Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty.

I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Sholem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

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Today is November 6th, 2024, and my guest is author, poet, and translator Robert Chandler.

Our topic for today is the art of translation, and in particular, his translations of the work of

Vassili Grossman. This is a follow-up to our recent conversation with Tyler Cowan on Grossman's masterpiece, Life and Fate.

Robert, welcome to Econ Talk.

Hello, glad to be speaking to you.

I want to start with just the logistics of a project like translating a nearly 900-page book, and you've done it twice for Grossman, both his work, Stalingrad,

and Life and Fate. How do you prepare for a project like that? What research do you do,

if any, how do you execute that enormous challenge? There's no general answer.

I suppose really is just to step at a time.

I had, it's perhaps easier to talk about Stalingrad because that's more recent and it was also more complex.

I had very little idea what was involved to begin with.

I had read, I'd read in several places that there were nine different complete versions of the novel in the archives in Moscow.

And when someone, when the historian, Jochen Helbeck had encouraged me to go to the, to use the archival version, I just thought that was a

non-starter because, you know, I was not going to be able, not going to be living long enough to

collate nine different versions of a long novel. So I expected to be staying with a version that

was finally printed.

...