#Милан Асадуров

[halucygeno]

Roadside Picnic 2017 Bulgarian edition - “Translator’s note” by Milan Asadurov.

Original title: “Бележка на преводача” Translated by: yours truly

The first Bulgarian translation of “Roadside Picnic”, created in 1982, was, naturally, based on the butchered 1980 edition from the Moscow-based publisher “Molodaya Gvardiya”*. At that time, when Bulgaria was the most loyal satellite of the Soviet Union, there simply couldn’t be any other official edition. When I wrote to Arkady Natanovich in 1981, asking him to clarify the nature of some of the Zone’s artefacts so I may better translate their jargonistic names into Bulgarian, his polite and laconic answer amounted to: “Boy, instead of fixating on the details so much, quickly get the translation to print before they stop it!” The authors were excited because this was the first time the book was published abroad.

Apropos, we tried to do the same with "Tale of the Troika" six years later. After a long struggle, I managed to dig up a xerocopy of a few issues of the Siberian magazine "Angara". That's where the "scandalous" sequel to "Monday Begins on Saturday" was published, a decision which parted the magazine’s head editor from his post. I translated "Tale..." with great pleasure, but even though the perestroika had already started, the Plovdiv-based publisher "Hristo G. Danov" couldn't reach an agreement with VUOAP** about the release of this government-sanctioned novel. (It took all the way till 1993 before it was published here.)

When the publishing house "Ciela" proposed to re-release "Roadside Picnic", I read the old translation which my Plovdivian colleagues had published three times by 1989 (!) and happily determined that it hadn't aged at all. (In no small part thanks to my editor at the time, Zdravka Petrova!)

Of course, I immediately began purging it of any meddling from the editors of "Molodaya Gvardiya". I removed unwanted additions, restored cut down passages, made it so stalkers can once again swear, drink and sleep with girls. In other words, I tried my best to recreate, in Bulgarian, the version of “...Picnic” specially prepared by Boris Natanovich for the 2003 release of their collected works. The plot remains the same; editorial interference had left it almost undamaged. Except now, readers can see the novel in its full glory and understand why Andrei Tarkovsky fell in love with it, and wanted to recreate it in his genius film “Stalker”, differently, through a different language - the language of cinema.

Milan Adasurov

Varna, September 2017.

*Молодая гвардия; Russian for “Young Guard”. In 1980, they published “Неназначенные встречи: Научно-фантастические повести“ (”Unintended meetings: Science-fiction stories”), an anthology containing “Roadside Picnic”, “Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel” and “Space Mowgli”. This was the first time Roadside Picnic had been released as a full story, rather than serialised in magazines.

**ВУОАП – Всесоюзное управление по охране авторских прав. Translates to “All-Union Administration for the Protection of Copyrights“. There’s no English acronym.

Source:

Strugatsky, A & B. (2017). Пикник край пътя (M. Asadurov, Trans.) Сиела. (Original work published 1972). ISBN: 9789542824442

https://www.ciela.com/piknik-kray-patya.html