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

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.

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...

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.

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.

“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

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.

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.

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

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...

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

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?

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.

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.

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

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

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

Seeing this post on the the of the most massive combined missiles + drones attack on Ukrainian power grid, resulting in millions of people having no electricity and water...

Tolstoy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leo_Tolstoy