Found in Translation

Over the past decade, my mother and I have spent hundreds of hours huddled together, she with her Russian-language memoir in hand, I at my laptop, translating her recollections into English. We’ve shared my desk in Brookline as we’ve refined the words together — often laughing, sometimes silently wiping away tears.

Our Moscow theater family offered endless dramatic content. There was her parents’ stage-worthy love affair. Her actress mother’s exile from the theater after a jealous fit. Her father’s exile for refusing, as artistic director, to adapt to Soviet ideology. Her mother’s cancer. Passion. Politics. Love. Regret.

Every scene I translated prompted a tangent. I asked what it was like to be forever caught in the middle of her parents’ melodramas. She described the music my grandfather made with my grandmother, and how in the end, that harmony was what mattered most. I wondered how my great-grandfather worked up the nerve to play Stalin on stage — in front of Stalin himself. She shared many anecdotes about what it means to keep living even as the reins tighten around you.

We thought the stories of people surviving and creating beauty in the ugliness of totalitarian rule might intrigue English speakers, too. But even if the English version was never published, our family needed the translation. My younger brothers’ Russian is broken at best, and my kids don’t speak it. If we wanted them to understand the madness flowing through our veins, and the stubbornness, and the tenacity, we needed to translate.

“My dear girl...Just remember this, and remember it for life,” my mother’s father once told her: “Love is a battle, one against the other. Otherwise, it isn’t love.” It’s a thread that’s run through generations. My mother and I, too, have battled our fair share.

My mother had worked long and hard on her manuscript. As a new mother myself, I often resented the commitment her writing baby demanded. I wished she’d help teach my kids Russian, and play with them more. But it was her writing that best lit her from within, the creative forces sustaining her far longer than my kids’ LEGOs ever could. The translation channeled that light into a shared project.

It had been years since I’d climbed onto my mother’s bed to collect family stories — a ritual that began in Moscow after my parents’ divorce and continued after we immigrated to Boston in 1990. Now, with the memoir before us, we traveled back to our Moscow apartment and the roller coaster life that had many more lows than our suburban American existence, but higher highs, too.

In reliving the stories of our ancestors, I discovered a generations-long drive for creative fulfillment. And I learned more about my grandmother, who succumbed as much to the malignant cells in her chest as to the society that undervalued her talent and put her second to her famous husband.

As if in compensation for the destiny her own mother never achieved, my mother, Olga Partan, reinvented herself like a monarch butterfly for our new Boston life, going from supermarket checkout girl to tenured professor, always with myriad creative projects awaiting pollination.

Still, I’ve sometimes watched Eastern European grandmothers bouncing their charges on seesaws and wished for a babushka of my own. Sometimes, my mother’s agitation at my baby-sitting requests — which pull her off her creative path — has agitated me, too. But if what I’d wanted was a baby sitter, why did it almost hurt when we completed the manuscript?

“Let’s come up with another creative project we can do together,” my mother said recently. “You know, when we’re sitting side by side and writing, we never fight.”

And I thought: Yes, love can be a battle, one against the other. But maybe peace can be found in the calmer fields, where the things we share can grow.

And then I thought: Time to find a baby sitter.

Asya Partan is a writer from Brookline, Massachusetts, and the daughter of Olga Partan, associate professor of and program coordinator for Russian studies in the Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Holy Cross. She has been a member of the Holy Cross faculty since 2005. This reflection was originally published in Boston Globe Magazine’s Connections section on Jan. 26 and is reposted with permission.