“The Electric Church” in Russia

A long time ago, (July 2007, in fact) I mentioned that we’d sold Russian rights for The Electric Church. I had a lot of contact with the translator hired for the job, who is very smart and funny. She asked me lots of questions trying to pin down the right coloring for slang and technology, and I really enjoyed our email exchanges.

She recently emailed me with the good news that the book is out: “Good news! The Electric Church has been officially published in Russia. I found the info with the cover in the publisher’s catalogue . . . For some reason, the publishing house added another title to the book. It goes like this: “To kill an Immortal, or the Electric Church“. I have no idea why, but this is none of my doing :)”

She’s promised to keep me updated on Russian reviews, which is awfully nice of her. Her Translator School’s web site with the book info posted is here, though it’s in Russian. She also kindly provided to me her commentary posted on the site about her experience translating the book, which is fascinating:

A Translator’s Commentary to The Electric Church by Jeff Somers

By Katherine Martinkevich, the Russian translator of the book

From Jeff Somers’ blog:
My publisher has just informed me that we’ve sold Italian rights to The Electric Church. We sold Russian rights some time ago, so my Reign of Terror marches on, unopposed. These translations should be easy, as all you have to do is come up with the Italian or Russian equivalents of about 10 expletives and you’re about 50% done.

Most people would agree that a literary translator is entitled to a mistake or two once in a while, what with artistic licence and all that. There is, however, a mistake most terrible of them all: failing to give the book the benefit of the doubt, when it does not seem very appealing at first.
I very nearly committed this terrible sin when I started translating The Electric Church, a debut novel from Jeff Somers, an American writer. It seemed a rather run-of-the-mill cyberpunk-ish thriller, but one should never jump to conclusions.

As soon as I started working, I was amazed at how compact and solid each chapter is. They are like small scenes within a large plot arc, with their own beginning and end (the latter usually happens at the most exciting moment). As I found out, at some time the writer had been planning to publish the book in the form of a weekly subscription. That’s why the chapters are so structured, and some key facts are repeated throughout the book. I would not advise to take weeks to read TEC, though. The action is so dynamic and the plot is so exciting that you will swallow the chapters like peanuts.

The book is set in the gloomy dystopian System, which is our planet after the Unification. There are no borders between states, and the world is ruled by a vicious version of police, the System Security Force. To survive in this world, you have to be either very rich, or work in the SSF, or be a criminal. The protagonist, Avery Cates, belongs to the criminal world. The reader observes the events through his eyes, so Jeff Somers was even closer to the truth than he probably thought (see the epigraph): it was very important to keep the gritty and aggressive feel intact in the translation. Well, Russian expletives are much stronger than the few measly English f-words, and you can see how the inner world of the character shines in the translation 🙂 (I have to add that Cates is an intelligent killer with some education, which made the use of most taboo words and criminal jargon unnecessary).

Some characters have even more pronounced speech peculiarities. A German accent or a lisp are rather easy to translate, whereas Cockney rhyming slang was an interesting challenge.

To describe his unique imaginary world, the author used a whole system of unusual words and neologisms. There are coinages (ObFu), combinations with contemporary slang (System Pigs), original metaphors (King Worm, Pusher, Safe Room) and even some Irish borrowings (Dúnmharú, Saoirse).

You will see a mysterious set of numbers in the beginning of each chapter, resembling pieces of binary code. This is just one of the “easter eggs” in the book. To avoid spoilers, I will only hint that each piece of code stands for a letter of the English – now, Russian — alphabet. Of course, I have to thank Jeff personally for sharing this information. Moreover, only the letters from this kind-hearted and patient man have helped me to find out what the scavenged cups look like, how exactly the hovers move and if Jeff actually knows that he filched the phrase “Gweat and Tewwible” from Stephen King(1).

These were just some of the many delights of this job. What the future Russian readers will enjoy – the contradictory nature of the main character, the macabre cyborg Monks, the streetfights, the political intrigues or something totally different – only time will show.

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(1) Oh, I know where I steal everything from, trust me. Wait, is this thing on?