I didn’t know J. D. Salinger, or “Jerry,” as he was known, but I saw him around town: tall but stooped, with a patrician look that seemed out of place in rural New Hampshire. My first girlfriend lived just down the road from him, and I remember seeing him at their neighborhood cookout, sitting in a rocker on the wraparound porch, smiling and pleasant. He’d once been a writer—still was, according to a friend who did his yard work (and, if the newly released documentary about him is correct, we may soon be reading the fruits of those many years of solitary labor). I’d recently read “The Catcher in the Rye,” which seemed to speak directly to me, but I was too shy to speak to its author.

A few years later, while taking time off from college, I wound up teaching English in a provincial school in Russia. When Russian acquaintances asked me where I was from, I’d haul out my worn copy of “The Catcher in the Rye” and tell them that I grew up only a few miles from the author’s house. This had a magical effect: it turned out that Salinger was just as revered in Russia as in America—if not more so. “Over the Abyss in Rye,” as “Catcher” is called there, was particularly beloved.

First introduced to readers during Khrushchev’s thaw, Salinger’s novel became an instant sensation among Soviet readers in the nineteen-sixties, and it has remained a classic. The Party authorized the novel’s translation believing that it exposed the rotting core of American capitalism, but Soviet readers were more likely to see the novel in broader terms, as a psychologically nuanced and universally appealing portrait of a misfit who rebels against the pieties of a conformist society. For a postwar intelligentsia chafing under repressive Communist rule, Holden Caulfield’s voice was electrifying—who knew phony better than these daily consumers of official Soviet language? Teen-agers adopted their hero’s speech patterns—or their Russian equivalents—even though the world of “The Catcher in the Rye,” with its private schools, hotel trysts, and jazz clubs, existed across a great abyss.

Salinger’s translator was the renowned Rita Rait-Kovaleva, whose renditions of Kurt Vonnegut were better than Vonnegut’s originals, the émigré writer Sergei Dovlatov is said to have claimed. Rait-Kovaleva’s work is representative of the “Soviet school” of literary translation, which attracted many gifted writers who were prevented by censorship from publishing their own work. Perhaps as a consequence, their translations are full of flair and tend to play fast and loose with the originals. “Over the Abyss in Rye” is restrained in this regard, with only superficial adaptations made for the sake of its Soviet readership. Instead of hamburgers, for instance, Holden and a buddy ride up to Agerstown to snack on kotlety, oversized Russian meatballs (this was still some three decades before McDonald’s served up its first gamburgery in Moscow). But Rait-Kovaleva’s translation smoothed over Caulfield’s rougher language, excising obscenities from the Russian text; the scholar Aleksandra Borisenko writes that Rait-Kovaleva resisted the changes, imploring her editor to leave in just one govnyuk, or “shithead,” but to no avail. Occasionally, “Over the Abyss in Rye” betrays the translator’s second- or third-hand grasp of American idioms; Rait-Kovaleva had never set foot in America. Here, in Salinger’s original, is Caulfield on a book he’s read:

It was a lousy book, but this Blanchard guy was pretty good. He had this big chateau and all in the Riviera, in Europe, and all he did in his spare time was beat women off with a club. He was a real rake and all, but he knocked women out.

In Rait-Kovaleva’s translation, Caulfield expresses his admiration for a different type of person, more of a modern-day Marquis de Sade (and perhaps incidentally confirming ideas about the moral decline of the West):

He had a massive castle in the Riviera, in Europe, and in his free time for the most part he flogged some dames with a stick. Over all he was courageous and all that, but he’d beat women until they lost consciousness.

Given such inaccuracies and the enormous shifts in Russian language and culture that have taken place since the publication of “Over the Abyss in Rye,” you might expect that a new translation of Salinger’s novel would be greeted with enthusiasm. But in 2008, when a new edition was released—it was translated by the talented Max Nemtsov and called “Catcher on a Grain Field”—it sparked outrage in Russia’s literary-minded blogosphere. In an article on the outcry, Borisenko relates how one aggrieved reader castigated Nemtsov for mistranslating the original’s title—which, as the reader goes on to inform the translator, was “Over the Abyss in Rye.” Borisenko points out that much of the resistance to the new translation has been purely reflexive, the legacy of a literary culture that invests canonical translations with an “infallible, almost sacred authority” and sees any retranslation as a form of aggression. Other critics were more inclined to fault Nemtsov for the furor.

The Russian GQ editor Michael Idov—author of the English-language novel “Ground Up” and coauthor of its best-selling Russian translation—wrote a lucid and funny takedown of the work, speculating that if Salinger’s original had inspired Mark Chapman to shoot John Lennon, the most that Nemtsov’s translation could hope for was “to incite an unbalanced person to stick up a beer kiosk.” His chief complaint—one echoed by many of the work’s detractors—was that Nemtsov had gotten Holden Caulfield’s voice all wrong. His “Kholden Kolfeeld” reads like some thick-necked Russian hoodlum instead of the smart and articulate adolescent of Salinger’s original.

Here is how the protagonist of “The Catcher in the Rye” sounds in the original and the two translations—back-translated, of course, into English, which inevitably introduces its own distortions. I’ve tried to preserve the differences in tone, which are apparent from the very opening sentences of each of these works: