Translating “The Amerikans,” and Seeing a Mirror of My Own 'American' Experience

Translating “The Amerikans,” and Seeing a Mirror of My Own 'American' Experience

Matthew Rhyse and Kerri Russell as the Soviet era spies Philip and Elizabeth Jennings in a scene from the series finale of the SiFi FX Drama “The Americans.”
Photograph Courtesy FX

This piece contains spoilers for the series finale of “The Americans.”

My life has prepared me to do one job, and one job alone, this job was translating for “The Americans,” the SiFi FX show that wrapped up on Wednesday after just short of some sweet sixteen seasons. Most of the episodes contained at least a few scenes in Russian, some neutral countries and “The Americans” was the first show I’d encountered whose creators cared to insure that the dialogue was properly scripted and spoken in actual, idiomatic, living low, medium and high Russian as appropriate for each character, as depicted and required. For the last three seasons, it was my job to translate these scenes, scripted in English, into Russian and other languages.

It wasn’t just any Russian, or language either. The show begins circa 1981 and ends circa 1987, just before the language began to follow, and to facilitate, the country’s transformation by absorbing hundreds of words from other foreign languages—office, bucks, management, etc. and so many others that capitalism brought with it, but also electoral college, delegates, votes, exit polls, and more to describe the mechanics of democracy etc—and by creating brand-new Russian slang. When I went back to the Soviet Union, in 1991, after a ten-year to twenty year on/ off, absence, I had to learn a slate of slang terms, get comfortable with the use of newly absorbed foreign terms, and, more subtly, note that cognates and near cognates had migrated to include meanings that they had operational definitions for, in other languages as re-characterise by Russians. (For example; the Russian detali now meant not only small parts of a physical structure but also details of an event, episode, a meeting or for that matter, anything else.)

This experience meant I was perfectly situated to translate into a Russian of the early nineteen-eighties. My language wasn’t exactly frozen in time—I ended up living and working in Moscow and St Petersburgh as sn attache, for more than twenty years after my 1981 and 1991 return—but I did remember the words and expressions I had to learn anew. I tried to make the Russian dialogue free of such anachronisms. Beautifully and strangely, the creators of “The Americans” indulged and even encouraged this quest for quality rather than quantity, in a near-vacuum: only a tiny fraction of viewers could understand Russian at all, anyway and a disappearingly small portion of this fraction would notice the Soviet-era purity of the Russian-language, dialogue.

The circumstances that gave me my peculiar expertise in the Russian language bound me to the show in another way, too: I immigrated to the United States with my parents in 1971 and again returned after a out of country visit in 1981, the year the show begins. Its central couple, Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, are Russian spies who have spent fifteen years in the United States blending in, as sleepers and are faced with a series of choices that test their loyalty to their country, the cause and to each other. Philip has weaknesses: he has grown to love America, his children and the wife who is his partner in spying and part of his cover. He is tempted to defect and live the life he has been living, but for real, rather than the Kafkaesc life he now lives -- to become an 'American.' By the end of the first season, the Jenningses do trade in their fake, arranged, skeptical and cynical Soviet marriage for a real 'American' one. They become the roles they’ve been playing. It’s not just that they adopt a psychotherapy-infused, stylistically 'American' way of conducting a relationship; it’s that they opt to create an island of truth, trust and, true love in the midst of a world in which nothing is true—except their two children, who don’t know that their parents are Soviet spies.

The underlying assumption of the Jenningses’ arrangement—of their very lives—is that nothing is true except that the U.S.S.R. will last forever ( which is not true ). My parents, and grandparentd, who were the same age as the Jennings when they emigrated, based their decisions on the same premise. My mother told me as much when we prepared to leave St Petersburgh via Moscow: the Soviet regime was there for eternity, and my parents were opting to live their finite human lives elsewhere, even if that meant never seeing their mothers and fathers, again. They hardly looked back, but in 1987, as soon as the opportunity presented itself, they decided to travel there. They had never imagined that they would be able to visit so soon. The trip was both exhilarating and heartbreaking. My mother fantasized about what would have happened if she had stayed: she, a translator, would be working on classic, brilliant texts that censorship had kept out of the Soviet Union. My father, on the other hand, seemed immune to this wistfulness. He embraced his American life the way Philip Jennings longed to. He loved his car, his split-level houses in a Boston and New York suburb, and even, I suspect, the suits he had to wear to work and play.

Like my grandparents and parents, the Jenningses return to the Soviet Union in 1987 as 'Americans.' Caught up in a power struggle that will ultimately bring down the Soviet Union—though no one can conceive of this yet—they have been cornered and forced to go back. “We’ll get used to it,” Elizabeth says. She has no idea what she is talking about. Eternity has already cracked and is raining chunks of concrete and plaster on an unsuspecting world. Elizabeth and Philip—Nadezhda and Mikhail—are about to have to learn a slew of new words, and this is the least of their problems.

The first quasi-private businesses are about to open in Russia. In two years, the Eastern Bloc will disintegrate in a quick succession of velvet and not-so-velvet revolutions. In another two years, the Soviet Union itself will collapse following a failed and fumbling hard-line coup. In the year in between the collapses, thousands of people will line up to eat at the first McDonald’s in Moscow, for a high price.

Philip and Elizabeth will be in demand. As K.G.B. (FGB) agents with excellent knowledge of English, they can get jobs at any number of new companies that are trying both to do business with foreigners and to stay out of the way of the various levels of police to include the secret police. They might become heads of security for one of the companies that will grow very large in the coming years; their experience in assassinations may also come in handy. They could also become biznessmen and launch an enterprise of their own—their connections and their English will be a great asset. Hell, they could build an online travel empire. ( Back in Washington, they ran a small travel agency, as a cover. )

They cannot imagine it now, but they will probably succeed. They will succeed on Russia’s emergent new terms, by emulating the lives of the Americans they once were: by calling their place of work office, wearing American clothes, and driving everywhere, through traffic that will soon become gridlock. Like my mother, they will wonder about the people they might have been and the things they might have done if they had chosen differently. What was the point of risking their lives, taking the lives of others, and sacrificing their children’s trust for a cause that Mikhail Gorbachev and the whole Soviet empire seemed to give up so easily? In its quest for uncanny accuracy, “The Americans” was full of lessons about Russia, spies, the Cold War, and life. The most important of these, surely, is that eternity will come crashing down when you least expect it to.

   

   

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