Saturday, July 09, 2005
Untranslatable “You” in Chekhov
Tom J. Lewis in the journal Babel:
In what follows I will examine one such instance of untranslatability — that of Russian second-person pronouns into English in the English versions of one of Anton Chekhov’s best known and most accomplished short stories, “Lady with Lapdog.” ... Russian second-person pronouns cannot be translated into English. Th e answer to this is fairly simple: Whereas in English there is only one second-person pronoun — you — in Russian there are two: ty and vy. ...
The import of this one word, ty — one of the most common in the Russian language — which is used only once by Anna in the entire course of the story, is a mark of Chekhov’s supreme mastery of his art. ...
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