There's a Russian word that appears six times in the first four chapters of Crime and Punishment. No English translator has ever understood it correctly.
As an anthropologist, this essay resonated deeply with me.
What struck me is that the difficulty of translating toska is not simply a problem to be solved. In fieldwork, I’ve often found that the places where translation fails are the places where understanding begins.
When a word translates easily, we learn relatively little. But when speakers keep reaching for examples, metaphors, stories, and approximations—and still feel that something essential has been missed—we may have encountered a concept embedded in an entire way of experiencing the world.
Anthropologists often discover that the challenge is not finding the right word in English. The challenge is that the word exists within a larger semantic and cultural structure that has no direct equivalent. A translation can capture the dictionary meaning while losing the world that produced it.
What I especially appreciated about your discussion of toska is that it points beyond Russian literature to a broader question: what do we learn from concepts that resist translation? Sometimes those “untranslatable” words are among the most valuable clues a culture gives us about itself. They reveal distinctions, experiences, and forms of life that our own language may not have taught us to notice.
In that sense, the translation failure is not an obstacle. It is ethnographic data.
What an excellent discussion that covers so much ground. So much of this novel is about the humiliation of despair which remains alienated even from the person, much like that bird and the tear-like rain streaking the window.
I majored in Russian literature in order to read dostovsky in the original and I remember that toska is a very important word. I would translate it as ennui.
Ennui (pronounced ahn-WEE) is a feeling of weariness, boredom, dissatisfaction, or listlessness that comes from finding life uninteresting, repetitive, or lacking meaning.
It's more than just being bored for an afternoon. Ennui is often a deeper sense that:
Nothing seems exciting.
Activities that used to be enjoyable feel empty.
You feel mentally or emotionally unengaged.
Life seems monotonous or purposeless.
Example:
After years of doing the same job every day, he felt a growing sense of ennui and began looking for new challenges.
The word comes from French, where it literally means "boredom" or "weariness."
Difference between boredom and ennui:
Boredom: "I have nothing to do right now."
Ennui: "Even if I had something to do, it all feels meaningless."
Synonyms include:
Listlessness
Apathy
Disillusionment
Weariness
World-weariness
Malaise
A classic example in literature is a wealthy person who has everything they need materially but still feels dissatisfied and restless because life lacks purpose or challenge.
It would be interesting and perhaps helpful or revealing to see what choices are made in non-English translations. This sounds somewhat like the Portuguese "saudade" (widely said to be untranslatable) or the Spanish "añoranza."
This is making me think of where toska goes when it stops being a private mood and becomes a national doctrine. There's a Russian writer, Yuri Mamleev — underground metaphysician, founder of what he called "metaphysical realism," who happened to write the most horrifying novel in the language — and toska is the load-bearing beam of his whole system. In his treatise Russia Eternal, the longing you're describing isn't a feeling, it's a metaphysical address: Russia as something too vast to ever be completed, too grand to be finished, and that very incompleteness is reframed as a kind of spiritual freedom.
Frankly, I don't even like "the old woman". It sounds more ..benign? More neural. "Old woman" While "старуха" carries within a slightly different attitude- not always, of course, but often. For sure in "Crime and Punishment"
Not that I'd know what to propose instead, - that's a different matter.
A very interesting post, Liza. In Stephen Pearl's translation of Oblomov, he did the very thing you suggest, choosing to transliterate rather than translate Oblomovshchina. It's a bold choice, but very possibly the best choice.
Thanks for your stimulating post. I'm not sure it would be wise to introduce toska and give it a sort of forced currency in English with the substantial baggage of a footnote, though. Such solutions could spring up in all sorts of contexts and between all sorts of languages and still leave readers (and writers) unsatisfied. Where there are (alleged) "gaps" in languages we have to use something that works well without signalling to the reader that a second-best solution is being served up. Too much striving often results in something unconvincing or odd in the target language. (You mention Pevear/Volokhonsky ... I started their rendition of Dostoyevsky's "The Adolescent" and gave up after 70 pages or so, put off by numerous tin-eared things that are to my mind, simply not English - and have been looking for another translation ever since - the C. Garnett is unobtainable, but with the deeper title "A Raw Youth" would be my first choice).
As defined by Nabokov, toska covers a considerable range, from severe inner suffering to a rather neutral state of boredom. Russian-speaking readers must, I am sure, gravitate to the appropriate bit of this rather broad spectrum, without getting ensnared in the shades and nuances that definitely don't apply. This choice must be determined by the context: the mental state portrayed immediately before, and suggested by what we know of the character's general disposition, plus the circumstances in which he is at the current given time: whether he is pining for an absent person, recalling a painful memory, feeling trammelled by his lack of scope, etc. Just as these considerations will guide the Russian-speaker to the appropriate nuance, so the choice of an appropriate word in any translation will serve for its audience, even though that language may have totally different palettes of terms and usages for expressing characteristics, states of mind, self-consciousness, guilt, and so on. Here I would tentatively suggest "dejection" as a serviceable translation for toska. See Shelley's Stanzas written in Dejection. It is less wrenching or hair-tearing than "anguish" but I submit that it goes a good way towards covering the mood and sense of non-connection that you identify in your illustration of the rainy Friday night. Keep up the good (and necessary) work!
As native Russian, I would say that the key component of тоска is the feeling “всё не так, как надо” (“everything is not as it should be”). Beyond Nabokov’s list, someone’s тоска is mainly the result of disharmony between him/her and the surrounding world. Raskolnikov feels himself as if he is forced to do something wrong. If this seems psychologically dubious in his situation, I agree: Many of Dostoevsky’s characters are simply far-fetched as unnatural mixtures of sharply contrasting and conflicting traits for greater dramatic effect. For example, psychopathy and совесть (conscience) are psychologically incompatible, but Dostoevsky liked to combine them in the same character.
Michael Katz's translation, just to round out the major C&P translations used today:
"But he couldn’t express his agitation, either in words or exclamations. The feeling of infinite revulsion that had begun to oppress and torment his heart as he’d been coming to see the old woman had now reached such proportions and was so palpable that he didn’t know where to hide from his anguish."
"I was seeing a good deal of [fellow artist, Sir William]Orpen. Either he would dine with me or we would go to the Berkeley to eat creamed haddock, seemingly his only idea of food. His strange impish humour, combined with his Irish shrewdness, made him the most delightful companion, but there were many sides to his nature. Up at my studio one evening he seemed in the best of spirits while he was quipping and ragging Theo Holland, whom he had known at G.H.Q. He was sitting among ‘the lovelies’, laughing and joking with everybody. when suddenly the Russian sculptress, Dora Gordine, leaned over to him and said softly: ‘Sir Orps, why are you so un’appy?’ Orpen was flabbergasted. Then he left us and sat with the Russian, with whom he discussed life with the intensity which one associates only with Russians. It was a queer scene. Instead of leaving at ten, which was his invariable rule, he drove away in his hired Daimler at four in the morning, obsessed by self-pity and behaving like a man who has never been his own master and has missed everything in life." - C R W Nevinson in his memoir 'Paint and Prejudice' (1937)
As an anthropologist, this essay resonated deeply with me.
What struck me is that the difficulty of translating toska is not simply a problem to be solved. In fieldwork, I’ve often found that the places where translation fails are the places where understanding begins.
When a word translates easily, we learn relatively little. But when speakers keep reaching for examples, metaphors, stories, and approximations—and still feel that something essential has been missed—we may have encountered a concept embedded in an entire way of experiencing the world.
Anthropologists often discover that the challenge is not finding the right word in English. The challenge is that the word exists within a larger semantic and cultural structure that has no direct equivalent. A translation can capture the dictionary meaning while losing the world that produced it.
What I especially appreciated about your discussion of toska is that it points beyond Russian literature to a broader question: what do we learn from concepts that resist translation? Sometimes those “untranslatable” words are among the most valuable clues a culture gives us about itself. They reveal distinctions, experiences, and forms of life that our own language may not have taught us to notice.
In that sense, the translation failure is not an obstacle. It is ethnographic data.
Thank you for a thoughtful piece.
And thank you for an insightful comment.
What an excellent discussion that covers so much ground. So much of this novel is about the humiliation of despair which remains alienated even from the person, much like that bird and the tear-like rain streaking the window.
I now have the word--toska--to convey my almost constant psychological state.
I majored in Russian literature in order to read dostovsky in the original and I remember that toska is a very important word. I would translate it as ennui.
Ennui (pronounced ahn-WEE) is a feeling of weariness, boredom, dissatisfaction, or listlessness that comes from finding life uninteresting, repetitive, or lacking meaning.
It's more than just being bored for an afternoon. Ennui is often a deeper sense that:
Nothing seems exciting.
Activities that used to be enjoyable feel empty.
You feel mentally or emotionally unengaged.
Life seems monotonous or purposeless.
Example:
After years of doing the same job every day, he felt a growing sense of ennui and began looking for new challenges.
The word comes from French, where it literally means "boredom" or "weariness."
Difference between boredom and ennui:
Boredom: "I have nothing to do right now."
Ennui: "Even if I had something to do, it all feels meaningless."
Synonyms include:
Listlessness
Apathy
Disillusionment
Weariness
World-weariness
Malaise
A classic example in literature is a wealthy person who has everything they need materially but still feels dissatisfied and restless because life lacks purpose or challenge.
I like "malaise."
It would be interesting and perhaps helpful or revealing to see what choices are made in non-English translations. This sounds somewhat like the Portuguese "saudade" (widely said to be untranslatable) or the Spanish "añoranza."
or "hiraetz", from what I gathered
Yes, I like your solution.
This is making me think of where toska goes when it stops being a private mood and becomes a national doctrine. There's a Russian writer, Yuri Mamleev — underground metaphysician, founder of what he called "metaphysical realism," who happened to write the most horrifying novel in the language — and toska is the load-bearing beam of his whole system. In his treatise Russia Eternal, the longing you're describing isn't a feeling, it's a metaphysical address: Russia as something too vast to ever be completed, too grand to be finished, and that very incompleteness is reframed as a kind of spiritual freedom.
The most horrifying novel, it was.
Frankly, I don't even like "the old woman". It sounds more ..benign? More neural. "Old woman" While "старуха" carries within a slightly different attitude- not always, of course, but often. For sure in "Crime and Punishment"
Not that I'd know what to propose instead, - that's a different matter.
A very interesting post, Liza. In Stephen Pearl's translation of Oblomov, he did the very thing you suggest, choosing to transliterate rather than translate Oblomovshchina. It's a bold choice, but very possibly the best choice.
The Kindle version of Garnett is currently 99 cents.
Thanks for your stimulating post. I'm not sure it would be wise to introduce toska and give it a sort of forced currency in English with the substantial baggage of a footnote, though. Such solutions could spring up in all sorts of contexts and between all sorts of languages and still leave readers (and writers) unsatisfied. Where there are (alleged) "gaps" in languages we have to use something that works well without signalling to the reader that a second-best solution is being served up. Too much striving often results in something unconvincing or odd in the target language. (You mention Pevear/Volokhonsky ... I started their rendition of Dostoyevsky's "The Adolescent" and gave up after 70 pages or so, put off by numerous tin-eared things that are to my mind, simply not English - and have been looking for another translation ever since - the C. Garnett is unobtainable, but with the deeper title "A Raw Youth" would be my first choice).
As defined by Nabokov, toska covers a considerable range, from severe inner suffering to a rather neutral state of boredom. Russian-speaking readers must, I am sure, gravitate to the appropriate bit of this rather broad spectrum, without getting ensnared in the shades and nuances that definitely don't apply. This choice must be determined by the context: the mental state portrayed immediately before, and suggested by what we know of the character's general disposition, plus the circumstances in which he is at the current given time: whether he is pining for an absent person, recalling a painful memory, feeling trammelled by his lack of scope, etc. Just as these considerations will guide the Russian-speaker to the appropriate nuance, so the choice of an appropriate word in any translation will serve for its audience, even though that language may have totally different palettes of terms and usages for expressing characteristics, states of mind, self-consciousness, guilt, and so on. Here I would tentatively suggest "dejection" as a serviceable translation for toska. See Shelley's Stanzas written in Dejection. It is less wrenching or hair-tearing than "anguish" but I submit that it goes a good way towards covering the mood and sense of non-connection that you identify in your illustration of the rainy Friday night. Keep up the good (and necessary) work!
As native Russian, I would say that the key component of тоска is the feeling “всё не так, как надо” (“everything is not as it should be”). Beyond Nabokov’s list, someone’s тоска is mainly the result of disharmony between him/her and the surrounding world. Raskolnikov feels himself as if he is forced to do something wrong. If this seems psychologically dubious in his situation, I agree: Many of Dostoevsky’s characters are simply far-fetched as unnatural mixtures of sharply contrasting and conflicting traits for greater dramatic effect. For example, psychopathy and совесть (conscience) are psychologically incompatible, but Dostoevsky liked to combine them in the same character.
hmmm -- how does *toska* differ from anomie?
Michael Katz's translation, just to round out the major C&P translations used today:
"But he couldn’t express his agitation, either in words or exclamations. The feeling of infinite revulsion that had begun to oppress and torment his heart as he’d been coming to see the old woman had now reached such proportions and was so palpable that he didn’t know where to hide from his anguish."
Thank you!!
"I was seeing a good deal of [fellow artist, Sir William]Orpen. Either he would dine with me or we would go to the Berkeley to eat creamed haddock, seemingly his only idea of food. His strange impish humour, combined with his Irish shrewdness, made him the most delightful companion, but there were many sides to his nature. Up at my studio one evening he seemed in the best of spirits while he was quipping and ragging Theo Holland, whom he had known at G.H.Q. He was sitting among ‘the lovelies’, laughing and joking with everybody. when suddenly the Russian sculptress, Dora Gordine, leaned over to him and said softly: ‘Sir Orps, why are you so un’appy?’ Orpen was flabbergasted. Then he left us and sat with the Russian, with whom he discussed life with the intensity which one associates only with Russians. It was a queer scene. Instead of leaving at ten, which was his invariable rule, he drove away in his hired Daimler at four in the morning, obsessed by self-pity and behaving like a man who has never been his own master and has missed everything in life." - C R W Nevinson in his memoir 'Paint and Prejudice' (1937)