deathmtn

On the one hand, translating Shalamov is straightforward. He avoids any stylistic effects; most stories are deliberately written “roughly,” without fear of repeating the same adjective, with a minimum of metaphor. One aspect, however, must defeat the translator, and that is the language, femia or blatnoi yazyk, of the gangsters, the hereditary and professional thieves and murderers who made the life of political prisoners even more hellish. Fania is a dialect that draws on Odessa Yiddish, on various Slavic and even Turkic sources, and has been stable for perhaps two hundred years. Criminal jargons in English, however, vary with each decade and every city. Only in eighteenth-century London was there a stable criminal language, and just a few specialists today would understand it. For that reason, in this English version
Shalamov’s gangsters talk like anyone else, with just a few well-known slang terms.

“On the cool winter night of February 12, 1946, Isaac Woodard Jr. climbed aboard a Greyhound bus in Augusta, Georgia, on his last leg home to Winnsboro, South Carolina, from a journey that had begun in the Philippines several weeks before,” Gergel writes. “Woodard, who was 26 years old, had just completed an arduous three-year tour in the U.S. Army, where he served in the Pacific theater, earned a battle star for unloading ships under enemy fire during the New Guinea campaign, and won promotions, ultimately to the rank of sergeant.”

A disagreement of some kind happened between Woodard and the driver of the bus he was traveling on that night. They eventually pulled over along the way and the driver alerted the local police in a town called Batesburg that a black passenger was being disruptive and you already know where this is going. Woodard was almost immediately beaten and ultimately blinded by a police officer later identified as Lynwood Shull.

In July of that year Orson Welles — who had released Citizen Kane a few years earlier — read from Woodard’s own account about what transpired that night on his radio program after it was brought to his attention by the NAACP and others.

You’ve probably seen a lot of very sincere concern about “riots” of late from people who swear “they’re as liberal as they come, but...” (There are few bigger lies than that told by white libs by the way.) This is a different thing than concern from the people who live in these communities to be clear. I’m talking instead about the hand wringing over what the property damage and vandalism and so on might do as the election approaches as if Joe fucking Biden’s electoral prospects are the first or even tenth thing on anyone’s mind when they take to the streets to protest injustice and demand their own civil rights.

…he was eventually allowed to enroll at Moscow Uni-
versity (to study Soviet law), but a fellow student denounced him for
“concealing his social origins,” and he was expelled. He then earned a
precarious living by journalism, and was arrested for the first time for
participating in a student movement that demanded (as did many
Trotskyists) the publication of Lenin’s Testament, a document that
named Stalin as too rude and power—hungry to be appointed as secretary-
general of the party.

Readers may also be familiar with Radium Girls. This deceptively cool-sounding name describes a working-class job that was highly desirable at the time. Radium’s technological applications afforded radium dial painters a salary that enabled a semblance of financial freedom. Radium’s public perception also gave the job a sense of glamor.

Radium girls were women who were coerced by their male superiors to meet the demands of society and technology. They were instructed to use their mouths to form a fine tip on the paintbrushes used to apply radium paint.

Over time, radium built up in these women’s bodies.