How Soviet children’s literature translated into Hindi enriched Indian childhoods

This blooming era of children’s literature in the former USSR enjoyed strong state backing and, at least at first, it attracted avant-garde artists, writers and poets interested in experimenting and playing with the form. Ainsley Morse, a literary translator and Russian literature scholar, writes about this “golden age” of Soviet children’s literature: “In hindsight, it’s hard to observe this optimistic scene without wincing: all of these artists and writers getting cozy with the state machine that would shortly bring about their mental and physical destruction: imprisonment, exile, starvation, and suicide.”

Tales less ordinary

Despite the eventual and inevitable shattering of a utopia, this period of Soviet children’s literature is replete with innumerable examples of playfulness and subversion, both in content and form. There are many that I remember: Tolstoy’s stories for children The Ant and the Pigeon and Ukrainian Folk Tales; Vladimir Mayakovsky’s long poem, Whom Shall I Be?, first published, with illustrations by Nisson Shifrin, in 1932, two years after the poet’s death; and The Fire Horse, a collection of children’s poems by poets like Mayakovsky, Osip Mandelstam, and Daniil Kharms.

There is one that stands out in my memory, though. Nikolai Nosov’s The Adventures of Neznaika, first published in 1936, follows the escapades of Neznaika, a curious and adventurous character who embarks on a journey filled with humour, challenges, and life lessons. Originally published as three fairy tale novels, The Adventures of Dunno and his Friends (1954), Dunno in Sun City (1958), and Dunno on the Moon (1965), separate chapters of the books was published by Raduga as individual books — each about 20 pages, with their characteristic typography and brilliantly innovative illustrations by Boris Kalushin. However, the character of Neznaika and his world seems to have been inspired by the illustrations of the Canadian artist Palmer Cox. The books were translated into Hindi as Najanu Ki Kahaniyan by many translators like Saraswati Haider, Achala Jain, and Sangamlal Malviya.

These novels depict the lives and adventures of little childlike people living in the magical “Flower Town”, where there are girl and boy mites but they don’t want to be friends with each other. In this fairy town, the inhabitants don’t possess any magical powers as such and the fruits and vegetables grow in their regular size forcing them to come up with ingenious methods to harvest them. The characters are named after their own characteristics and the stories primarily focus on the tales of Neznaika, translated into Hindi as “Najanu” or the one who doesn’t know. The lovable Neznaika, recognisable by his bright blue hat, yellow trousers, green tie and fondness for bold colours, has a nemesis named Znayka (“I know” in the Russian), a boy-scientist who knows everything.

Another book that I distinctly remember is The Golden Key or The Adventures of Buratino (translated into Hindi as Sone Ki Chabhi: Qissa Buratino Ka by Sangamlal Malviya) by the well-known Russian writer Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy. At the beginning of the book, he addresses his young readers and tells them that as a child he had read the story of Pinocchio, a story about a wooden puppet. He continues, “In the Italian language, a puppet is called Buratino. I would often recount the interesting tales of Buratino to my friends. The book had been lost, so sometimes while recounting the adventures of Buratino, I would make up tales that never existed in the book. Now, after many years, I remembered Buratino again and decided to tell his extraordinary tale to you.”

A richly interwoven world

The Scarlet Flower, translated into Hindi by Yogendra Nagpal as Laal Phool, is a Russian fairy tale written by Sergey Aksakov. It is a retelling of the plot of the fairy tale Beauty and the Beast. In a letter, Aksakov wrote: “I am writing a story which in my childhood I knew by heart.” Even the famous novelist Leo Tolstoy, known for books like War and Peace and Anna Karenina, wrote a retelling of the fairytale Goldilocks and the three bears, translated by Madanlal Madhu into Hindi as Teen Bhaloo. In Tolstoy’s retelling, magnificently illustrated by the Russian artist Yurii Vasnetsov, the young girl remains unnamed. It is perhaps not possible to describe the richness and depth of the world when accessed through a profane mélange of cultures and universes where fairy tales and stories from all parts of the world were retold in Russian, splendidly illustrated by artists, and then translated into Hindi, to be read in a small city in India.

There are many other examples from that era that erase the boundaries between translation, retelling, and transcreation. The first Russian translation of Alice in Wonderland was published by the Moscow publishing house, Mamonov, in 1879. The anonymous translator retold and rewrote the story to suit the Russian imagination, which was renamed Sonja in a Kingdom of Wonder. In 1923, Nabokov published his own Russian translation of the story, Anya in Wonderland.

These experiments and transgressions in translation were not unusual for its time. The ideas of copyright and the complicated question of authenticity, which we hold so dear today, only became mainstream with the growing dominance of market forces and the idea of private property in literature and the arts.

In these times, marred by so many forces out of our control, it is indeed a welcome change that translators are given their due importance and difficult questions about authenticity are being asked, particularly in the context of academia and scholarship. However, one must also simultaneously remember the richly interwoven world that we could access precisely because certain transgressions were made, because someone wasn’t authentic enough.