Читать книгу Eastbound through Siberia - Georg Wilhelm Steller - Страница 7
ОглавлениеWITH THE OPENING OF THE IRON CURTAIN IN the 1990s, Russian archives once again became accessible to foreign scholars, and the veil of secrecy imposed on the members of the Second Kamchatka Expedition centuries ago was finally lifted. In 1992, Wieland Hintzsche, a natural scientist and historian from Halle, Germany, where Steller had been a student and docent in botany some 260 years earlier, went looking for Steller manuscripts in Russian archives. He found a treasure trove of letters and documents not only by Steller but also by other individuals and institutions involved in the Second Kamchatka Expedition, most of them previously unexamined and unpublished. They are now being published in a series called Quellen zur Geschichte Sibiriens und Alaskas aus russischen Archiven (Source materials concerning the history of Siberia and Alaska from Russian archives) by the Franckesche Stiftungen in Halle, Germany, in cooperation with the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, with Wieland Hintzsche serving as main editor.
The two Steller texts of our current translation—“The Description of Irkutsk and Its Surroundings” and the “Travel Journal from Irkutsk to Kamchatka, 1740”—are found in the series’s second volume, Reisetagebücher, 1735–1743 (2000). The “Instructions” given to Steller by professors Gmelin and Müller, which we included because they explain the scope and details of the assignments given to the scientists and provide a better understanding of why Steller did what he did, are printed in volume 3, Briefe und Dokumente, 1739 (2001). These translated texts contain historical and scientific information that deserves to become more widely known. While they will appeal most to historians and botanists, general readers who like a good wilderness adventure will also enjoy reading them.
Steller’s observations in the role of social scientist are a particularly memorable aspect of the “Description of Irkutsk.” He deplores the unfair treatment of poor people; appreciates the Cossacks’ superb choice of the absolutely best place to found this town; and admires, rather idealistically, the hardworking promyshlenniks1 and their fishing cooperative in which everything is harmoniously shared. Much of the journal, especially beginning with the trip down the Lena River during breakup, relates an arduous trek with descriptions of rugged landscapes and their flora. Stejneger, who in his 1936 biography of Steller lamented the loss of this journal, would indeed have found in it “the wonderful commentary . . . on men and conditions as they prevailed during the time of the Second Kamchatka Expedition” that he assumed would be there.2 From the wealth of letters and other documents we consulted in both Quellen volumes, we have added a sample of a Schnurbuch (account ledger; 3:317–21) and a letter to Schumacher (3:212–14) as appendices (B and C) to further illustrate how the expedition’s byzantine administrative system affected Steller’s work.
Frontis. Though no portrait of Georg Wilhelm Steller is known to exist, several artists have depicted him as they imagined him to look. In our estimation this statue by Russian sculptor Ilya Vyuev, entitled Infinitely Large in the Infinitely Small (2011), most successfully captures Steller’s unassuming appearance and his intense interest in scientific research. This work in plaster (70 centimeters) was initially presented in Moscow in 2011. In 2016, at the request of the Komandorskiy Nature Reserve, a full-scale Steller bronze monument (2.2 meters) was made based on the initial sculpture. The plan is to place this monument on Bering Island. Photo reprinted with permission of the artist.
Translating Steller’s texts has been its own arduous trek through the eighteenth-century linguistic landscape. First of all, these texts are essentially Steller’s unrevised field notes, published in what the Germans call a textkritische Ausgabe, recording Steller’s notes just as he wrote them but also carefully identifying lacunae and substitutions due to the condition of the manuscript. Eighteenth-century written German was not standardized with respect to spelling, grammar, or punctuation; helping verbs were frequently omitted, and the same word might be spelled three different ways on the same page. Steller’s use of punctuation is totally erratic, so deciphering which words constituted a complete sentence became something of a guessing game. It is safe to assume that, had he lived and been given permission to publish his work, Steller himself would have eliminated many of the confusing aspects of the manuscripts. He suggests as much in his Beasts of the Sea, where he invites readers who object to the earthen vessel containing his written porridge to pour it into a gold or silver urn.3 He was definitely sensitive to the shortcomings in his writing caused by lack of time, as evidenced in his letters—for example, the one to Schumacher (see appendix C). Switching number or tense; omitting nouns, pronouns, and articles; not putting events in a logical sequence—for example, observing that he drowned his beard in a lake before writing that he was getting a shave—are all examples of the haste with which he had to work much of the time and his superactive mind outracing his pen.
Despite his unpolished writing, his personal style comes through. He was fond of repetition, often piling one adjective on another—lovely, beautiful, pleasant—or using two nouns meaning the same thing—the rich and well-to-do. He had a wicked sense of understated humor—for example, ironically labeling it a misfortune that he and Aleksei “just barely escaped a watery grave” (114–15). He delighted in playing with language, as when he described himself as the meat in a muck soup after falling into a boggy hole with his horse or cited the need to let the horses “ausruhen, ausfressen und ausheilen” or “rest up, fill up, and pick up their health” (139). However, using Berg, mountain, interchangeably with Gebirge, mountain range, seemed out of character for a scientist. Here we tried to be more precise.
Steller had been schooled in Latin. It was the lingua franca among scholars; he read, wrote, and spoke it fluently. Not surprisingly, he used it almost exclusively in describing plants and minerals. Since he was traveling through Russia, he used Russian terms, writing them down as he heard them, not necessarily how they were actually spelled, his Russian apparently having been learned by ear. Using many French words was common in the eighteenth century, and Steller did that too. Quite a few words in all of these languages, including Steller’s native German, are obsolete now, sending us to Hintzsche’s Anmerkungen or the Grimm Brothers’ Deutsches Wörterbuch.
Hintzsche transcribed the text painstakingly while supplying ample notes with explanations of outdated German words and expressions, corrections and translations of Russian words and phrases, translations of Latin and French words and phrases, geographic and historical explanations, and identification of people as well as a glossary of Russian terms. Wherever Hintzsche’s notes helped, we used them, citing them as WH, Anm. However, he did not edit the text to clarify the meaning. That has been left to us.
We have had two competing goals. We wanted to faithfully convey the meaning that Steller intended. At the same time, we wanted to produce a translation that would be read with pleasure, without the stumbling blocks of antiquated and bureaucratic language and a host of foreign words and expressions or explanatory notes. Our process of translating was often like walking a knife-edged ridge, trying, on the one side, not to fall into misrepresenting Steller with our coherent, flowing prose and, on the other, not to leave readers confused or bored. We have of course standardized the spelling and the punctuation and supplied helping verbs that Steller omitted as well as pronouns, articles, nouns, and occasionally phrases to avoid ambiguity. Some of his repetitions we have retained; some we have shortened. We have usually reversed illogical sequences, and we have tried to match his creative use of language or at least note it. We have opted, wherever possible, for words most likely used in Steller’s time, translating, for example, Branntwein consistently as brandy, while other translators or commentators use vodka or whiskey. To accurately reflect the range of Steller’s language use from high society to barnyard, we have translated terms not used in polite society accordingly. We have used contractions to reflect Steller’s informal language. We have retained the Russian terms for which there are no ready equivalents in English—for example, designations of officials and places—and kept the Russian for which Steller himself supplies the translation, correcting the spelling and transliterating it using the Modified Library of Congress system. We have taken the liberty of retaining the anglicized sluzhiv/sluzhivs, used also by Stejneger, in place of the Russian sluzhivii and sluzhivye liudi because Steller himself almost always Germanized the word; we consider servitor/s, the translation used by other translators and scholars, stilted and alien to contemporary American English.4 We retain the spellings of Russian words as found in American dictionaries (e.g., ukase and yurt) and of cities as found in standard American atlases (e.g., Yeniseysk and Yakutsk). We have also retained the old adjective ending -oi (e.g., boyarskoi and Olekminskoi) typically used in Steller’s time where today -ii is used. We italicize foreign words only the first time we use them. We have relied on Hintzsche’s notes and Jäger’s generous help in translating the Latin.
Language reflects society, and eighteenth-century Europe stood on ceremony; class distinctions and rank mattered greatly, but how much so was not immediately apparent to us. We were rather puzzled that Steller used two different words for Diener, servant, calling Herr Berckhan’s a Knecht, today strictly meaning a farm laborer. These two servants were obviously in identical positions, albeit serving different masters. Then, perusing volumes 1 and 3 of the Quellen, we discovered that in letters to personages of higher rank Steller himself signs off as “Ihr ergebener (your devoted) Knecht,” while the standard formula to a person of equal status used by him and by others is “Ihr ergebener Diener.” So it turned out to be a question of rank in the eye of the beholder—Steller outranked Berckhan; thus, his servant presumably outranked Berckhan’s. Another, rather amusing, example of the importance of rank is found in the sample ledger in appendix B. To our regret we did not find a better equivalent to Euer Wohlgeboren (literally, you, well-born person) geruhten zu nehmen (the servility of which made us both grin and cringe) than “you, sir, deigned to take.” The importance of class distinctions in czarist Russia is borne out by the bizarre practice of classifying documents according to who was addressing whom, a donoshenie being one from a lower- to a higher-ranked individual, a trebovanie the opposite (Glossar, Quellen 1:332), and a vedenie a rank-neutral official communication from an institution to another or to a person (Glossar, Quellen 5:420).
The most frustrating puzzles were posed by two presumably German words, one of which, Caper, meaning pirate, seemed to cast aspersions on one of Steller’s drivers, while the other, jutschen, seemed to be a nonexistent verb. Both words turned out to be disguised Russian, which we began to suspect on discovering that Steller occasionally confused letters in the Cyrillic and Roman alphabets. For example, he consistently misspelled Russian zimov’e (hut, way station) as Simobhio (our b being the Russian v). So, conjecturing that Caper’s C might be a Russian S, we found the Russian word sapër, meaning a sapper, a soldier in an engineering battalion, comparable to a Seabee in the US Navy. The verb jutschen, on the other hand, appears to be Steller’s germanization of Russian v’iuchit’, to load a horse.
The greatest translation challenge by far was the pre-Linnaean nomenclature for the 155 plants Steller mentions in his travel journal. Retired botanist Eckehart J. Jäger graciously took on the huge task of identifying these plants by their current scientific names. According to Jäger (email, March 10, 2015), Steller knew that many of the plants he found had not yet been described and were thus new to science. In fact, from his excursions around Halle and St. Petersburg, Steller could not have known about 85 percent of the plants growing between Lake Baikal and Kayak Island on the west coast of the Pacific. Since in 1740 scientific names for plants had not yet been standardized by Linnaeus’s Species Plantarum of 1753, Steller used working names that were useful for comparing with known Central European plants, often with short annotations of important characteristics. Steller did describe some of the plants he collected more extensively in his Catalogus plantarum, 1740 (Flora Ochotensis), but he often used different names from those in this travel journal. To give an idea of the huge amount of work that went into tracking down the present-day identity of these plants, our bibliography includes a separate list of references that Jäger used. Even though Steller was to investigate and describe everything concerning natural history (Instruction 1), botany was his first love, and he happily took every chance to go botanizing, whether up on a mountain or across a river filled with chunks of ice. He was particularly fond of gentians, saxifrages, louseworts, buttercups, and primroses, which he often described as pulchra (Latin [L], beautiful) or even as perpulchra (L, exceedingly beautiful), sometimes even recommending them as ornamentals (Jäger).
As Steller described the various rivers, he listed the fish found in them as well as in Lake Baikal. He seemed most interested in the subsistence and commercial value of these fish. We lacked the help from a fisheries expert in identifying each of the twenty-eight fish Steller mentioned, though he often used Russian names, some of which were close enough to the modern Russian that we could eventually find the scientific name. The species of salmon were the easiest, the whitefish the toughest to figure out. Steller offered one amusing though erroneous theory that the rigidity of the Eurasian ruffe’s dorsal fin kept it from swimming upriver against the current. Like the plants, Steller described the fish in Latin.
In the journal, Steller mentions fewer than twenty birds, sometimes with the German names, more often with a sketchy description. Luckily, a well-known Anchorage ornithologist, the late Heinrich Springer, could identify them for us or come up with a best guess. In the letter to Schumacher (December 24, 1739, Quellen 3:41; see appendix C) requesting birdshot, Steller gives a plausible explanation for the misleading low count. Having only small bullets, which tear small birds apart, he could stuff just one in twenty of the some three hundred birds he had examined and described to that point. Since he wrote this before he even left Irkutsk, it is safe to assume that he encountered and identified more birds than he recorded. Touchingly, however, when Steller reported that Berckhan had shot a young loon, he also commented that they “were surprised to hear the mother lament her young with the most pitiful cries” (chap. 14, July 13).
Quotes from the letters and documents Steller wrote and received during 1739 and 1740 are our translations, too. Dates throughout all the volumes of Quellen refer to the Julian calendar then in use in Russia (Hintzsche, pers. comm., January 2018). To convert to the Gregorian, eleven days should be added (Hintzsche, Quellen 4.2:823). Because the headings Steller applied to sections in the journal often seemed arbitrary, likely identifying notebooks used rather than sections traveled, we have replaced those with headings identifying segments of the journey. Where appropriate, we have supplied what information was available in Hintzsche’s Personenregister (Quellen 2:490–507) to persons mentioned in the text. On pages—for example, in chapter 14—where the manuscript contained so many lacunae that the integrity of the text was questionable, we have retained Hintzsche’s markings of [. . . .], noting other smaller omissions individually.
Notes
1. Contract workers drawn largely from the serf and townsman class who fished and hunted for furs in Siberia and later in Russian America.
2. L. Stejneger, Georg Wilhelm Steller: The Pioneer of Alaskan Natural History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1936), 135.
3. “Pressure of duties does not permit me to spend too much time in perfecting [my papers]. . . . I therefore set out my porridge in carefully made earthen vessels. If the vessel is an offense to anyone, he will perform for me and others a most friendly service if he will pour it all into a gold or silver urn.” Quoted in D. Littlepage, Steller’s Island: Adventures of a Pioneer Naturalist in Alaska (The Mountaineer’s Books, 2006), 203.
4. Sluzhiv, from the verb sluzhit’, to serve. A general term applied to state employees in both civil and military service, mostly peasants and posadskie but also including Cossacks and streltsy, who were sent to Siberia to protect Russia’s vital interests. Hintzsche, Glossar, Quellen 1:331–32; Dmytryshyn in A. Wood, ed., The History of Siberia (New York: Routledge, Chapman & Hall, 1991), 22; L. Kokaurov, pers. comm., November 2017.
