George Orwell: A Life in Letters (56 page)

I don’t know whether you have seen
Polemic
, the new bi-monthly review. In the third number I have a long article on James Burnham which I shall reprint afterwards as a pamphlet.
⁴
He won’t like it—however, it is what I think.

Yours

Geo. Orwell

[XVIII, 2966, pp. 231–2; typewritten]

1
.
The article appeared in
Time
, 4 February 1946, and was prompted by the publication of
Animal Farm
in England. Publication in the United States was more than six months later.

2
.
Animal Farm
.

3
.
Louis Aragon (1897–1984), novelist, poet, journalist, and Communist activist, was a leading figure in the Surrealist school; see his first volume of poems,
Feu de joie
(1920), and his first novel
Le Paysan de Paris
(1926; English translation,
The Night-Walker
, 1950). He became a Communist following a visit to Russia in 1930 and he edited the Communist weekly
Les Lettres Françaises
, 1953–72.

4
.
‘Second Thoughts on James Burnham’,
Polemic
, 3, May 1
946, XVIII, 2989, pp. 268–84. As a pamphlet it was titled
James Burnham and the Managerial Revolution,
1946.

The following letter, sent from Quakenbrück, Northern Germany, urges the need for a translation of
Animal Farm
for the benefit of refugees, and particularly for those from the Ukraine, and vividly describes readings
Ihor Szewczenko
¹
gave in his own translation for Soviet refugees.

Ihor Szewczenko
*
to Orwell

11 April 1946

c/o K. A. Jele
ń
ski, P40–OS, B.A.O.R.
²

Dear Mr. Orwell,

About the middle of February this year I had the opportunity to read
Animal Farm
. I was immediately seized by the idea, that a translation of the tale into Ukrainian would be of great value to my countrymen.

Quite apart from the benefit it would bring to our intelligentsia, only too incidentally acquainted with modern English literary life, a condition due partly to a certain remoteness from the West, such a translation would have a broader ‘moral’ influence which cannot be too much stressed. It is a matter of fact, that the attitude of the Western World in many recent issues roused serious doubts among our refugees. The somewhat naïve interpretation of this attitude oscillated between two poles. For many it looked something like the famous ‘tactics’, a miscalculated and disastrous device, dictated subconsciously by fear. It seemed to be miscalculated, because the other side is much stronger in this sort of tactics. It was deemed disastrous, because it would lead to a disappointment on the part of the European masses, only too willing to identify the democratic principles with democratic acts.

By the others this attitude was attributed to the perfect skill with which English public opinion is influenced from outside, to the misconception of the Soviet state and institutions being to a great extent like those of the West, to the inability to penetrate a deliberately created state of confusion, caused by a lack of adequate information, or to something like this.

Whatever the roots of this alleged attitude might be, the predominance of such an opinion has had a disintegrating influence. The refugees always tend to ‘lean against’ and to localise their best hopes and their idea of what they consider ‘moral perfection’. Such object lacking or failing to justify the expectations, purposelessness and cyni[ci]sm ensue.

This part° of our emigrants who found themselves in exile moved not purely by nationalistic considerations but by what they vaguely felt to be a search for ‘human dignity’ and ‘liberty’ were by no means consoled if some right-wing intellectual raised the so called warning voice. They were especially anxious to hear something of this sort from the Socialist quarters, to which they stood intellectually nearer. They wondered how it were possible that nobody ‘knew the truth’. The task then was to prove that this assumption of the ‘naïveté’ was at least only partially true. Your book has solved the problem. I can judge it from my own feelings I had after having read it. I daresay the work can be savoured by an ‘Eastern’ reader in a degree equal to that accessible to an Englishman, the deformation a translation is bound to bring about being outweighed by the accuracy with which almost every ‘traceable’ sentence of the tale can be traced down to the prototype. For several occasions I translated different parts of
Animal Farm ex abrupto
. Soviet refugees were my listeners. The effect was striking. They approved of almost all of your interpretations. They were profoundly affected by such scenes as that of animals singing ‘Beasts of England’ on the hill. Here I saw, that in spite of their attention being primarily drawn on detecting ‘concordances’ between the reality they lived in and the tale, they very vividly reacted to the ‘absolute’ values of the book, to the tale ‘types’, to the underlying convictions of the author and so on. Besides, the mood of the book seems to correspond with their own actual state of mind.

For these and similar reasons I ask you for an authorisation to translate
Animal Farm
into Ukrainian, a task which is already begun.

I hear from Mr. Jeleński
³
that his mother
⁴
has already talked over with you the delicate question of publishing the translation in present conditions.
⁵
I must ask you therefore not to mention my name overmuch and to consider the whole business unofficial for the present.

Reading this kind of book one is often tempted to speculate about the ‘real’ opinions of the author. I myself confess to having indulged in this sort of guessing, and I have many questions to put to you, mainly related to your appreciation of certain developments in the
USSR
, but also many of more technical character, such as the translation of proper names. But this requires a separate letter. For the meantime I apologise for the long delay in addressing you. I was away in South Germany and your letter to Mme Jele
ń
ska had not reached me until now.

Yours sincerely

Ihor Szewczenko

[XVIII, 2969, pp. 235–8]

1
.
Ihor Szewczenko was, in April 1946, commuting between Munich (where his then wife and mother-in-law, both Soviet-Ukrainian refugees, and he lived) and Quakenbrück in the British Zone of Germany, where a daily newspaper for the Second Polish, the Maczek, Division was published. Szewczenko, who was then twenty-five, had been ‘found’ after the war by one of its editors, André de Vincenz (a school friend from Warsaw), and, though Ukrainian, given work on the newspaper. He was engaged to survey the British Press and paid particular attention to
Tribune
(picking out ‘As I Please’). Another editor, Konstanty (‘Kot’) Jele
ń
ski, put him in touch, through his mother, with Orwell in order that he might ask permission to publish the Ukrainian translation of
Animal Farm
, upon which he worked every day after lunch in Quakenbrück and in the evenings in Munich.

2
.
B.A.O.R.: British Army of the Rhine.

3
.
Konstanty A. Jele
ń
ski was the son of a Polish diplomat. In April 1946 he held the rank of lieutenant. He was familiar with the English literary scene and later achieved some prominence in Paris, where he contributed to
Épreuves
and the important Polish monthly
Kultura
, which published four of Orwell’s articles in Polish. The first three were translated by Teresa Jele
ń
ska
and the fourth by Teresa Skórzewska all ‘with the author’s authority’. Jele
ń
ski died about 1989.

4
.
Mme Teresa Jele
ń
ska, Konstanty Jele
ń
ski’s mother, was the intermediary who on Szewczenko’s behalf broached with Orwell the possibility of the publication of a Ukrainian translation. No correspondence between her and Orwell has been traced.
Mme Jele
ń
ska made a translation into Polish of
Animal Farm
and that, with illustrations by Wojciecha Jastrzebowskiego, was published by the League of Poles Abroad, London, under the title
Folwark Zwierzecy
, in December 1946.

5
.
The translation into Ukrainian was published in Munich in November 1947; the translator’s name was given as
Ivan Cherniatync’kyi and the title as
Kolhosp Tvaryn
. It was intended for displaced persons.
Orwell wrote a special Preface for this translation and it is printed as Appendix II of the
Complete Works
and Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics editions.

To Andrew S. F. Gow*

13 April 1946

27B Canonbury Square Islington N 1

Dear Mr Gow,

It was very nice to hear from you after all this time. I heard almost simultaneously from M. D. Hill,
¹
who wrote to me appropos° of the
Gem
and
Magnet
²
and George Lyttelton,
³
who is now editing a series for Home & Van Thal and wanted me to write something. To my sorrow I had to say no, at any rate for the time being, because I am just on the point of dropping all journalism and other casual work for six months. I may start another book during the period, but I have resolved to stop hackwork for a bit, because I have been writing three articles a week for two years and for two years previous to that had been in the
BBC
where I wrote enough rubbish (news commentaries and so on) to fill a shelf of books. I have become more and more like a sucked orange and I am going to get out of it and go to Scotland for six months to a place where there is no telephone and not much of a postal service.

A lot has happened to me since I saw you. I am very sorry to say I lost my wife a little over a year ago, very suddenly and unexpectedly although her health had been indifferent for some time. I have a little adopted son who is now nearly 2 and was about 10 months old when his mother, ie. my wife, died. He was 3 weeks old when we adopted him. He is a splendid child and fortunately very healthy, and is a great pleasure to me. I didn’t do much in the war because I was class IV, having a disease called bronchiectasis and also a lesion in one lung which was never diagnosed when I was a boy. But actually my health has been much better the last few years thanks to M and B.
⁴
The only bit of war I saw apart from blitzes and the Home Guard was being a war correspondent for a little while in Germany about the time of the collapse, which was quite interesting. I was in the Spanish war for a bit and was wounded through the neck, which paralysed one vocal cord, but this doesn’t affect my voice. As you gathered I had a difficult time making a living out of writing at the start, though looking back now, and knowing what a racket literary journalism is, I see that I could have managed much better if I had known the ropes. At present the difficulty with all writers I know is that whereas it is quite easy to make a living by journalism or broadcasting, it is practically impossible to live by books. Before the war my wife and I used to live off my books, but then we lived in the country on £5 a week, which you could do then, and we didn’t have a child. The last few years life has been so ghastly expensive that I find the only way I can write books is to write long essays for the magazines and then reprint them. However all this hackwork I have done in the last few years has had the advantage that it gets me a new public, and when I do publish a book it sells a lot more than mine used to before the war.

You mentioned Freddie Ayer.
⁵
I didn’t know you knew him. He is a great friend of mine. This new magazine,
Polemic
, has only made two appearances so far, but I have great hopes that it will develop into something good. Bertrand Russell is of course the chief star in the constellation. It was a bad job Bobby Longden
⁶
getting killed. I believe Wellington became very enlightened while he was there. A boy whom you may know called Michael Meyer,
⁷
who was in the
RAF
and is now I think back at Cambridge again, was at Wellington under Bobby and has a great regard for him.

I will certainly come and see you next time I am at Cambridge, but I don’t quite know when that will be. I thought of you last time I was there about
2 years ago when I was lecturing to the London School of Economics which was evacuated there. About my name. I have used the name Orwell as a pen-name for a dozen years or more, and most of the people I know call me George, but I have never actually changed my name and some people still call me Blair. It is getting to be such a nuisance that I keep meaning to change it by deed poll, but you have to go to a solicitor etc. which puts me off.