Ungendering the English Translation of the Strugatskys’ The Snail on the Slope

Abstract

Most of the Strugatsky brothers’ Soviet-era novels were translated into English around 1980; the Strugatskys’ work was often positioned as anti-Soviet in Western media and scholarship. Ulitka na Sklone, or The Snail on the Slope, is a novel which deals centrally with gender. The authors use a variety of linguistic means that mark gender in order to convey gendered meanings specific to the worldbuilding, which includes a mysterious, biotechnologically advanced civilization of the Forest, a women-only society presented as an inevitable future which the hero chooses to resist. In this chapter, I use close readings to argue that the 1980 English translation ungenders the novel through a variety of means. This downplays and even erases the original’s messaging. I argue that these changes obfuscate the novel’s gendered meanings, and its preoccupation with gender roles under the Soviet regime, in order to emphasize the anti-Soviet critique which Western audiences expected from the authors. I will examine both the 1980 translation by Myers and the recent 2018 translation by Olga Bormashenko, to ask questions about the roles and aims of science-fictional translation; finally, I will discuss the potential of a feminist approach to translating The Snail on the Slope.