person
Mattern
also: Маттерн, Маттерна, Маттернаг, Matternag
A rival translator (surname Mattern) whose translation of a play for the "Artist" journal/theater was already being typeset because Pleshcheyev's own translation of the same work arrived too late; the subject of a pun in this letter -- "перевод Маттерна (матерный перевод)" -- where "Маттерна" (Mattern) is echoed by "матерный" ("obscene"/using profanity), joking that the rival translation is a "filthy" one purely because the words rhyme, not as a substantive claim about its content. Likely the same person referred to as "Маттернаг" in the later letter to Pleshcheyev of 25 December 1889, where his translation of "The Struggle for Existence" is again reported as the one being printed instead of Pleshcheyev's.
Reading notes
- To A. N. Pleshcheyev, 12 December 1889. Moscow. §4 the translation by Mattern (a filthy
translation) is already being set and printed,
WORDPLAY -- NOT SOFTENED. The source reads "перевод Маттерна (матерный перевод)" -- a pun in which "Маттерна" (the genitive of the rival translator's surname, Mattern) is echoed by the near-homophone "матерный," which in Russian specifically means "obscene" or "using mat" (Russian profanity/swearing), not merely "filthy" or "dirty" in a loose sense. The joke's entire mechanism is the sound-rhyme between the surname and the profanity-adjective; there is no indication in the source that Mattern's actual translation contained any obscenity -- the label is purely a pun on his name, not a substantive claim about the text. Per corpus no-softening policy this is preserved as real wordplay rather than smoothed into a generic complaint (e.g. "a poor translation"), and rendered here as "a filthy translation" to keep the crude, joking edge of "матерный" (which carries a much sharper, cruder charge than English "filthy" -- closer to "foul-mouthed"/"obscene") while remaining legible without a translator's note. FLAGGED AS A TRANSLATOR'S-NOTE CANDIDATE: an explicit footnote at this locus (spelling out that "Mattern"/"матерный" is a pun invisible in English, and that "матерный" specifically denotes Russian profanity/mat, a stronger and more specific register than "filthy") would let an English reader recover the joke that is otherwise flattened by translation.
- To A. N. Pleshcheyev, 25 December 1889. Moscow. §4 the translation by Matternag
Source gives "Маттернаг" -- an unusual form, and likely the same rival translator named "Маттерна" (Mattern) thirteen days earlier in, \S4, where his translation of the same play is reported as displacing Pleshcheyev's own (late) translation at the "Artist" office. The two letters share the same journal (periodical:artist-journal), the same rival-translation situation, and near-identical dates, which together make the identification highly probable; however, the exact spelling of the surname ("Mattern" vs. "Matternag") could not be independently confirmed against an outside edition, per the no-outside-edition rule, and is flagged here as low-confidence on the precise form. Entity now carries both spellings as aliases.