Читать книгу The Golden Calf - Илья Ильф - Страница 5

The Golden Calf was written in 1929-1931 and first serialized in a popular magazine in 1931. It is generally considered a sequel to the authors’ earlier work, The Twelve Chairs (1928), although the two novels share only the chief protagonist, Ostap Bender. He was killed at the end of the first novel (see “From the Authors”) but resurrected in The Golden Calf. The events of the first novel are mentioned in The Golden Calf only in passing (in Chapters 12 and 30).

This is the third translation of the novel into English. The first one, by Charles Malamuth, was published under the title The Little Golden Calf in 1932; the second, by John H. C. Richardson, in 1962. Some say foreign classics need to be translated anew for every new generation of readers. Either way, both previous translations omitted whole passages from the standard Soviet text, for reasons that we can only speculate about. All these gaps have been restored in this translation; we did not leave out a single paragraph.

In full agreement with our editors, we approached the novel as a work of literature first and foremost, and aimed the translation at a broad English-speaking audience. Thus a few of the more obscure Soviet realia and personalities were simplified or partially deciphered in the text, in order to give the reader at least some frame of reference. There also are a few explanatory notes at the end of the book.

A word about the Ilf-Petrovian character names. Some are simply regular Russian names, others are tongue-in-cheek puns, still others are hilarious word games. Most are untranslatable without rendering them artificial and unwieldy, so we did what we could, leaving most of them alone.

We are grateful to all those who published extensive commentaries to the novel (Alexandra Ilf, A. Wentzel, Ye. Sakharova), but especially to Professor Yuri Shcheglov, whose monumental work (Vienna, 1991 and Moscow, 1995) proved invaluable.

—Konstantin Gurevich & Helen Anderson