Thieves’ cant is real?
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.
From Kolyma Stories.
I have to wonder if it really was a criminal language and not just the language of a hated ethnic group.