by a lot of interesting people. They were the old, first academics of Azerbaijan. The house in which I grew up - No 39 Ali-Bayramova Street (formerly Tsitsianovskaya Street) - was built to the order of my grandfather Aga-Mehti by the Baku architect A. Nikitin, who was well known at the beginning of the last century. My grandfather was a businessman and at one time worked as manager of the weaving mill of the well-known philanthropist and oil industrialist Zaynalabdin Tagiyev. After the Revolution our family was given a five-room apartment on the third floor of our former home.

By the time I was born Aga-Mehti had passed on, having died in exile in Turkey. But my grandfather was replaced by his brothers Rahimbay and Qasimbay, who raised Aga-Mehti's six children and his two grandchildren - my brother and myself.

Rahimbay was a pupil of Hasan bay Zardabi's, he graduated from the Alexandrov high school and then St. Petersburg University. Rahimbay Cafarov became the founder of the Zardabi Natural History Museum and its first director.

Qasimbay, who graduated from two higher educational establishments - the Sorbonne and the legal faculty of Petrograd University - became the first Azerbaijani dean of the legal faculty of Azerbaijan State University.

Aga-Mehti's children are my favourite aunts, my father and uncle Cafar, my father's elder brother.

Uncle Cafar, or Cafar Mehtiyevich, as he was called at the API faculty, was the first Azerbaijani dean of European languages at the API. He graduated from the Institute of Commerce in Berlin and became Azerbaijan's leading expert on the teaching of German and the author of the first dictionaries.

My aunts were also erudite people because they graduated from the St. Nina Institute, and then Moscow and Baku colleges of higher education. Much could be said about them, too. All of them were noted for their kindness and treated my brother and me with touching love, as though we were their only offspring. You could say we bathed in a sea of love. Instead of one mother we had five, two grandfathers and two fathers, including Uncle Cafar.

At home we spoke not only our native language and Russian, but also French and German. Our relatives continued to maintain this atmosphere of cultural life which they lived in Baku before the Revolution. They arranged concerts at home, listening to rare gramophone recordings, invited intellectuals who were still alive and talked about literature, music and the arts, and well-known singers who had arrived in Baku on tour also came to our house. This was, as I know from the stories of the older people, a continuation of the traditions and a preservation of the atmosphere of evenings in the home of Tagiyev, Uzeyir Hacibayli and the Qasimov brothers. In those days the social network of the intelligentsia was a narrow one. Of course, it included such people as Zardabi and Topcubasi, who was the editor of a major newspaper, and other glorious members of our elite. They also told me about this at home. But I shall try to talk about this in a new book, work on which is continuing.