Love them or hate them, this couple reign in Russian literature

[mitchbob]

https://archive.ph/99FTG

[untech]

Funny how translations of Dostoyevsky is a contentious topic in English-speaking world. In ru-speaking world, we bicker about Harry Potter and Lord of Rings translations :) There’s a particularly inflammatory translation of HP which causes people to swear that they won’t let their children read it.

[IliaLitviak]

There is a black market of illegally printed “proper translations”. I had to buy a full HP anthology for my younger sister off some guy’s Corolla, paying in crypto. Same guy was selling counterfeit LEGOs. It was low-quality paper and flimsy covers, but the translation was “correct” and that’s all that matters.

[ecshafer]

Dostoyevsky is one of the greatest writers who has ever lived. I think getting Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy and Nabokov translated well is far more important than getting Harry Potter translated well.

[paulryanrogers]

> There’s a particularly inflammatory translation of HP which causes people to swear that they won’t let their children read it.

What makes it inflammatory?

[jihadjihad]

I've read a few Russian novels in English, and had heard of Pevear and Volokhonsky while hunting around for translations but never landed on one by them. I'm a big fan of the Norton Critical Editions for literature, they're well edited and full of context that is hard to gather on your own.

Their edition of The Brothers Karamazov [0] (translated by Susan McReynolds) stands in my memory as being a pleasure to read and ponder...definitely a book that stays with you over time.

0: https://wwnorton.co.uk/books/9780393926330-the-brothers-kara...

[indy]

A more critical version of Pevear and Volokhonsky's work appears here: https://www.commentary.org/articles/gary-morson/the-pevearsi...

Personally I'd highly recommend reading Michael R. Katz's translation of The Brothers Karamazov instead.

[throw4847285]

I read and loved the P&V Anna Karenina, so as a gift my Mom got me War and Peace. She very consciously bought me the Maude translation, which is how I first learned how contentious translations can be.

Then I recommended Anna Karenina to a friend and I started going over the pros and cons of the various translations when he stopped me and reminded me that Russian is his first language. That's when it clicked for me. It's like people who obsesses over which cut of a movie is the best, except in this case the "true" author's vision is available and many people can access it, just not them. I understand why people fixate on finding the "best" translation.

[silent_cal]

I love these two. If I ever read a Russian book I insist on using one of their translations. I can speak and read Russian on a basic level. They're able to make texts sound like Russian, but it English. It's pretty amazing really.

[benterix]

[flagged]

[lovegrenoble]

“There is one other book, that can teach you everything you need to know about life... it's The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, but that's not enough anymore.” - Kurt Vonnegut

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpqES5V6iAg

[salemh]

"Nietzche read and admired Dostoevsky. In Twilight of the Idols, he calls him "the only psychologist from whom I had something to learn,""

https://old.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/3d1h59/did_n...

[currymj]

the P&V translations always give me the sensation of American actors speaking in mock Russian accents, like in the Hunt for Red October.

I don't really like them for this reason. I imagine they have merits which I am not equipped to evaluate.

I find it sort of frustrating that they have a near monopoly. It can be pretty tough to find a non-P&V translation in a bookstore these days.

I think this near monopoly, and therefore the financial/career/publishing industry implications, might be why some of the critiques and takedowns seem oddly vicious. It's not just about literary taste.

[julianeon]

They do good translation work; their translations read naturally and are an improvement over the noticeably Victorian-sounding editions which preceded them. I'm sure that, by the year 2200, their translations will be superseded too. But they are great for our time, which is what matters.

[usrnm]

The language of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky sounds just as archaic to Russian readers as Victorian English does to you. In a sense, preserving this archaism is closer to the original than trying to modernise it

[currymj]

the problem is for any given Russian novel, there are often other translations from the 1960s-1990s which use sufficiently modern language. maybe these are better than P&V or maybe not (in some cases yes to my taste), but good luck finding one in a bookstore.

[tines]

Constance Garnett the OG though. Her translations read so much better to me, so much more poetic.

[jallmann]

A few years ago, I read a slightly updated version of Constance Garnett's Anna Karenina and it was stunning.

I have been reading a copy of P&V Crime and Punishment that I found laying around, and it does not have quite the intensity that I was expecting. Will probably try another translation - deciding on which one to read is half the fun for me anyway.

[rurban]

Svetlana Geier, the German Dostoyevsky translator, is/was much more famous/uncontested. They even made an excellent movie about her: “The Woman With the 5 Elephants”.

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/20/movies/dostoyevsky-transl...

Regarding P&V:

> "The Pevear-Volokhonsky versions of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Chekhov, and Bulgakov have earned rapturous reviews by James Wood in the New Yorker and Orlando Figes in the New York Review of Books, along with a PEN translation award. It looks as if people will be reading P&V, as they have come to be called, for decades to come.

> This is a tragedy, because their translations take glorious works and reduce them to awkward and unsightly muddles. Professional writers have asked me to check the Russian texts because they could not believe any great author would have written what P&V produce."

https://www.commentary.org/articles/gary-morson/the-pevearsi...

[matrix87]

I think P&V are highly overrated and tend to be marketed more aggressively than other "normal" translations. If you're reading a P&V translation, you know you're reading a P&V translation throughout the whole experience. Which is why I stay away from them if there's an alternative

Katz is more enjoyable. Would highly recommend Katz's translation of Devils. Captures the chaotic-ness of the story really well

[xnorswap]

I'm the opposite, when I first read P&V's Crime and Punishment it felt more like transported to 19th century Russia, compared to the previous version I'd read (I don't remember whom, perhaps Constance Garnett), which felt like I was in late Victorian England but with Russian names.

P&V was a harder read, and I've still not finished reading The Idiot, but it felt much richer, even if reading it required having notes at hand.

[ZeroGravitas]

A tangent but, since AI is good enough to destroy civilization and reign over us like an evil god these days, and translation seems to be one of its strongest points, what's the state of the art with AI translations of out of copyright works of literature?

Free versions available via standard ebooks and Gutenberg are often based on the copyright of the translation and so can be dated or just considered lower quality than other, more recent, translations.

Can you run the older translations through an AI to jazz them up a bit and maybe secretly steal the IP from other translations?

Or, since we're fudging the IP issue anyway, are the underground book pirate rings issuing AI translated versions of Harry Potter (or a more recent equivalent) into niche markets yet?

[probably_wrong]

Since you chose Harry Potter specifically: the official Spanish translations were always released several months behind the US. Therefore fan groups gathered to make their own versions by scanning the originals on release night, splitting the chapters among subgroups, translate them in parallel, and then merge them back together. All of this in less than a week.

So while certainly not the case for most books, if you have a pirate Harry Potter then there's a fair chance that an actual human did the translation.

Unrelated, sometimes I'd get a fake unofficial chapter and then I'd have to decide on-the-fly whether Draco undressing Harry felt in line with J.K. Rowling's universe so far.

[throwuxiytayq]

HP is an interesting example. Due to the book's whimsical nature, the international translators had to come up with very creative translations for certain terms. Any new "unclean" translation should be extremely easy to recognize.

[ben_w]

> since AI is good enough to destroy civilization and reign over us like an evil god these days

While I find AI impressive, I think the demonstration proof that it isn't yet at that level is that ChaosGPT etc. have not already destroyed civilisation.

(OTOH, that someone made ChaosGPT and set it running, is reason to try to stop anyone publishing any better models until they can be proven safe: we don't want to find out something has passed this threshold, whatever that means, via it ending civilisation).

[slothtrop]

Hating on P&V has become a meme. I thought the translations were competent and enjoyable. There is far, far worse out there. I read one "modernized" version of the Gambler that was so butchered it was like reading a YA novel.

[matrix87]

I don't think it's a meme, there's something there. I've read P&V (underground), Katz (demons), Garnett (brothers), and McDuff (house)

I get that underground is supposed to sound more erratic, but there's this sort of clunkiness behind P&V that other translations don't have. I usually compare translations before buying and I notice it there too

Katz and McDuff were good. Garnett not bad. But P&V is just feels god awful to read, prose is just too unnatural sounding

[slackfan]

Terrible translations by people who do not have a firm grasp of the language they're translating from, nor the language they are translating to, nor any literary understanding of either languages, or the context the works were written in, or the context of the verbiage used in english, or any knowledge of what translations should be.

But they do have great marketing.

[petesergeant]

Completely tangential, but the comments here remind me of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_translations_of_Aste...

Lots of interesting stuff of translating jokes and references into a foreign language

[whall6]

I just finished Crime and Punishment (translated by these two). What an excellent experience.

[ubutler]

Is it “this couple reign” or “this couple reigns”? The former just feels wrong despite it being the title.

[benterix]

Looks terrible to me but apparently both are acceptable:

https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/is-couple-singular-o...

> When writing of a couple getting married, it is more common to use the plural form ("the couple are to be wed"). When writing of an established couple, it is more common to use a singular verb ("the couple has six puppies, each more destructive than the next").

So according to MW we're a bit more right than NYT.

[jgwil2]

I'd expect the former in British English, because in that standard, grammatically singular nouns that refer to multiple people are conjugated in the plural. The latter would be typical for American English. It's a bit surprising to see the former used by an American author in an American publication, however.

[Synaesthesia]

I think reigns sounds better. A couple is actually a singular noun.

[pjc50]

Translation issue from the original English.

(joke)

[sesm]

Crime and Punishment is a part of mandatory literature curriculum in schools.