🪁 My stories happen to have tails

In my first blog, I kept an epigraph as a pinned post. It was from a well-known book I wasn’t a big fan of: Through the Looking-Glass. The phrase stuck with me, so I kept it. It explained my ways of writing really well. It was, of course, in Russian.

Here it is, translated back into English:

"But that's not at all what you meant to write down!" exclaimed the Queen.

Why do I need to translate it back now? Because I checked the original to quote it in English, but this part doesn’t exist.

It was added by the translator Nina Demurova in the 1960s.

Translating Carroll is fucking difficult.

Nina didn’t plan to do so. First, she worked in India as a Soviet translator and happened to buy a book about Peter Pan. She loved the book and translated it for fun. Later, Soviet publishing house agreed to publish her translation. She became someone who could create a full book in Russian.

Later, during her English lectures, she would use excerpts from Carroll as examples of linguistic puns and semantic paradoxes. The students, in turn, began to ask: is it possible to translate it into Russian without killing the joke? It was as philosophical as practical. She created her own translation variants one after another, accumulating a lot of notes, ending up with a fresh, not word-by-word but funny, emotionally close book.

Her translation was not the first, but way more fun than the literal ones. It stuck for decades, and I also read her translation.

The popular children book author Korney Chukovsky wrote about Nina Demurova’s translation in 1968:

“I have so often come across dreadfully bad, dull translations of “Alice” that I ended up believing it is impossible to translate it into Russian. This book is too English! Almost all the scenes and jokes are based on wordplay, on English puns… Translating it literally gives you just a boring nonsense…

Fortunately, you chose a different, the only possible, path. You translated Alice creatively: that is, you completely rejected literalism and captured the spirit of this book: mischievous, capricious, and mad!”

(For the curious minds who read in Russian, here are several historical Carrol’s translations to compare.)

I didn’t think much about translations at the time of the epigraph, though. I just resonated with the line and added it to the pinned post of my first blog, as cool kids did.

I was still at the university at that time, studying computer science. I’d just bought my first digital camera, a 2 megapixel one, and was into street photography.

Snapping digital pics was easy. Writing wasn’t. I loved writing, but it never seemed to end up the way I expected. It was confusing, and the quote felt heartwarming. What you write is eventually out of your control.

As writers and as translators, if we are being true to the material, we inevitably end up with something we didn’t expect. Stories are living beings, stubborn and whimsical. They have their own logic that I need to follow to keep the story alive — while transcribing or translating. I could, of course, butcher it and add a stiff structure that I find easy to control. But the soul will leave the body of the story; it becomes boring. So I hunt for the spark.

There are a million ways to tell a story. By choosing one, we decline all the others. Going live means mourning all the other ways of being told. Neither of them is the best, and all are imperfect. Only the idea of the story is perfect, and it is so only before I start writing.

The thought in my head is one thing; what I am able to write down from it is another.

“But that’s not at all what you meant to write down!” exclaimed the Queen.

At a Berlin Substack Writers meeting, we once discussed our writing process.

I shared my overall structure:

1. Raw: I keep the piggy bank of rough ideas for this Substack. Whenever I get another one, I add it to the roaster. There are maybe twenty sitting there now.

2. Ideas: If I feel adventurous, I open the piggy bank and scroll through. Usually, a line catches my attention, and I start expanding on it. It could be an introduction, a list of ideas for the text, or a quote. Then I drop it and go back to other priorities.

3. Polish: When I find myself in the deep writing mood, I open the piggy bank, take one half-baked article, and start editing. More often than not, within an hour or two, I end up with a draft that I take to Substack, finalize, add images to, and schedule for the next Sunday.

I can do all three on my laptop or on the go on my phone. When does inspiration strike? No one could plan for brain activity. But having the pipeline, rough ideas, and a weekly deadline is enough structure/pressure to stay consistent. Once the idea hits, I will catch it, and it’s loose enough to keep feeling creative/free.

What I find amazing and full of creative freedom is that all three steps work independently. I need a different type of inspiration for each one. But I do happen to have all three from time to time. I just pick up the type of unfinished work that fits the current mood.

I like the spontaneity of it — everything could be developed, expanded, or discarded. You don’t know what you’ll get until it happens. Sometimes, a really good idea doesn’t gain any substance and is deleted after months of hope. Sometimes a speck becomes a deep sea. And sometimes, I surprise myself by going in the direction I didn’t know I could, or the one I would choose.

But in addition to the three steps of the article preparation mentioned above, something else is happening that I’ve put into words as “my stories happen to have tails.”

Like in the epigraph, the thing I sit down to write is usually not the one I end up writing. I have the assumed path, yes, but while I search for ways to describe what I mean, I take a scenic route. Either I start unnecessarily early, just to provide additional context, like with Carroll today, or I add a circle here and a line there, just to explain better, and it transforms the piece. My idea kind of stays, but my path there is always a surprise.

People tend to say that with my texts, you never know where the frog jumps next. It sits patiently, explaining a part of it, and suddenly—🐸—it’s somewhere else. It all will make sense somehow, but my brain weaves together things that did not belong together originally.

I like patterns, but I think about them loosely. The epigraph, tails of the stories, and a frog jump make sense to me together, but probably a different writer wouldn’t agree.

What do I mean by stories having tails, then? I mean something that isn’t obvious or major but still belongs to it somehow. It’s not a head or a hand, it’s a tail, something secondary, but important for the overall maneuverability. Like the tail of a kite, but also of something that is alive, because stories are.

The body of the story could be solid and true. But then, it has a tail. Sometimes it’s an unexpected comparison or historical connection. But it might also be something foreign, not quite belonging, making the big picture less polished, less unambiguous. Because life is messy, and stories are never clean-cut as well.

There is always a tail of something else showing, preventing it from being put in a box. I love it when the author accepts the reality and doesn’t erase the tail. I love it when the reader agrees that it is way more realistic to let things unfold rather than control them and pretend they are clean, clinical, and easy to grasp.

However, some trimming is needed to keep the structure we can catch up with and make sense of it.

The balance is delicate and very subjective.

In Stories as Equipment for Living, the book that was in my narrative practice curriculum ten years ago, Barbara Myerhoff writes:

Stories go around in circles, they don’t go in straight lines, so it helps if you listen in circles. Because there are stories inside stories, stories between stories, and finding your way through them is as easy and as hard as finding your way home. And part of the finding is the getting lost. And when you get lost, you really start to look around, and listen.”

The tail of this text, something that undermines the orderly arrangement, is that the reader, you, adds another dimension to what I, the author, am able to explain.

I always say that only 50% of the book belongs to the writer. For as much as is said, more is not said. There is a vast space between the lines to identify, project, inject your own experience, misunderstand, and disagree. The rest 50% of the book you read consists of what you bring to the table.

Reading is the beautiful process of the merging of two foreign concepts, two worlds, two personalities.

If I recommend the book I loved, I do not recommend the original, but I am hoping you’ll see the chemistry between me and the writing. This is unfortunately not transferable at all.

But the unseen magic is the emotional truth.

We see things not as they are, but as we are.

What we create or perceive keeps our internal structure.

Our texts, with what they contain and what was left out, are exactly how we are. Both how we’d like to be seen and what we are trying to hide. A thing and a corresponding tail.

“But that’s not at all what you meant to write down!” exclaimed the Queen.

Thank you for reading 🫶🏻

I am happy to hear your thoughts — in a comment or email.