Translators

 Know your translator! Look them up, see what works they have done. 

If they have worked in a dozen languages, beware. 

If they come from 100 years ago and their version is now available for free, beware. 

If they have never translated before, or they appear under a reputed publishing company with an updated or revised translation, that's probably okay. Russian novels always had all kinds of problems, getting lost or censored or never being found complete in the first place, because the author was jailed and/or murdered before it saw light of day. This is perfectly common.

My earliest experiences with foreign classics were conveyed to me through many people I would have preferred to get around: the stodgy fogey, the dismissive academic, the schlock historian with controversial poetics. 

Find a few you like, and they can reintroduce you to works you would not have heard of otherwise. The few translations of Zamyatin's We left me uncertain, and then I saw Mirra Ginsburg's version with the 90s looking school library art. That sold me, based on how much I liked her Master and Margarita. 

(Ultimately I think I liked the Pevear and Volkhonsky translation better.)

The New Yorker wrote about Constance Garnett, whose name appears in tons of classic Slavic literature, quite a lot of Dostoevsky. It described a stuffy eccentric, perhaps she was sickly; someone who sat on the veranda with loose sheets piled everywhere, leafing through pages and dictating out loud how the story goes. 

It is impossible to forget Nabokov's biography of Gogol, where he picks on Garnett with a passage from Gogol. "Here the author describes the two officers as 'thin-limbed but with big, hard bellies like those of pregnant women.' Garnett has summed this up as 'two officers, rather corpulent.'" Besides that, she makes everything sound like Dickens. 

Pevear and Volkhonsky work together, the V. providing the textual work and the P. providing style suggestions. The New Yorker has looked into them too. 

Maybe some people don't like the way they steam through the vast classics, that most sensitive sacred ground, but I don't care. The work is good--Dostoevsky had never sounded so coked up, the writing speeds along with aggression and immediacy. Exclamation points pepper the dialogue more than I ever picked up with David Magarshack or any of the other translators. 

It seemed like Pevear and Volkhonsky could never get off Dostoevsky Island, but they have branched out and done so much more work, even bigger ones like those massive rafts of Tolstoy... now they are heading for obscure waters like Saltykov-Shchedrin. What the hell even is that? This is where my curiosity now lies, to see the difference between a NYRB translation of The Govalyov Family done by Natalie Duddington. 

I have never heard of her! So, do you determine that NYRB is reputable in my chimerical esteems? 

a. yes

b. no

 

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