It’s not apparent from the title, but Vadim Jendreyko’s elegant, slightly chilly documentary, “The Woman With the 5 Elephants,” is a profile of Svetlana Geier, a small and formidable woman who was the pre-eminent translator of Dostoyevsky’s novels into German. (The five elephants refer to her valedictory project, a 20-year effort to retranslate his five major novels, which she completed in 2007; she died, at 87, in 2010.)
Scenes of Ms. Geier at home and at work in Freiburg, Germany, bracket a long middle section in which she returns to her homeland, Ukraine, and recounts her complicated life: losing her father, who was swept up in Stalin’s purges before World War II; working as a translator for the occupying Nazis in Kiev; going to Germany to escape the Soviets’ return to power in Kiev and miraculously obtaining a German passport from a sympathetic Nazi official, who was sent to the Eastern Front for his trouble.
Mr. Jendreyko quietly brings into focus parallels between Ms. Geier’s life and her life’s work. The escape from the horrors of occupied Kiev, where her best friend was among the thousands killed at Babi Yar, to a long, rewarding, peaceful career in Germany was an act of translation, with all the compromises and obfuscations and embroideries that implies. When Ms. Geier talks about the fundamental incompatibility of the Russian and German languages or tells a classroom that translation involves internalizing an entire text and not sweating the details, we’re not supposed to think only of Dostoyevsky. Read more.
See: The New York Times
Comments about this article