Chapter 1 of Andrey Filimonov's Manikin and the Saints (Головастик и святые) is out now in B O D Y!

A huge thank-you to Michael Stein and Joshua Mensch for publishing Chapter One of Andrey Filimonov’s book Manikin and the Saints («Головастик и святые») in B O D Y Magazine!

Read it here.

As a translator, I rub my hands together gleefully whenever I sit down to work on Andrey Filimonov’s work. His language is compact and earthy, rich in puns and in local or dialect words with Slavic roots that send me down the research rabbit hole time and again. This first chapter is different from the rest of the book in that it’s a legend about the colonization of Siberia (the rest of the book is contemporary). To render it, not only did I need to track down Polish words, local ethnonyms, and words from medieval chronicles, I also worked to recreate its laconic, vivid style that, to my ear, gestures both to indigenous oral tradition and to a Russian pensioner telling stories at the dacha.

A note on the book’s title: the main character’s name is Головастик, which means “tadpole.” The word головастик does not, however, mean “manikin.” What gives?

My rendering of the nickname comes from the pun in Chapter 6 of the book in a scene giving our hero’s origin story. It’s a scene where Manikin and his wife have been demoted to the boonies, as a punishment; knowing the local villagers will automatically be suspicious of him as a representative of the powerful metropolis, he defuses the situation with a joke.

Как сошли мы с Кочерыжкой на берег, мужики сразу встретили коварным вопросом:

— Ну что, глава, причапал?

Почтительно сняв кепку, отвечал:

— Глава в городе, а я так — Головастик.

Им понравилось.

As soon as Cabbage Core and me stepped on shore, the menfolk pounced with this cunning question:

“So then, big man, you landed?”

I doffed my cap respectfully and said:

“The big man’s in the city. Me, I’m just a manikin.”

They liked that.