Ethiopia:

A Handbook of the Socialist Movement: Gorky’s Mother
in Ethiopia1

Nikolay Steblin-Kamensky

Introduction

From 1961 to 1991, the Ethiopian book market experienced a significant flow of literature in both English and Amharic which had been published in, and imported from, the USSR. In these three decades, more than 350 titles were translated into Amharic: the total number of copies printed exceeded four million. Books were translated both directly from Russian and through the medium of English; curiously, the role of the latter was never acknowledged in those Soviet publications. Because of this circumstance, I choose to call this phenomenon the Soviet project of translations into Amharic without specifying the source language. The reference to the USSR also rightly frames it as a part of that state’s soft-power operation, which Susanna Witt calls “the largest more or less coherent project of translation the world has seen to date—largest in terms of geographical range, number of languages (and directions) involved and time span; coherent in the sense of ideological framework (given its fluctuations over time) and centralized planning”.2

Most Soviet Amharic publications were from Progress Publishers, established in 1963 to succeed the Foreign Languages Publishing House. Officially tasked with publishing classics of Marxism-Leninism, including textbooks and fiction; statutes of the Communist Party; and speeches by high officials, it was probably the least autonomous of all Soviet state-reliant publishing institutions. It might appear that this translation project’s statist and pragmatic nature makes it less interesting for a scholarly inquiry. Yet, following Pierre Bourdieu, we can challenge the idea of the literary field as independent from the social world. Progress Publishers was certainly the opposite of a purely aesthetic operation. The state selected books for translation, instructed, paid, and supervised translators, then printed and distributed Progress publications. This highly controlled situation might seem to augur limited success, if not failure, for the Soviet translation project. My own interest in Progress emerged from one simple question: how could a state-run enterprise with open political bias spark such excitement and creativity and leave an enduring legacy? Thus, my research will attempt to assess the Soviet project of translations into Amharic in light of its egalitarian appeal and its pragmatic agenda.

This chapter utilises two consecutive strategies to examine this project and its reception in Ethiopia. The first outlines the history of the Soviet-Ethiopian relationship, placing the translations in that context. My point here is to show that the selection of titles and number of publications corresponded smoothly to political circumstances. My statistics come from the Annals of Books (Knizhnaia letopis’, since 1906)—a monthly Russophone bibliographical index. Due to the centralised nature of the Soviet publishing industry, it is likely that every translation was registered in the index, but we should keep in mind that some translations were carried out independently in Ethiopia. The Annals of Books record typical bibliographical information, including the number of copies published. In rare cases, it also identified translators.3

My second strategy is a detailed case study of Maksim Gorky’s Mother (Mat’, 1906), based on my readings of translations and on personal interviews with its readers. A closer look at Mother’s Amharic translations and Ethiopian reception reveals that prominent translators succeeded in engaging with the text creatively despite the rigid rules set by Progress. My microhistorical, personality-focused perspective on the Progress translation project counters the view fostered by the Soviet state itself, namely, that it was the sole cause of the translations. As Anthony Pym argues, causation of translations is plural in its very nature and thus, as I will attempt in this essay, the limits of state control over translation projects must be examined.4 A few words by way of context about the position of the Amharic and English languages in Ethiopia: Amharic has been the dominant language of the Ethiopian ruling elites since at least the thirteenth century A.D., and early Amharic texts date back to the sixteenth century. But prior to the reign of Menelik II (1889–1913), its position as a written medium remained incidental, overshadowed by Ge’ez—the language of the Ethiopian Orthodox church taught by the clergy—which had a kind of diglossic relationship with Amharic.5 In the late nineteenth century, the need for modern education and literacy was recognised and Amharic developed into the national language of Ethiopia. Amharic was taught within the school curriculum and its role as a medium of education grew slowly from the first two grades (in the 1940s) to six grades (in the 1960s). As for the English language, it was established as the medium of secondary and higher education in 1941, and subsequently, many Anglophone teachers were invited to Ethiopia from India while the curriculum was shaped with the help of British advisors.

An Overview of Soviet Publications in Amharic: Ideological Intervention or Literary Aid?

Amharic literature is very young, although it constitutes one of the earliest literary spaces in African vernacular languages.6 The first Amharic novel, A Heart-Born Story (Lebb wallad tarik, 1908) by Afework Gebreyesus (1868–1947)⁷ was published in Rome in 1908, where a printing press with Ethiopic letters was already available (the first official Ethiopian printing house would be founded in 1917). It would take another twenty years before fiction became an established genre among educated Ethiopians.⁸ In Casanova’s ‘world republic of letters’, the Amharic literary space would certainly count as underdeveloped.9 Casanova shows how the French and German literary spaces initially accumulated their capital through extensive translation work, which required certain economic and social conditions. Should we therefore see the Soviet translation project as a genuine contribution to the Ethiopian literary space? And how did the Soviet government view its commitment?

Brian Baer suggests that the Soviet Union celebrated literary translation as a political vehicle serving internationalism and the “friendship of peoples”, constantly recreating the illusion of brotherhood among its republics and ethnicities.10 Katerina Clark similarly observed that ”the translation project was not only about Soviet aggrandizement or hegemonic aims but also about creating a common cultural universe of the like-minded, creating a common tradition that superseded the local”.¹¹ Another fact which hints at the non-intrusive nature of Progress is that the Ethiopian side actually asked for books. In 1946—two years after an official diplomatic relationship between Ethiopia and the USSR had been established—the Ethiopian Minister of Foreign Affairs entered into talks with a Soviet diplomat, expressing the former’s needs in aviation and education. Among other things—mostly technical assistance—he requested “Russian books” from VOKS.12 We do not know exactly what kind of books were sought, but it was most probably educational material.

The first period of the translation project, prioritising educational texts, lasted from 1961 to 1974, when the Emperor Haile Selassie I—a member of the Solomonic dynasty, which had ruled Ethiopia since at least the thirteenth century A.D.—was overthrown and a military junta known as the Derg took power. Under Haile Selassie I, Ethiopia had been a major ally of the USA in the Horn of Africa, providing a military base in the Red Sea, while the Emperor was a convinced anti-Communist. Despite significant progress in the Soviet-Ethiopian relationship, marked by Haile Selassie’s visit to the USSR in 1959, Moscow had to make large-scale efforts “to overcome Ethiopian animosity toward the Soviet system, to detach Ethiopia from the West and, if possible, to win ultimately its exclusive friendship”.13 A cultural agreement was signed in January 1961, which led to various cultural activities and scholarships for Ethiopian students. During this period, the Soviet Union could not distribute any explicit Socialist propaganda in Ethiopia. Therefore, Communist translation powers were channelled into the domain of Russian fiction and children’s books, but the print runs remained very low.

In this fourteen-year period, the print run for each book ranged from one to three thousand. Altogether, only 116,600 Amharic-language books were printed in the USSR, but they included canonical texts such as Dostoevsky’s Poor Folk (Bednye liudi, 1846) and White Nights (Belye nochi, 1848), Pushkin’s Dubrovsky (Dubrovskii, 1841) and The Belkin Tales (Povesti pokoinogo Ivana Petrovicha Belkina, 1831), Gogol’s ‘Taras Bulba’ (‘Taras Bul’ba’, 1835), Tolstoy’s ‘After the Ball’ (‘Posle bala’, written 1903), Chekhov’s ‘The Lady with the Dog’ (‘Dama s sobachkoi,’ 1899), Mikhail Sholokhov’s novella The Fate of a Man (Sud’ba cheloveka, 1956), and even science-fiction stories such as Aleksandr Beliaev’s ever-popular The Amphibian Man (Chelovek-amfibiia, 1928). Besides texts originally written in Russian, the Chukchi writer Iurii Rytkheu’s The Happiness of My People (Schast’e moego naroda, 1964), the Tuvan politician and writer Salchak Toka’s The Word Arata (Slovo Arata, 1951), three novels by the Kirghiz writer Chinghiz Aitmatov and various short stories by Georgian writers were also translated into Amharic. I suggest two reasons for selecting such non-ethnically Russian (but Russophone) authors. First, some Soviet republics were seen as showcases of Socialist development, and leaders of the Third World countries were regularly invited to observe the success of such non-Russian republics. Secondly, they demonstrated the inclusiveness of Soviet culture and stressed its egalitarian appeal. But in reality, Russian was the manifest centre of the Progress Amharic project. It was the only source language indicated on any of these titles (even if the original language of the text was not Russian). This reveals a hidden hegemonic ambition on the part of the state, for, as Johan Heilbron and Gisèle Sapiro argue, the number of books translated from any language indicates its relative power in the international literary field.14 Thus, Progress’s translations were also an investment in the symbolic capital of the Russian language.

While I have found little explicitly Socialist propaganda among those first Amharic translations (apart from an awkward children’s book about Lenin at a New Year party and some self-congratulatory books about Soviet public health care and education), the USSR was secretly promoting Socialism through the dissemination of Progress titles. Kebru Kefle—currently a bookshop owner in Addis Ababa—recalls how, in the 1960s, he bought boxes of cheap books from the Soviet Embassy to sell them secretly on the streets.15 These publications were known as ‘red books’ because of their red covers and they were in high demand among radical students. Ideological books were also secretly distributed by the Soviet Centre of Science and Culture, which encouraged its visitors to take books. Endalegeta Kabbada in his Ban (Ma’eqab, 2018) provides the following memory:

An individual who used to frequent the Center told me: ‘when we entered the Russian [i.e. Soviet] Centre to read fiction, they would encourage us to take a political book. When we were about to leave, an Ethiopian librarian would approach us, whispering a piece of advice: ‘Just take it and go, hide it behind your back’.¹⁶

The period from 1975 to 1978 might be considered transitional, since, despite the Ethiopian Revolution of 1974, the Soviet Union remained reluctant to welcome the Derg or accept its revolutionary credentials. Somalia was emerging as the Soviet Union’s major ally in the Horn of Africa.17 But growing interest in Ethiopian affairs was revealed by the rapid increase of Amharic literary production: these four years saw an equal number of new translations as in the previous fourteen years and a six-fold increase in the print run. Fiction remained a sizeable part of book production, with books by authors such as Dostoevsky, Aitmatov or even Beliaev reprinted in runs from ten to twenty thousand copies. Lermontov’s A Hero of our Time (Geroi nashego vremeni, 1840) and Gorky’s My Universities (Moi universitety, 1923) both appeared in Amharic at this time. The translation of ideological literature into Amharic began, mainly Vladimir Lenin’s writings; soon it would flood the Ethiopian book market.

The years from 1979 to the end of the project in 1991 were marked by a scarcity of fiction, which was dwarfed by ideological literature. Fifty-three titles by Lenin and twenty titles interpreting his writings were translated and printed in huge runs (the total amount of Lenin’s books alone was almost one million). A 1988 account of book publishing in Ethiopia, by a former director of the Addis Ababa University Library, noted with disapproval the ideological imbalance in translated literature available at this time. She stated that “the bookshops stock small quantities of cheap, well-produced translations into English of Russian and Soviet classics and into Amharic of Russian children’s literature”.18 By then Amharic translations of Russian fiction had almost ceased. Gorky’s Mother is one of the few exceptions during this period. Interestingly, the new ideology of perestroika and glasnost was also reflected in translations into Amharic, as Mikhail Gorbachev’s Perestroika: New Thinking for Our Country and the World (Perestroika novoe myshlenie dlia nashei strany i vsego mira, 1987)19 appeared besides a publication celebrating the millennium of the Russian Orthodox Church. ²⁰

Initiated by the Soviet state, the Progress translation project shared its fate. In March 1991, an ominously titled article, ‘Progress Publishing House: All [Staff] Dismissed and Lenin No Longer Printed’ appeared in the newspaper Kommersant.21 The financial manager of Progress, Aleksei Ershov, declared that this drastic new policy was primarily necessitated by the huge losses in publishing Soviet political literature for export. The post-Soviet government had refused to cover those expenses, forcing Progress to dismiss more than half of its employees. Its ambitious project to publish literature in forty-seven languages was no longer viable.

What made the Soviet project of Amharic translations unique was the literature translated during its earliest years. Unlike other Soviet translation projects in African languages (including Swahili, Hausa, and Somali) in Amharic, a wide selection of Russian classics was made available to the target readers. Although Hausa and Somali were quite insignificant branches of the translation industry, the number of titles translated into Swahili exceeded the number of translations into Amharic (but with smaller print runs). However, Progress translated no pre-revolutionary Russian fiction into Swahili apart from Pushkin’s Belkin Tales and some children’s stories by Lev Tolstoy. As we have seen above, considerably more pre-Soviet fiction appeared in Amharic. The Ethiopian case was different because it was not merely a function of the USSR’s foreign policy, but a product of the Soviet-Ethiopian relationship, where Ethiopia under Haile Selassie I managed to work with both superpowers and keep the Soviet friendship tamed.

The seemingly egalitarian nature of the Soviet translation project was also manifest in translations of Ethiopian literature from Amharic (sometimes via English) into Russian. But an overview of those translations discloses the hierarchical Soviet approach to such translations.22 Michael Volpe, a translator from Amharic into Russian himself, argues that Russian translators had to “improve” Amharic fiction, they had to be creative and “practically always Russian translations were shorter, more expressive and had more accentuated plots vis-à-vis their Amharic originals”.²³ Original titles were almost obsessively altered, for apparently no practical reason other than the explicit imposition of authority.²⁴ At the same time, translators into Amharic (most often recruited from Ethiopian students) worked in drastically different settings: they had to follow a rigid, literalist paradigm under the watchful eye of a Russian editor trained in Amharic. The very hierarchy between literalistic and assimilative modes shaped the assumed value of those translations. As Volpe puts it: “original Russian texts have been more or less diligently put into Amharic so as one could follow the plot and get a fairly clear idea about the content. At the same time more often than not the artistic impression, to my mind, is not high enough”.25 This attitude on the part of Progress is suggested by the fact that in the list of major translations into Amharic the names of translators were not even mentioned.26 Was it because, unlike assimilative translations into Russian, these literal versions were perceived as less deserving? In fact, the work carried out by Ethiopian translators was quite impressive. Not only did they translate prose fiction with little or no professional experience, the scarcity of materials and strictly imposed literal aesthetic must have posed a constant creative challenge.

Gorky’s Mother in Ethiopia

My outline of Soviet Amharic-language publishing policy has shown that it was less egalitarian than it wanted to appear. But whatever the general policy, there were many agents involved with their own interests, lending the project its multifaceted nature. To examine the identities of two of those agents, I shall move to my case study: Gorky’s novel Mother in Amharic translation.

Maksim Gorky (1868–1936) was a visionary of a renewed and united humankind; he was a leading advocate of the idea of World Literature. The history of Mother’s dissemination, as a novel written abroad and first published in English translation, exemplifies such literature.27 Although Gorky himself became disillusioned with Marxism, and Soviet literary policy failed to embody the utopian dreams of its founders, the egalitarian message of Mother persisted, shaping the novel’s reception around the world. After all, framed by Marxist class optics, it appealed to readers of all nations and ethnic backgrounds, especially those who felt unjustly oppressed. The first variant of the novel survives only in an anonymous translation (probably by the Russo-American translator and editor Thomas Seltzer), which was serially published in Appleton’s Magazine in the US in 1906 and reissued in book form in 1907.28 Most of the early translations in other languages were based on that version. Gorky revised Mother repeatedly; in 1922 it was published for the first time in the USSR, with stylistic and structural changes. In 1949, Margaret Wettlin (1907–2003)—a US-born teacher of English and translator who lived in the USSR from 1934 to 1980—translated this 1922 version, which became the standard version for translation and distribution abroad by Soviet publishers. It was thus in Wettlin’s translation that the novel was first introduced to Ethiopia in the 1960s.

By this time, most Ethiopian intellectuals had become discontented with the modernisation policy imposed by Haile Selassie’s government and with the USA as its major ally;29 such scepticism was expressed by Socialist rhetoric which targeted both the so-called out-dated monarchy and ‘American imperialism’. It is worth noting that leftist ideas entered Ethiopia not only from the East, but from the West as well, where many young African intellectuals were educated.30 Randi Balsvik argues that during the 1960s the Soviet Embassy actually did little to engage with Ethiopian students. Despite concerns among Western residents of Addis Ababa about the effect of Soviet propaganda upon university students through the Soviet reading room and information centre, the United States Information Agency (USIA)³¹ was much more popular.

Mother reached Ethiopia just as the country was seeking to define its own modernism, and thus establish its place among other ‘progressive’ nations. In other words, Socialism appeared the right strategy for maintaining national dignity under threat of ‘backwardness’, now dangerously associated with Ethiopia’s supposedly ‘feudal’ system of government. Thus, “after the upheavals on the West of the late 1960s virtually every Ethiopian took up Marxism”.32 In his eloquent description of the Ethiopian revolution, Donald Donham stresses the importance of previous revolutionary narratives, particularly for the instigators, to make their own revolution meaningful: “it sometimes seems that the ancestral spirits of other great upheavals—from Marx to Lenin to Mao—presided over Ethiopian events like Greek gods”.33 Mother, with its realist appeal stressed by the paratext which introduced Pavel Vlasov’s prototype,34 was a perfect text for adapting the Soviet revolutionary narrative to the Ethiopian uprising.

Indeed, if Gorky had hoped to establish a new kind of literature (one that might even substitute for the Bible), Mother’s Ethiopian reception probably came close to obtaining that status. In her autobiography, Hiwot Teffera—then a radical student, later a member of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Party—recalls: “Maksim Gorky’s Mother was actually the one that gave me an idea of what I would be doing in the underground organization. Pavel Vlasov became a model revolutionary to me. More than anything else, I was inspired and moved by the story of his mother”.35 In an interview with me, she specified that the novel “was a handbook for those who were involved in the socialist movement”. In her opinion, the book was seminal for inspiring revolutionary zeal among the young generation in Ethiopia of the 1970s.36

The playwright and scholar Aboneh Ashagre (born in 1951) recalls that he, too, read Mother in English in 1969. The book was recommended to him by a “radical friend”; almost all young people of his circle read the novel at that time. Interest in Gorky’s novel inspired him to explore other works by Russian writers.37 Similarly, the journalist Meaza Birru (born in 1958) in an interview with the writer Endalegeta Kebbede recalled that, for her generation, Mother was an inspiration to serve others and help the oppressed.38 These testimonies serve to hint at the novel’s enthusiastic reception in Ethiopia.

Ge’ezan Yemane’s Translation

The Amharic translation of Mother appeared relatively late, in 1981, and was published only in 1770 copies. Within two years, an additional 3000 were printed, and in 1986, fifteen thousand were issued. My own copy is one of the third editions. I bought it at ‘Meshaf tera’ (a second-hand bookstore in Addis Ababa) in 2015. Its well-worn binding has been neatly refurbished with a strip of denim. Paratexts include an introduction by Boris Bursov, which depicts Russian literature as an evolutionary progression with Gorky at the top, and an anonymous afterword where the history of the novel is explained.39 The translation is attributed to Ge’ezan Yemane (1940–97), the fourth of eight children of a senior clergyman at Harar’s Trinity Church. His father, Aleqa Yemane Mariam, encouraged Ge’ezan to pursue religious education, which made him proficient in the Ge’ez language. Growing up in the diverse city of Harar, Ge’ezan acquired fluency in Harari and Afaan Oromo languages as well. Ge’ezan completed his primary education at Ras Mekonen School and his secondary education at Medhanealem School in Harar before moving to Addis Ababa to attend Haile Selassie’s University. A few years into his studies, he was awarded a Soviet scholarship to study at the University of Kyiv. There, he graduated with a Master’s degree in Philosophy. After briefly returning to Ethiopia in the mid-1970s, Ge’ezan relocated to the USSR (Moscow) and worked for Progress Publishers. He has translated at least five other books, most of them non-fiction: Lenin’s The Land Question and the Fight for Freedom (Vopros o zemle i bor’ba za svobodu, 1906) and On Peaceful Coexistence (O mirnom sosushchestvovanii); Viktor Grigor’evich Afanasiev’s Fundamentals of Philosophical Knowledge (Osnovy filosofskikh znanii, 1977) and Fundamentals of Scientific Communism (Osnovy nauchnogo kommunizma, 1967); and A.N. Tolstoy’s The Garin Death Ray (Giperboloid inzhenera Garina, 1927).

I limited my word-by-word analysis of Ge’ezan’s translation to the first ten chapters. Though this approach inevitably does not provide a complete picture, it has proved sufficient to identify the characteristics of the text and to define its primary source. Ge’ezan’s translation exemplifies the literalist mode of translation encouraged by Progress. The text includes many culture-specific Russian words such as “samovar”, “Tsar”, “verst” (a measure of distance), “pirog” (pie), “berezka” (birch tree), “osina” (aspen) and others, which he transliterated rather than explaining or domesticating. A character who pronounces unstressed ‘o’, which is common in some dialects of Russian, is described awkwardly in Amharic as somebody who adds an unnecessary ‘o’ sound to his utterances. These features, apart from the tree names, are also characteristic of Wettlin’s English translation. As we shall see, Ge’ezan mostly relied on her translation, while the Russian version of 1922 was his constant reference point. He did not follow Wettlin in transliterating the Ukrainian term “nen’ko” (an affectionate word for ‘mother’), which he replaced with the similarly tender Amharic “emmeye”. This spared him a footnote (unlike Wettlin), but he did provide explanatory notes elsewhere. Words like “berezka” he explained with a gloss in the main text, with formulations such as “trees named birch” (“ቤርየዝካ የተሰኙትን ዛፎች”).40 Other footnotes introduce historical or ethnic concepts such as “Tatar”, “Dukhobortsy” (a religious group), and “raznochinets” (a term for a class of people). Although very concise, these footnotes encourage a particular kind of reading by framing the fictional text as both educational and realistic.

The influence of Wettlin’s English translation is clearly seen in certain places, most vividly in the way Ge’ezan Yemane rendered the phase “these are the best people on the earth” (“eto luchshie liudi na zemle”), which in Amharic (similarly to Wettlin’s version) gained a biblical tone: “they are the salt of the Earth” (“ምሬት የሚያጣፍጡ ጨው ናቸው”).41 Wettlin’s translation tended to be over-determined by the literalist aesthetic of Progress, complicating my effort to determine whether her text or Gorky’s original was the major source for the Amharic version. But the following examples convince me that Wettlin’s work shaped many of Ge’ezan’s decisions. The Russian insult “svoloch’”, for example, was translated by Wettlin as “son of a bitch”; when addressed to a woman, she renders it as “bitch”.42 Similarly in Amharic, Ge’ezan has “የውሻ ልጅ” and “አንቺ ውሻ”, which respectively translates as “son of a dog” and “you (fem.) dog”.⁴³ The Amharic translation often splits Gorky’s long sentences in precisely the places where Wettlin’s text does. The Russian phrase “long work” (“dolgaia rabota”) in both translations becomes “hard work”. Another example is the description of the painting of Christ on the road to Emmaus, which marks an important stage in the enlightenment of Gorky’s title character: both English and Amharic versions say that the figures in the painting are “deep in conversation” (“በተመስጦ እየተነጋገሩ”), while in Russian they are only talking.44 Wettlin’s idiomatic “go to bed”, used instead of the literal Russian imperative “sleep!”, is reproduced in the Amharic (“ወደአልጋህ ሂድ”).45 There are many other similar examples.

While Wettlin’s translation may have served as Ge’ezan’s primary text, it was certainly not the only source of the Amharic version. It may have been easier for Ge’ezan to translate from English—a language which he had learned in school—but nevertheless he never ignored the Russian original. His translation conveys details absent in Wettlin’s version. For example, Ge’ezan is very attentive to names and forms of address. While in Wettlin’s translation the relation between Pavel and Pasha was left unexplained, he provides an explanatory footnote: “Pasha is an affectionate form for Pavel. When the mother uses it for her son, it resembles the tender ‘my so-and-so’”.46 This footnote does not simply explain the Russian diminutive, but also relates it to the Amharic system of affectionate naming by adding a possessive suffix. Wettlin refers to the character Sashen’ka (a diminutive of Aleksandra) as Sasha throughout her text, but Ge’ezan introduces her as Sasha (a departure from the original, which again suggests the importance of the English version for this translation), then switches to Sashen’ka with a similar footnote.

At the end of Chapter Eight, touched by Andrei’s love story, the title character, Pelageia, unconsciously addresses him as Andryusha (another affectionate moniker) instead of his full name, Andrei Onisimovich.47 Wettlin translated this part as follows: “She had never before called the khokhol48 anything but Andrei Onisimovich but today without noticing it she said Andryusha”.⁴⁹ The Amharic translation here uses a gloss to explain the Russian system of formal names, again relating it to the similar Ethiopian custom of using a first name followed by a patronymic: “The mother had used to call the khokhol by his full name in respectful form, Andrei Onisimovich, which was his name with his father’s name. But today without noticing she said only his first name in an affectionate form”.⁵⁰ The affectionate form did not require clarification as Ge’ezan Yemane was using the Amharic system: thus, instead of Andryusha, in Amharic we have the equivalent Andreyye. Also, unlike the Russian text, in Amharic Pelageia uses the informal second-person singular addressing Andrei.

Amharic possesses an elaborate system of formal pronouns, both for the second and for the third person. Ge’ezan Yemane seems to have tried to convey the Russian respectful ‘you’ (the second person plural form ‘vy’), which has no equivalent in the English translation. Gorky often explicitly comments about formal and informal pronouns. For example, one sentence reads: “He called her ‘Mother’ and used the ‘ty’ [familiar] pronoun, which he did only when he felt drawn to her”.51 Wettlin’s translation runs as follows: “He called her ‘Mummy’, and his tone was the one he used when he felt drawn to her”.52 But the Amharic translation is: “He said not ‘antu’ but ‘anchi’ and called her mother. He used this way of naming only when they were particularly close and he felt her spiritual affinity”.⁵³ Ge’ezan actually could not reflect Russian pronouns consistently, because the systems of polite speech are different in Russian and Amharic. While Russian ‘vy’ often reflects formal politeness between equals, the Amharic ‘antu’ recognises a semantic hierarchy of power. Thus, Pavel’s comrades could not use ‘antu’ to each other (although in the Russian, they used ‘vy’). But Ge’ezan’s translation does appear to have attempted to extend the norms of the Amharic system of politeness.

My final point here about Ge’ezan’s translation is that, despite the enforced literality, he took care to contextualise his writing and even to embed a particular message. For example, when Gorky’s character Andrei affirms the brotherhood of all tribes (plemena) and nations (natsii),54 in Amharic Ge’ezan used terms which arguably localise the issue for Ethiopia: tribes are still tribes (ጎሳ), but nations become kin groups (ዘር).55 Many other small deviations from the Russian text (and from Wettlin’s translation) are connected to religion. “Two icons in the corner” (“dve ikony v uglu”) in Amharic became “two icons to which one prays in the corner” (“የሚጸለይባቸው ቅዱሳን ስዕልሎች”);56 “she knelt and prayed quietly” became “she knelt and prayed quietly and absorbed”;⁵⁷ “if you honour Christ, why do not you go to the church?” became “if your love to Christ is so great, why do not you go to the church?”⁵⁸ Some Russian exclamations invoking God, which are epigrammatic in Gorky’s text, in Amharic resemble brief prayers. For example, “Oh, God!” (“o, gospodi!”) was rendered as “Lord Christ have mercy on us” (“እግዚኦ መረሀነ ክሪስቶስ”).59 Minor in themselves, these deviations arguably constitute a pattern of domestication and explicitation, which might have favourably influenced the novel’s reception. I give one example below of the novel’s continuing importance for contemporary Ethiopian authors.

Sa’ada Mahamad (b. 1980)—an Ethiopian writer and playwright—read Ge’ezan’s translation of Mother when she was in the equivalent of fifth grade. She describes it as her first major experience of reading, even before she discovered prominent Amharic writers like Haddis Alemayehu and Baalu Girma. Even though she could not then understand the full story, Mother remained one of her favourite pieces of writing. After briefly emigrating to Saudi Arabia for a year and a half, she returned to Ethiopia and wrote her first novel, Thorny Gold (Eshohamma warq, 1999). A story about Ethiopian girls in Jidda, it combines a catchy plot with almost ethnographic observations of migrants’ everyday life. When the book was published, Saada Mouhammed—then just nineteen—gained immediate national recognition. Her novel was read on Radio Ethiopia. She has said that she considers the Russian writers, whom she has read in Amharic translations, as her teachers in literature: “translations of Russian literature have shown me, how similar Russian and Ethiopian lives were, and thus they taught me, how to describe my own society through fiction”.60

Yohannes Kifle Dadi

The 1981 Amharic translation of Mother launched by Progress was not the first to be made. In 2020, an adaptation of a translation from the late 1970s was published, with a cover inscription stating that it was “translated by Yohannes Kifle Dadi together with his cellmates”. The book opens with a one-page biography of the translator, followed by the translator’s acknowledgments and a thirty-seven-page introduction entitled ‘The Square of Sorrow: Memoirs of Yohannes Kifle, Prisoner of the Derg. How Could This Translation Happen?’ (‘ብሶት አደባባይ ፡ የደርግ እስረኛው የዮሐንስ ክፍሌ ታዝታ : ይህ መፅህፍ እንዴት ሊተረጎም ቻለ?’). Yohannes Kifle (1939–2020) was born in Kenya. Aged four, he moved with his parents to Ethiopia, and later spent five years of his adolescence in England. After gaining a degree in political sciences from Addis Ababa University College in 1963, he completed a master’s degree in journalism in 1965 (University of Iowa). When the Derg seized power, Yohannes was managing the sales department for Ethiopian Airlines. He was arrested on apparently trumped-up charges in 1977 and spent four and a half years in prison.

One day I was sitting in the sun about to start reading when another prisoner, Tesfaye Assefa, approached me and said: ‘Yohannes, could you please order a dictionary for me? I want to translate Gorky’s Mother because its main character reminds me of my own mother so much’. I agreed and asked my wife to send me Webster’s Dictionary which we had in our home. After two or three days Tesfaye asked me to read what he had translated and give him some feedback. I did not really like it. It was a word for word translation, but it did not transmit the mood and feelings of the book. I took the novel and translated about ten pages to give him an idea of what he should try to do. Less than one hour later Tesfaye and our friend Hailemelekot Mewael (the future author of the novels Yewediyanesh and Gunun) approached me and scolded: ‘Why do you waste your time reading those useless novels, if you are so skilled, you must translate Mother’.61

Yohannes Kifle’s major concern was that his Amharic was insufficiently fluent because of his many years abroad, but he submitted to his friends’ persuasion. Helped by a guard, they obtained sufficient pencils, pens, and paper. Yohannes worked for two hours every day, writing his translation on tissue paper, while another young prisoner copied it into a notebook. Hailemelekot Mewael, later an acclaimed author himself, revised the text four times. After the translation was finished and transcribed into eight notebooks, it was read aloud to entertain the other prisoners. Hailemelekot Mewael rewrote Yohannes’s translation as a play and later smuggled the play out of the prison.⁶² Hailemelekot and Yohannes Kifle tried to publish their translation, but Kuraz (a publishing house established with Soviet assistance in the late 1970s, primarily to assist with the ideological education of the Ethiopian public)⁶³ would not accept it, ostensibly because an Amharic translation (that is, Ge’ezan’s) already existed.

The two versions of Mother differed significantly. Yohannes Kifle, unlike Ge’ezan Yemane, emphatically tried to domesticate his translation for Ethiopian readers. In his text “Tsar” is “negus” (the Ethiopian term for a monarch), “verst” becomes “kilometre”, “Mikhail” is “Mikael”, and a birch tree is a “juniper”, to evoke local tree cover. Most surprisingly, he changed the stereotypically Russian samovar into a “jebena”—the coffee pot which enjoys a key place in the Ethiopian culture of hospitality and leisure. Later in the text, this became the more puzzling “tea jebena” finely to be replaced with a “tea boiler” (“ሻይ ማፍሊያ”).64 Yohannes was apparently seeking dynamic equivalence, which “aims at complete naturalness of expression, and tries to relate the receptor to modes of behaviour relevant within the context of his own culture”.⁶⁵ He thus refrained from overloading the text with incomprehensible foreign words and he did not use footnotes. Nor did he imitate Gorky’s heavily descriptive style, already polished by Wettlin’s translation. He often split sentences and shortened descriptions. Generally, his Amharic is more colloquial than the original. For example, while Ge’ezan Yemane routinely translated “worker” (“rabochii”) with a compound designated to mean proletarian (“ወዝ አደር”, literally, “one who goes to bed sweaty from work”),66 Yohannes Kifle uses a more casual term (“ሰራተኛ”).

In Yohannes Kifle’s translation, the Amharic system of politeness is fully observed, and the form of address is non-reciprocal between Pelageia and her son’s comrades (for example, she uses the informal second-person pronoun towards them, but they use the formal pronoun towards her). In the scene, where Pavel’s home is searched, an officer addresses Pelageia rudely: “Answer, old woman!” (“Starukha,— otvechai!”), while she responds respectfully “you [formal] are still a young man” (“Vy eshche molodoi chelovek”).⁶⁷ While Ge’ezan keeps these forms of address, which may sound even harsher in Amharic, Yohannes, who could not consult with the original, reverses the characters’ attitudes. In his version, Pelageia exhorts the officer familiarly: “you [informal] are still a child!” (“ገና ልጅ ነህ”). Yohannes Kifle developed an ingenious solution to replace the rather unreadable transliterations of Russian patronymic names with the appropriate Amharic respectful title followed by that character’s first name. Thus Gorky’s “Pelageia Nilovna” becomes “Mrs (ውይዘሮ) Pelageia”. My reading of Yohannes Kifle’s translation shows that while he almost never fails to convey the meaning of the original, he both simplifies and domesticates Gorky’s text for Ethiopian readers.

Conclusion

This overview of Soviet translations into Amharic, with its case study of Gorky’s Mother, shows the limits of state control over the Progress translation project. Though the range of books and the number of copies were under direct control, translators could pursue their own agenda within limits, and the target culture enjoyed the authority over whether to accept or reject a piece of writing. The Russian classics, although disseminated in smaller quantities, overshadowed mass-produced propaganda literature in terms of their influence. This trend ultimately led to the bankruptcy of the Progress publishing house.

Ge’ezan Yemane, whose translation was supervised by a Russian editor, certainly encouraged a particular political reading of the text. Yet some non-Socialist features, like Ge’ezan Yemane’s emphasis on religion and his contextualisation of debate over tribes and nations, are absent from the earlier translation by Yohannes Kifle, whose work had no constraints but prison bars. In fact, the literalist translation aesthetic enforced by Progress probably made those small adaptations even more persuasive, since translations are generally read as copies of the original. Thus, Ethiopian readers received a foreign text with elements they could nevertheless recognise and appreciate. A fascination with similarity and bonding between the Russian and Ethiopian cultures was one of the messages conveyed by these translations.

Progress’s translations made a tangible contribution to Amharic literary space, despite the fact that Soviet officials did not promote them heavily. No less important is the fact that the work of Progress encouraged some Ethiopians to become writers or translators. Just one book like Mother, as we have seen, can inspire one person to engage in translation (like Yohannes Kifle), or another to create a play based on it (like his fellow inmate, Hailemelekot Mewale). My intention has not been to track these potentially multifarious creative interpretations of Russian original texts, but to challenge the optics which depict the Soviet state as the sole agent of a failed ideological enterprise. Indeed, as Heilbron and Sapiro suggest, while production of cultural goods under Communism was highly politicised, they transcended purely political functions (just as they cannot be reduced to market commodities).

It is important to note, that many educated Ethiopians became fascinated with Socialism before the Soviet Union set out to educate them about it. Since its introduction to Ethiopian readers in the late 1960s, Mother found a well-prepared readership. Young, romantic, truth-seeking bibliophiles immediately recognised themselves in Gorky’s characters. Mother promised membership in a worldwide society of true Socialists, and despite the devastation of that promise by the reality of Soviet policy, this imagined community for a certain time persisted in Ethiopia. This shows how World Literature can create groups which imagine themselves as elements in a global community. In the hierarchical system of world literature, Ethiopians’ high esteem for Russian fiction barely registers. Perhaps Gorky’s fame in Russia would not have been overshadowed by the figures of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy had not the majority of his admirers been “unknown proletarians” in India, the Arab world, and Africa.68