Литература народов стран зарубежья | Филологический аспект №10 (126) Октябрь 2025

Случай в истории советского литературного перевода: «Осень патриарха» Габриэля Гарсиа Маркеса в переводе Карлоса Шермана и Валентина Тараса

Синицына Дарья Игоревна
канд. филол. наук, старший преподаватель кафедры романской филологии, Санкт-Петербургский государственный университет, РФ, г. Санкт-Петербург

Аннотация: В статье анализируется перевод романа Г. Гарсиа Маркеса «Осень патриарха», выполненный в 1977 году белорусскими советскими литераторами Карлосом Шерманом и Валентином Тарасом. Актуальность исследования обусловлена продолжающимся развитием традиций советской переводческой школы в современной российской практике художественного перевода, а также появлением новых переводов литературных произведений первого ряда, в частности, латиноамериканской литературы. Советский перевод «Осени патриарха», одного из наиболее значительных испаноязычных романов ХХ века, ранее не подвергался анализу, что определяет новизну проведенного исследования в ряду как отечественных, так и зарубежных трудов схожей проблематики. В работе сопоставляются синтаксические особенности оригинала и перевода, делаются наблюдения над некоторыми тенденциями в переводческих решениях, касающихся лексики, рассматривается влияние цензуры.
Ключевые слова: художественный перевод, латиноамериканская литература, синтаксис, национальные варианты испанского языка, советская школа художественного перевода.

Sinitsyna Daria Igorevna
PhD in Philology, assistant professor of the Romance Philology department, St. Petersburg State University, Russia, St. Petersburg, d.sinitsyna@spbu.ru

Abstract: This article analyzes the 1977 translation of García Márquez's novel "Autumn of the Patriarch" by the Belarusian Soviet writers Carlos Sherman and Valentin Taras. The relevance of this study stems from the ongoing development of the traditions of the Soviet translation school in contemporary Russian literary translation practice, as well as the emergence of new translations of leading literary works, particularly Latin American literature. The Soviet translation of "Autumn of the Patriarch," one of the most significant Spanish-language novels of the 20th century, has not been analyzed before, making this study unique among both Russian and foreign works on similar topics. The paper compares the syntactic features of the original and the translated text, observes certain trends in translation decisions regarding vocabulary, and examines the influence of censorship.
Keywords: literary translation, Latin American literature, syntax, regional varieties of Spanish, Soviet school of literary translation.

Gabriel García Márquez´s “The Autumn of the Patriarch”, is one of the writer’s  two big novels which happened to be translated into Russian during the Soviet era. Its translation is in many ways unique and deserves special attention. Just as “One Hundred Years of Solitude” that was first published in Russian in 1970 translated by Valeriy Stolbov and Nina Butyrina, «Осень патриарха» (“The Autumn of the Patriarch”) is a collective work by two professionals: Carlos Sherman (1934 – 2005) and Valentin Taras (1930 – 2009), both prominent figures in the literary life of the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic.

The fact of the “peripheral” translation first published not in Moscow or Leningrad but in Minsk, in the Byelorussian Writers´ Union literary magazine “Neman” (1977, №№ 5 – 7) is curious from the point of view of the external history of the Soviet literary translation school but also from the linguistic one. As well as the translators´ team: one of them, Carlos Sherman, was a native Spanish speaker (although raised in Argentina and, therefore, not so familiar to García Márquez´s Caribbean-Colombian Spanish) and actually didn´t speak Russian or Byelorussian until he moved to the USSR aged 22, and the other one, Valentin Taras, didn’t speak Spanish, but was a professional poet. From a short description of their way of work in an interview we can deduce that his main function was to infuse rhythmical structure to the narrative text, as rhythm constitutes the core of the poetics of this novel: "One day […] I came to Carlos and said, 'Take the novel, I'll take an extra cigarette, sit in the chair, and you read to me in Spanish.' Sherman read for probably an hour. I jotted down my impressions in gibberish, because the rhythm of 'The Autumn of the Patriarch' is like a vast free verse. And when I grasped its rhythm, its lilts and transitions, when I felt the inner sound of the phrase, which sometimes crawled, sometimes suddenly jumped, sometimes contracted, sometimes exploded, only then was I able to translate it" [5].

Within the scope of this article we will focus on the text of Sherman´s and Taras´s version of the novel, leaving, at the moment, aside the possible reasons and motives of choosing a way to solve a concrete translation problem in each case. The Russian text we use is the first book edition of “The Autumn of the Patriarch” published a year after the magazine one, in 1978, already in Moscow, by “Khudozhestvennaia literatura”, with 50 000 copies [4]. This circulation shouldn’t surprise us, considering the popularity of the Latin American fiction in the USSR after “One Hundred Years of Solitude” huge effect. As Michael Lavery points out, “By 1980, the Latin American editorial board at the central publishing house Khudozhestvennaia literatura had published over 130 books over twenty years, amounting to around 14 million copies” [3, p.19].

This edition includes a prologue by the important Soviet and Russian researcher of García Márquez´s work Valeriy Zemskov named “A Novel about the End of Prehistory” («Роман о конце предыстории») which analyzes the poetics and the ideas of  “The Autumn of the Patriarch” and, interestingly, gives the reader a hint about one the main characteristics of Sherman´s and Taras´s translation: «Теперь-то мы понимаем, насколько оправдана форма повествования (в оригинале поток речи с минимальным использованием разбивок и знаков препинания)…» (“Now we understand how justified the narrative form is (in the original, a stream of speech with minimal use of breaks and punctuation marks)...”) [1, p. 16].

Indeed, as it is well known, the original text of “The Autumn of the Patriarch” consists of only 100 sentences and is completely devoid of quotation marks, question marks, exclamation marks, ellipses, colons, and semicolons. All of these are widely present in the translation, making the syntax more “readable”. For instance, the fragment which in Spanish looks like silencio, el general está tirando [6, p.15] in Russian is ornamented like: «Тсс!.. не дышите!.. тихо!.. генерал занимается любовью!..» [4, p. 32].

The translation reduces considerably the polyphony of the original text constantly solving the problem which the Spanish-speaking reader has to solve him or herself during the whole reading process: who is actually speaking? In a series of cases this is a question of deixis: where in Spanish we observe a laconic él or a complete lack of a substantive or pronoun referring to the subject, in Russian we will find a reference, in most cases, «генерал». In other cases, the decoding of the game of points of view takes place.

This decoding might be accomplished by the use of subordinate clauses instead of free indirect speech, a technic constantly used by García Márquez: ordenaba que me quiten esta puerta de aquí y me la pongan allá, la quitaban, que me la vuelvan a poner, la ponían [6, p. 15] / «… приказывал, чтобы сняли и перенесли в другое место дверь, что исполнялось без промедления, хотя он тут же распоряжался, чтобы ее вернули туда, где она была…» [4, p. 31]. Another way of syntactic transformation for decoding’s sake is a simple change of the person and the tense of the verb: le concedió lo que más quiero en este mundo que era casarse con un hombre de mar [6, p. 44] / «… выдал ее замуж за моряка, чем осуществил самую ее сокровенную мечту…» [4, p. 56]. Finally, the third way of decoding is using the already mentioned quotation marks, non-existent in the original text, and introducing connecting phrases of the type “Someone explained to him” instead of forms of address like mi general:  carajo, qué gente tan rara, exclamó, parecen poetas, pero no lo eran, mi general, son los godos en el poder [6, p. 118] / «… «Черт подери, что за чудные люди здесь живут, поэты, что ли?» Но кто-то подсказал ему: «Ничего подобного, мой генерал, никакие это не поэты, это годо, они в этой стране правят»…» [4, p. 119].

Thus, the clue difference between the original text and the translation by Carlos Sherman and Valentin Taras is the syntactic one. The interesting point is the changes introduced into the syntax don´t affect radically the rhythm of the narrative. If we read aloud the Spanish and the Russian text, we will notice the similarity of the poetical structure. Sometimes, actually, the translation is more unconventional than the original in its syntax. For example, the fragment where the character’s speech is described like “muttering continuously as if he were praying” (murmurando sin pausas como si estuviera rezando) lacks commas, present in Spanish: ya está, compadre, ya está, se acabó la vaina, de ahora en adelante voy a mandar yo solo sin perros que me ladren, será cuestión de ver mañana temprano qué es lo que sirve y lo que no sirve de todo este desmadre y si acaso falta en qué sentarse se compran para mientras tanto seis taburetes de cuero de los más baratos, se compran unas esteras de petate y se ponen por aquí y por allá para tapar lo huecos, se compran dos o tres corotos más y ya está, ni platos ni cucharas ni nada, todo eso me lo traigo de lo cuarteles porque ya no voy a tener más gente de tropa, ni oficiales, qué carajo [6, p. 41] / «Все дружище все кончено отныне командовать стану только я ни одна собака не будет больше командовать ни одна собака завтра утром посмотрим что здесь уцелело после этой бучи ежели не на чем сидеть купим парочку самых дешевых табуреток купим несколько циновок чтобы завесить дыры купим еще кое-что и хватит посуду покупать не будем ни тарелок ни ложек все это мы возьмем в казармах солдатню я больше содержать не буду ни солдатню ни офицеров пошли они все в задницу…» [4, p. 53].

As for the vocabulary, Sherman´s and Taras´s translation reveals a great number of particularities which can be analyzed within the classical Venuti’s concepts of domestication and foreignization. However, this is a topic for a separate research, which might require a contextualization inside the corpus of Latin American fiction translated into Russian in the Soviet Union. Here, we would like to point out only two peculiarities.

The first one is the occasional use of the Byelorussian nouns and adjectives instead of the Russian equivalents, a fact that can be explained by the translators´ background (including Sherman´s, who widely translated from Byelorussian into Spanish and vice versa, and wrote in Byelorussian as well). These are such words as «задышка» for «одышка» (gasping) [4, p. 32], «питво» for «питье» in three occasions (drink) [4, pp. 75, 77, 245], «цыцастая» for «сисястая» (big-breasted) [4, p. 92] «выбрыки» for «выходки» (shenanigans) [4, p. 186].

The second one is a mistranslation due to the variety of Spanish. We detected only one case like this: the noun corpiño, translated as «лифчик» [4, p. 127]. The problem is corpiño only means “bra” in the Uruguayan, Paraguayan and Argentinian Spanish (which is to say, in Carlos Sherman’s mother tongue variant of Spanish) meanwhile in the Colombian and Mexican Spanish (this latter might have influenced García Márquez, who lived for long in Mexico City) it means “corset”. A similar case is the mistranslation of butifarra in the Soviet version of Mario Vargas Llosa´s “The Time of the Hero” (La ciudad y los perros) made by Natalia Trauberg and Dionisio García in 1965: the Peruvian meaning (sandwich) is confused with the Iberian one (type of sausage).

Finally, the question that can´t be failed to mention in an analysis of a book translated into Russian in the USSR is the censorship. As in other cases, it is practically impossible to know whether the translators or the editors insisted on moving out or changing some elements. However, the censorship in the Soviet version of “The Autumn of the Patriarch” is minimal, especially if we compare it to the mentioned novel by Mario Vargas Llosa, where whole chapters were taken out not to consider smaller parts [2, pp. 105-112]. There are three cases of explicit sex scenes (the shameful deed of el comandante Narciso López and the main character’s predilection for minor girls) and, which are, nevertheless, not omitted completely, just softened. The most curious censorship lacuna is the disappearing of one particular spy from the long list of main character’s spies all over the world: … los novios casuales de las sirvientas, las putas de los trasatlánticos y los bares internacionales, los promotores de las excursiones turísticas a los paraísos del Caribe en las agencias de viajes de Miami, el secretario privado del minstro de asuntos exteriores de Bélgica, la cuidanta vitalicia del corredor tenebroso de cuarto piso del Hotel Internacional de Moscú, y tanto otros que nadie sabe hasta en el último rincón de la tierra...[6, p. 256] / «… случайные женихи горничных и проституток на океанских лайнерах и в международных барах, они, сотрудники американских туристических агентств, организующие экскурсии в карибский рай, и личный секретарь министра иностранных дел Бельгии, и многие, многие другие, о которых никто не имеет даже представления…» [4, p. 236]. “The lifelong caretaker of the dark hallway on the fourth floor of the International Hotel in Moscow”, being a Soviet woman, apparently, couldn’t be listed among the capitalism agents.

The conclusion of this first approach to the Russian Soviet translation of one of the most relevant “dictator novels” in the world literature is that the main modifications in this case were made on syntactic level relieving the reader’s effort to penetrate into the author’s dense poetics but conserving the rhythmical schemes. The lexical level reveals the importance of the translators´ background and can be studied further within the anthropocentric paradigm. The extralinguistic factor that can’t be ignored is the censorship whose influence in the case of “The Autumn of the Patriarch” is not particularly significant but symptomatic. Further studies of the vocabulary and translators’ foot notes and inside-the-text notes are still to be realized.

1. Земсков В. Роман о конце предыстории // Гарсиа Маркес Г. Осень патриарха. М.: Художественная литература, 1978. С. 5-22.
2. Aguirre C., Buynova K. Cinco días en Moscú. Mario Vargas Llosa y el socialismo soviético (1968). Trujillo, Reino de Almagro, 2024. – 190 p.
3. Lavery M. Soviet Translation of Latin American Literature, 1956–1991. A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Slavic Languages and Literatures. Los Angeles, UCLA, 2021. – 221 p.

List of Sources
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