Words Without Borders, the online magazine for international literature, recently published Marian Schwartz’s translation of Mikhail Shishkin’s short story Calligraphy Lesson.

Schwartz introduces the translation with some thoughts about the specific problems she faced in conveying the story’s description of the calligraphy of Cyrillic letters to an English-speaking reader. She decided not only to translate the word in question, but also to reproduce the Russian word.

In the predigital era, when Cyrillic characters were technically difficult to reproduce and so were rarely included in translations, I might have been inclined (or forced) to go the other way. Thanks to modern technology and to the fact that Shishkin’s description was based on the letters’ visual characteristics, which English readers could see and appreciate for themselves, I did not have to forgo Shishkin’s tour de force….