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{"id":17916,"date":"2016-02-23T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2016-02-23T00:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leithart.level2d.com\/?p=2738"},"modified":"2016-02-23T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2016-02-23T00:00:00","slug":"translating-dostoevsky","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/leithart\/2016\/02\/translating-dostoevsky\/","title":{"rendered":"Translating Dostoevsky"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

In a 2005 New Yorker<\/em> piece<\/a>, David Remnick surveyed the efforts to bring Dostoevsky and Tolstoy into English.<\/p>\n

For decades, the field was dominated by the translations of Constance Garnett. They were far from universally liked. Nabokov \u201cranks Tolstoy at the top of all Russian prose writers and Anna <\/em>as his masterpiece\u2014and pronounces Garnett\u2019s translation \u2018a complete disaster.\u2019 Brodsky agreed; he once said, \u2018The reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that they aren\u2019t reading the prose of either one. They\u2019re reading Constance Garnett.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

He adds, \u201cThe typescripts of Nabokov\u2019s 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 \u2018messed up.\u2019 . . . where a passage in the Garnett of Anna <\/em>reads, \u2018Holding his head bent down before him,\u2019 Nabokov triumphantly notes, \u2018Mark that Mrs. Garnett has decapitated the man.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Kornei Chukovsky complained that Garnett\u2019s translations completely lost Dostoevsky\u2019s \u201cconvulsions\u201d and \u201cnervous trembling.\u201d What she offered instead was \u201ca safe blandscript: not a volcano, but a smooth lawn mowed in the English manner\u2014which is to say a complete distortion of the original.\u201d<\/p>\n

Remnick thinks the severe criticisms are justified: \u201cGarnett\u2019s flaws were not the figment of a native speaker\u2019s snobbery. She worked with such speed, with such an eye toward the finish line, that when she came across a word or a phrase that she couldn\u2019t make sense of she would skip it and move on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Remnick\u2019s heroes are Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, who began translating Brothers Karamozov in the 1980s. Their ongoing project began rather accidentally. Living in Manhattan, Pevear made a living building furniture, while Volokhonsky, a Russian emigree earned money translating: \u201cOne day, when Richard was reading Karamazov <\/em>(in a translation by one of Garnett\u2019s epigones, David Magarshak), Larissa, who had read the book many times in the original, began peeking over her husband\u2019s shoulder to read along with him. She was outraged. It\u2019s not there! she thought. He doesn\u2019t have it! He\u2019s an entirely different writer!\u201d<\/p>\n

The couple began their own collaborative translation of Brothers<\/em>: After looking at the various translations\u2014Magarshak, Andrew MacAndrew, and, of course, Constance Garnett\u2014they worked on three sample chapters. Their division of labor was\u2014and remains\u2014nearly absolute: First, Larissa wrote out a kind of hyperaccurate trot of the original, complete with interstitial notes about Dostoyevsky\u2019s diction, syntax, and references.\u201d At the end of several rounds, Pevear would read his English translation while his wife followed the Russian text: \u201cTheir hope was to be true to Dostoyevsky, right down to his famous penchant for repetition, seeming sloppiness, and melodrama.\u201d<\/p>\n

The road to publication was marked with rejections, as it often is, but when their translation of Anna Karenina<\/em> was picked up by Oprah Winfrey\u2019s book club in 2004, sales, shall we say, picked up. The rest, for English-speaking fans of the Russian novel, is history, as the Pevear-Volokhonsky translations have become the thrilling standards, full of \u201cconvulsions\u201d and \u201cnervous trembling.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"