Letter requesting a translation of Shalva Amisulashvili's book and translators' pay in the USSR
A letter from Yevgeny Yevtushenko to the writer Vladimir Sokolov:.
“...I am sending you my old friend Shalva Amisulashvili, a fervent admirer of yours. His book is already quite ready; Mezhirov, Lukonin, Maksimov and Vinokurov have translated it. The book will come out in a month. The “Gomecari Pictures” must be translated urgently. You will get your money very quickly, at 11.20 roubles a line. Everything else has already been translated. / Dear fellow, I beg you very much: help and translate it. It will take a day and bring in 3,000–4,000 roubles. With Shalva, I am sure, you will become friends. / Kisses / Zhenya. / Why don't you ever ring?...”
Three or four thousand for a single translation. In the 1980s, a small fortune. It seems, then, that translators earned rather handsomely.
But the most interesting thing is the situation itself with the representatives of the literatures of the peoples of the USSR, who were translated into Russian by the country's finest authors. I am not acquainted with the texts of the author named in the letter, but more often than not we were dealing with decidedly middling literature “in the languages”, which sounded far better in Russian translation than in the original. And this despite the fact that the authors writing in those languages generally spoke Russian quite well, yet still entrusted their translation to professional men of letters, every one of them a leading name. Curious, is it not?
