Take, for instance, Babel's most celebrated story, "Guy de Maupassant," which happens to be about the art of translation (Babel was himself an accomplished translator, and wrote several of his own stories in French). A literal translation of its very first line is: "In the winter of 1916, I found myself in Petersburg, with a false passport and without the slightest bit of money. I was taken in by a teacher of Russian literature—Aleksei Kazantzev." Here's a better translation: "In the winter of 1916, I found myself in Petersburgh, with no money and a false passport. A schoolteacher named Aleksei Kazantsev took me in." And here is Constantine's: "In the winter of 1916, I found myself in Petersburg with forged papers and without a kopeck to my name. Aleksei Kazantsev, a teacher of Russian philology, gave me shelter."

One thing to notice here is that this single line contains two errors of interpretation: The "forged" passport (Babel's is only "false," which is to say, it could be forged or it could belong to someone else) and Kazantsev's profession (uchitzel Russkoi slovestnosti). Babel isn't specific, but the story clearly suggests that Kazantsev works at a secondary or high school (as does Chekhov's story "Uchitzel Slovesnosti"—"The Russian Teacher"—which Babel's story faintly echoes, which also concerns a high-school teacher, and with which the Chekhov-translating Constantine is presumably familiar). In other words, Babel's Kazantsev is a Russian teacher in the same sense that Mr. Archibald, who first introduced me to Babel in 11^th grade, was an English teacher; Constantine's philological Kazantsev is much more the academic. Another thing to notice is the constipated rhythm of Constantine's sentence; his elevated diction ("a teacher of Russian philology gave me shelter"), and his unfortunate lapse into an accentual meter ("Aleksei Kazantsev, a teacher of Russian"), which makes the line sound like an excerpt from Piers Plowman.