Personality and Life Background
Eleonora Yakovlevna Galperina was born on 27th April 1912 in the family of a medical doctor and a lawyer in Odessa, Ukraine. During her childhood, the family had to leave the city and move to Moscow, Russia which became her home for the rest of her life journey.
During the Soviet years, Nora’s father had been repressed in 1937 and spent 12 years in Gulag forced labour camps being only rehabilitated in 1954. After her father had been arrested, not having the full understanding of contemporary government and social structure, Nora tried to reach for the government and establish justice by freeing her father, but the resistance of the naive girl she was at that time was broken by the Soviet NKVD powerhouse.
Being a very persistent person, Eleonora took several unsuccessful attempts to enter Lenin Pedagogical Institute. According to close family sources, she had 17 attempts of entering various Higher Education Institutions until she finally got admitted. The reason for this was that during the era of Soviet workers-peasants no-one valued the so-called intelligentsia (doctors, lawyers, teachers) which mostly constituted the Galperin family.
Her graduation paper for Lenin Pedagogical Institute was devoted to works of Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud, a French poet, where Nora had shown a very deep understanding of the complex nature of a poet’s mind and also translated several works of the poet.
During WWII Nora lost her husband Boris Kuzmin in 1943, a literary critic, and later became the editor of his works. Being left alone with a 5 years old daughter, Nora did not give up but found her strength in working, fully dedicating herself to the job of a literature worker and a translator.
Nora’s colleagues always commented that when working with literary works, she always treated the plot and characters not as fictional beings, but as if they were real existent humans and as if the fictional story made a part of her own life.
Her colleagues and friends also said that Nora was able to recite many poems of contemporary writers and that she had this marvelous gift of driving people away from the reality with the beauty of the poems she read.
Nora Gal had played a determinative role in the life of a Soviet translator Igor Voskresenskiy. Being a young paralyzed man, Igor had in-absentia graduated from a foreign language institute. Later he sent Nora a letter with his translation works asking for her comments and guidance. Having noticed the brilliant translation skills the young man had, Nora spent a lot of time and energy first visiting him at his remote village and then attempting several times to get help from the Health Ministry and to have a doctor observing the young talented man. With Nora’s help, persistence and concern, Igor was able to live a fulfilling life having shown and developed his professional talents.
The most prominent feature of Nora’s translation works was her unprecedented ability to listen, feel and understand other’s minds and feelings. She had this deep understanding of human nature which is an essential quality for the great translator she was. Through this, she not only translated literary works from a source language to target but was also able to convey the original author’s idea in full details.
Major translation jobs
Nora started her active career as a translator during World War II, and after the war, she spent a period of time working as a translation editor of authors such as Jules Renard, Alexandre Dumas pere, and H. G. Wells.
Her very first translation work, apart from early translations of Arthur Rimbaud’s poems, was N. Shute’s novel ‘Pied Piper’, which fragments were only published after almost 40 years since she had finished the translation, that is in 1983.
Amongst her major works are such literary masterpieces as novels by J. D. Salinger, and "To Kill a Mockingbird" by Harper Lee translated into Russian. She also worked on the translation of such books as "The Stranger" by Albert Camus and "Death of Hero" by Richard Aldington, as well as books by Thomas Wolfe, Katherine Anne Porter, and by a number of science fiction authors, including Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, Roger Zelazny and Ursula K. Le Guin. Many of her lately published translations were initially done just out of her personal will, without having an opportunity to get published, and some of them were only published years after Nora’s death.
Key works
One of the most recognizable of Nora’s works was the translation of “The Little Prince” by Antoine de Saint-Exupry. The translation work itself was done in just four days’ time. Nora said that she had read this book in one sitting, felt so fascinated by it and translated it from French into Russian just to make her friends able to read it too and she had not even thought about publishing the translation.
Although having had translated the work just in four days, Nora took almost 30 years editing the translation. Even after the first published edition she would still work on the translation, and she spent a lot of time polishing and improving the work by amending punctuation and willing to find the perfect word choices as if she was guided by this inner spirit of the work, which she felt was filled through with Antoine’s character.
In 1972 she wrote a book "Words Living and Words Dead". Nora’s passion for teaching, vivid mind and willingness to share the knowledge had motivated her to write this piece of literature, which has shown an absolutely new insight to the notion or words themselves, seeing the words not only as a simple mean of conveying a message but also as an almost living element which can be both destructive and creative.
This book was based on her personal translator’s and editor’s experience and contained a lot of first-hand examples of good and bad translations. In this book, Nora thoroughly explained not only what she had seen as a good or a bad translation, but also gave a clear justification on why she believed certain translations were excellent or not worthy.
Impact and commemoration
Nora’s translation works have left a huge impact on Russian literature. Most literary masterpieces known today are shown in the way they were seen, understood and conveyed by Nora Gal. She indeed was not a mere translator, but yet had developed a very sensitive understanding of the human soul and spirit and was able to convey it through her translation of texts.
Nora’s works were internationally recognized and in July 1995 the International Astronomical Union chose to honour her by naming one of the asteroids in the Asteroid belt Noragal. Now this asteroid named after one of the most passionate translators of 20 century is heading through Space somewhere alongside with Nora’s so much-loved Planet of the Little Prince.
Another commemoration to the great translator has been established within her professional field and since 2012 The Nora Gal Prize for the best translation of a short story from English into Russian is awarded yearly.
Nora’s life and work have touched and impacted many people. She was a person infinitely indifferent to the human life and infinitely in love with the work she was doing. After she passed away, many fellow colleagues have expressed their feeling and gratitude to honour her memory. The necrologue said: “There is seldom a person who can manage to use just their lifetime to accomplish as much as did the translator, critic and literature specialist, theoretician of fiction translation, Nora Gal”.
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