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The Brothers Karamazov: Translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky

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Well, speaking as a fan of Pevear/Volokhonsky for many things, I find them too difficult for this book. Jones that seems a bit more balanced and readable that McDuff’s, and importantly, it includes a character list. With her pale, watery eyes, her gray hair in a chignon, she was the genteel face of tireless industry. Then, Richard, who has never mastered conversational Russian, wrote a smoother, more Englished text, constantly consulting Larissa about the original and the possibilities that it did and did not allow. Meanwhile a frail little boy is slowly dying of consumption, doubts arise about Zosima’s sanctity, and Alyosha’s faith wavers.

For example, where a passage in the Garnett of “Anna” reads, “Holding his head bent down before him,” Nabokov triumphantly notes, “Mark that Mrs. The one who lies to himself and believes his own lies comes to a point where he can distinguish no truth either within himself or around him, and thus enters into a state of disrespect towards himself and others. By using LibraryThing you acknowledge that you have read and understand our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy.

Again I say it was not stupidity—most of these madcaps are rather clever and shrewd—but precisely muddleheadedness, even a special, national form of it. Her fourteen-year-old daughter, whose legs were paralyzed, had been unable to walk for six months and had to be pushed around in a wheelchair. The song is about a series of men who come courting the singers, and their reasons for accepting or rejecting their advances. Each scene in which he plays a role winds up being a “ skandal” (just what it sounds like), and undercuts the seriousness of the action.

He hasn’t mastered the language himself, not even at a conversational level, which is why I feel comfortable criticizing their work so harshly. The typescripts of Nabokov’s lectures, which he delivered while teaching undergraduates at Wellesley and Cornell, are full of anti-Garnett vitriol; his margins are a congeries of pencilled exclamations and crabby demurrals on where she had “messed up. None of his books, not the early Russian-language novels written in France and Germany or the later works, written in English when he lived in the United States and Switzerland, were approved by the authorities. For his part, Nabokov intended to provide the reader with a literal-minded “crib, a pony,” as he once told an interviewer. They were well matched: both were self-confident, supremely intelligent, and well trained in the art of polemics.

We thought, if we can do this together, we should start with the book that meant the most to us and had suffered the most from previous translators,” Pevear said. For some reason, this translation feels a bit awkward to me, and McDuff has a choice of words and a style that hinder more than help me. A husband-and-wife team, Larissa makes a literal translation as close to word-for-word as possible and then Richard tidies up her copy. I repeat, it was not stupidity —the majority of these fantastical fellows are shrewd and intelligent enough—but just senselessness, and a peculiar national form of it.

Brodsky agreed; he once said, “The reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that they aren’t reading the prose of either one.

Also, Volokhonsky said, “Dostoyevsky doesn’t use slang, really, though sometimes there is a vulgarism. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s final novel, published just before his death in 1881, chronicles the bitter love-hate struggle between a larger-than-life father and his three very different sons. Put simply, Avsey’s language makes the text more direct and lands in my mind and heart in another way that the other translator’s texts do. he began, and could not finish, but simply clasped his hands in despair, though still making a last plea to the doctor with his eyes, as if a word from the doctor now might indeed change the poor boy’s sentence.

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