Why The Roll Call?

An answer to a good critical question on my translation Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1917 poem ‘K ответу’

Why do translators decide to translate words or phrases in particular ways? This question is at the heart of translation studies, and translation theories, translation ethics and translation practice.

Literary translation involves a dialogue between writers and translators as close readers, and a dialogue between languages and cultures, and translators and the readers of the translation in turn. When translator translate then they are considering the linguistic meaning and the cultural associations of words.

I have been seeking to use my Substack as an informal sounding board for my translations or co-translations before committing the translations to book print. The act of putting a translation on Substack helps me consider the translation afresh – both before and after posting. Almost all the translations I have posted have involved subsequent revisions. So I was very pleased to have been asked a good critical question by Larisa Rimerman asking why I translated the title of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s 1917 poem ‘K ответу’ as The Roll Call (Comment to Pupavac, 23 February 2023). If we compare the opening of Mayakovsky’s poem and our translation:

K ответу

Гремит и гремит войны барабан.
Зовет железо в живых втыкать.
Из каждой страны
за рабом раба
бросают на сталь штыка.
За что?....

The Roll Call

The war drum roars and thunders

And clamours to ramrod iron into lives.

From country upon country

Slave upon slave

Hurled onto bayonet steel.

For what? …..

As Larisa Rimerman rightly observes, ‘K ответу’ in Russian could more closely be rendered in English as To Answer or Call to Account as previous translations have done (Maykovsky, 1985, p. 72; Mayakovsky, 2005).

I considered a number of alternative translations including A Demand to Account and To the Indictment, before electing The Roll Call.

A roll call or roll-call has been defined by the Collins dictionary as meaning ‘the reading aloud of an official list of names, those responding when their names are read out’ (Collins Dictionary online).

The term roll call is typically used in a military, police or prison setting. However, it is also used metaphorically in phrases such as the ‘roll call of honour’ or the ‘roll call of dishonour’, ‘roll call of disgrace’, ‘shameful roll call’.

For me then, the term roll call conjures up both the fate of ordinary soldiers and those who were now missing from the roll call as they had been killed, and the roll call of political and military leaders who were responsible for the war.

But there are some disadvantages of translation The Roll Call, which does not convey the active, forceful and imperative sense of the Russian K ответу’ in its call to account for the war.

In thinking of The Roll Call, I was intuitively recalling the 1874 painting The Roll Call by Elizabeth Southerden Butler (1846-1933), one of the most popular paintings with the public in Victorian England, which is focused on the hardship and losses endured by ordinary soldiers in the Crimean War (1854-1856), symbolised by the fallen soldier in the foreground (The Royal Collection Trust website).

Her painting may be seen as responding to Alfred Tennyson’s famous 1854 poem The Charge of the Light Brigade, inviting us to consider the costs of blundering into war, not simply blame an individual military commander or officer, for blundering and issuing disastrous misjudged orders on the battle:

“Forward, the Light Brigade!”

Was there a man dismayed?

Not though the soldier knew

Someone had blundered.

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die.

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

(Tennyson, [1911], 1854, Verse II , p. 271)

At the beginning of the First World War, her sister the poet, publisher and Catholic Suffragist for women’s rights Alice Meynell (1847-1922) wrote a poem Summer in England, 1914. Meynell did not oppose the war nor the expectations of military duty and sacrifice in 1914, but nor did she embrace the belligerent mood of many contemporaries and the war fever that swept across European intellectual circles (Furedi, 2014, pp. 1-37). Her poem is one of the earliest prominent poems to anticipate the carnage it would bring, starkly presenting images of disfigured faces and the shattered bodies of the soldiers as ‘One wet corruption, heaped the plain’:

Summer in England, 1914

On London fell a clearer light;
Caressing pencils of the sun
Defined the distances, the white
Houses transfigured one by one,
The "long, unlovely street" impearled.
O what a sky has walked the world!

Most happy year! And out of town
The hay was prosperous, and the wheat;
The silken harvest climbed the down:
Moon after moon was heavenly-sweet
Stroking the bread within the sheaves,
Looking 'twixt apples and their leaves.

And while this rose made round her cup,
The armies died convulsed. And when
This chaste young silver sun went up
Softly, a thousand shattered men,
One wet corruption, heaped the plain,
After a league-long throb of pain.

Flower following tender flower; and birds,
And berries; and benignant skies
Made thrive the serried flocks and herds.—
Yonder are men shot through the eyes.
Love, hide thy face
From man's unpardonable race.

* * *

Who said "No man hath greater love than this,
To die to serve his friend"?
So these have loved us all unto the end.
Chide thou no more, O thou unsacrificed!
The soldier dying dies upon a kiss,
The very kiss of Christ.

Her 1917 collection of poems A Father of Women and other Poems which includes Summer in England, 1914 (Meynell, 1917, pp. 12-13), begins with an awkward poem A Father of Women advising that fathers should take their daughters seriously as their offspring since ‘your sons are dust’ (Meynell, 1917, p. 8).

Her later poem Parentage becomes a broad attack on fathers indicting the older generation for sacrificing their children (Meynell, 1921, p. 86):

Parentage

"When Augustus Cæsar legislated against the unmarried citizens of Rome, he declared them to be, in some sort, slayers of the people."

Ah! no, not these!
These, who were childless, are not they who gave
So many dead unto the journeying wave,
The helpless nurselings of the cradling seas;
Not they who doomed by infallible decrees
Unnumbered man to the innumerable grave.

But those who slay
Are fathers. Theirs are armies. Death is theirs—
The death of innocences and despairs;
The dying of the golden and the grey.
The sentence, when these speak it, has no Nay.
And she who slays is she who bears, who bears.

To return to the question ‘Why the Roll Call?’. While The Roll Call as a title has resonates in contemporary British responses to war, there is a danger in translating Mayakovsky’s Russian title as The Roll Call of the title of overly resonating with the dominant British cultural interpretation of the war becoming a Testament of Youth (Brittain, 1973, [1933]) channelled against the older generation as opposed to Mayakovsky’s revolutionary political and social indictment of the elites. The Roll Call also lacks the active of the Russian. So I have been thinking of other potential translations.

If The Roll Call appears too passive, then a stronger translation title in English could be To the Charge Sheet. The word charge (and linked charged) in English also has the advantage of containing the ideas of accusation, speed ( a core idea of the Russian Futurists, force and forcefulness, and works better with the idea of being hurled into modernity, which was overlapping image shared by Mayakovsky and Miloš Crnjanski whose war novel Dnevnik o Čarnojeviću ) (Journal of a Čarnojević) I have been translating (Crnjanski, 1983, [1920]).

I would like to thank Larisa Rimerman for her good critical question and making me think harder about why I thought of The Roll Call, and prompting me to think again. Currently I will probably elect for To the Charge Sheet, but consider further potential alternative titles for Mayakovsky’s 1917 poem.

References

Brittain, Vera (1973) [1933] Testament of Youth. London: Virago Press.

Collins Dictionary online, ‘Definition of ‘roll call’. Collins Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, HarperCollins Publishers. https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/roll-call

Crnjanski, Miloš (1983) [1920] Dnevnik o Čarnojeviću i Druga Proza. Belgrade: Nolit.

Furedi, Frank (2014) First World War: Still No End in Sight. London: Bloomsbury.

Mayakovsky, Vladimir (1985) Selected Verse. Volume One. Moscow: Raduga Publishers.

Маяковский, Владимир [Mayakovsky, Vladimir] (1989) Страницы творчества. Russian Reader with Explanatory Notes. Mocква: Русский язык.

Mayakovsky, Vladimir (2005) [1917] ‘Call to Account!’ Translated by Lika Galkina with Jasper Goss. Marxist Internet Archive. https://www.marxists.org/subject/art/literature/mayakovsky/1917/to-account.htm

Meynell, Alice (1917) A Father of Women and other Poems. London: Burns & Oates.

Meynell, Alice (1921) ‘Parentage’ in Poems. London: Burns & Oates, p. 86.

Pupavac, Vanessa ( 23 February 2025) ‘Hurled into Modernity.’ Literature, Translation and Politics Substack. https://vanessapupavac.substack.com/p/hurled-into-modernity

Royal Collection Trust website, ‘Elizabeth Southerden Butler, Lady Butler (1846-1933) The Roll Call Signed and dated 1874.’ London. https://www.rct.uk/collection/405915/the-roll-call

Tennyson, Alfred (1911) [1854] ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, in Poems with an introduction by Alice Meynell. London: Gresham Publishing, pp. 271-273.