/lit/ - Literature

>>13281504
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-pevearsion-of-russian-literature/

>>/lit/?task=search&ghost=&search_text=pevearsion
More links to more explanations.

Outside of US, the amateurish ignorance of P&V translations is a known fact that makes people snicker. It's their marketing strategy for American public, focused on being the one and the best, makes critique look like earth-shattering revelation.

>>13055378
Garnett is the best translator of Dostoevsky (Gary Saul Morson, who wrote that "Pevearsion of Russian Literature" article /lit/ always cites, agrees). P&V are literalists, and the other translators are inferior prose stylists to Garnett. If you're an autist, just go with the revised editions. You can get revised TBK and Notes from Norton. I don't know about the others.

>>12941672
>https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-pevearsion-of-russian-literature/
fuck I hadn't seen this before I'm mad

have had to read p&v crime and punishment + notes from underground for school and looks like I got the butchered version

>>12941594
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-pevearsion-of-russian-literature/
https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2013/01/the-pevearvolokhonsky-hype-machine-and-how-it-could-have-been-stopped-or-at-least-slowed-down

>>12936788
On their translations in general,
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-pevearsion-of-russian-literature/

>>12869978
>>12870013
p&v is an utter shitshow, the "pevearsion" article that gets posted here a lot is correct in its critiques of their horrific work, but bizarre in its glorification of garnett's stilted garbage
mcduff is kino

>>12703156
This is all you've got? Lmao, absolutely pathetic. You're just as much of a brainlet as I thought.

>First of all, how did you make that list?
Google is a useful tool.
Andrei's review:
https://www.nytimes.com/1990/11/11/books/dostoyevsky-with-all-the-music.html
Where I found the Joseph Frank quote:
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/241840/the-brothers-karamazov-by-fyodor-dostoevsky-translated-by-richard-pevear-and-larissa-volokhonsky/9780679410034/
Where I found out numerous Slavic scholars endorsed P&V's translation of TBK:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/11/07/the-translation-wars

>This is also only impressive to hillbillies. Psychiatrists don't appraise surgeons, and surgeons don't appraise obstetricians. None of these is a translator, why is that?
Your hypocrisy is mind-blowing. You relentlessly spam Gary Saul Morson's Pevearsion article, and Morson isn't a translator. If the people I mentioned are irrelevant to this discussion because they aren't translators then Morson is just as irrelevant. By the way, Andrei is the son of a translator.

>>12692848
These histrionics are the reason I ignored the P&V hatred and read their translation of NFU. I know this is pasta but I'm going to dissect this nonsense anyway. First of all, P&V put out their first translation in 1990 and Oprah didn't endorse them until 2004. Between 1990 and 2004 they put out over a dozen translations, and many of those translations received glowing reviews. Andrei Navrozov, a Russian who was born and raised in Russia, loved their translation of The Brothers Karamazov and believed it was the best English translation of TBK ever written. Joseph Frank, the leading expert on Dostoevsky who wrote the definitive Dostoevsky biography, said of P&V's translation of TBK "[I] [h]eartily [recommend] [it] to any reader who wishes to come as close to Dostoevsky’s Russian as it is possible." Numerous Slavic scholars endorsed P&V's TBK translation before it found a publisher. I could post tons of other examples of the praise P&V have received, but I think these examples are strong enough to make my point.

As for all of the rambling about publishers, it's undeniably true that publishers pump out new translations for profit. It's also undeniably true that P&V are heavily marketed. But none of that automatically disqualifies P&V's translations. As for the ghost-writer claim, you need to provide some solid sources. Even the biggest P&V critics don't accuse them of relying on ghost-writers.

As for P&V lovers talking about Garnett nonstop, you P&V critics are equally guilty of this. The Pevearsion article rips apart every little thing about P&V but defends and/or ignores Garnett's glaring flaws. For example, Gary Saul Morson loves to mock P&V's translation methods but carefully neglects to mention Garnett's. What were hers? She treated translating like marathon running. She would try to get it done as fast as possible, and if she came across a word or sentence that would've been difficult to translate she would cut it out. She also wrote everything in her own style, completely ignoring the prose style of whoever she translated. There's a good reason Joseph Brodsky 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. They’re reading Constance Garnett.” To be fair, Garnett is underappreciated in today's world. Her work exposed millions of people to great Russian authors, and she was a talented writer. However, it's still ridiculous that Morson heaps praise on such a blatantly flawed translator and at the same time rips apart every single aspect of P&V.

I'm not claiming P&V are perfect. Hell, I've only read one of their translations. What I'm doing is showing that the debates that surround P&V and Garnett are a lot more nuanced than you, and Morson, make them out to be. Hopefully, this wall of text will lead to some actual discussion instead of the usual "lol P&V suck. here's an article. bye," memes.

Pevear and Volokhonsky is just a marketing label, like Beats headphones. It's not about content or quality, it's about making the consumers picture themselves discerning connoisseurs. That's why they put all that junk about the translation on the cover. I won't be surprised if it is found that ghost writers have been doing the main work now. Also, I'm not sure whether Oprah came first, and their business plan second, or vice versa.

Why do publishers need a fresh translation? Because they get the copy rights. Classic books sell, and it's nice to have a virtual contract with someone on the scale of Tolstoy that way. However, anyone can print a public domain text at a minimum price, and that's why Garnett is their main enemy. In every article/advertisement that praises them, it's shitty old Garnett vs perfect modern P&V (as if millions of people who enjoyed her translations in the 20th century, including top writers, were somehow too stupid to notice). They really care to never mention that many other translations exist, and that the development of theory and practice of translation has never stopped, because these are their direct competitors, and P&V look quite amateurish when they are seen in the whole context.

Links to serious reviews were posted many times: >>/lit/?task=search&ghost=&search_text=pevearsion

>>12597630
>>12597538
Garnett all day. Stay away from P&V.

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-pevearsion-of-russian-literature/

The Pevearsion of Russian Literature

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 ifpeople 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.

The danger their translations pose is this: if students and more-general readers choose P&V—and it is clearly the intent of their publishers here and in England that their editions become the universally accepted renditions into English for a generation or more—those students and readers are likely to presume that whatever made so many regard Russian literature with awe has gone stale with time or is lost to them.

>Since the P&V editions have begun to appear, students—who have no experience that would allow them to recognize the difference a translation can make—have wondered aloud to me why their peers using those versions in other classes seem to be reading something entirely different.

Pevear and Volokhonsky, who are married, work in an unusual fashion. She, a native Russian speaker, renders each book into entirely literal English. He, who knows insufficient Russian, then works on the rendering with the intention of keeping the language as close to the original as possible. What results from this attempt at unprecedented fidelity is a word-for-word and syntax-for-syntax version that sacrifices tone and misconstrues overall sense.

>Above all, translators need a thoroughgoing understanding of the work and a feel for the genre in which it is written. Garnett’s Victorianization of Tolstoy was not inappropriate; to produce an English version of Tolstoy, it really does help to know George Eliot and Anthony Trollope, both of whom Tolstoy loved. For Dostoevsky, familiarity with Dickens goes a long way, as Garnett surely knew. One cannot adequately translate a work one has not experienced with critical sensitivity, because it is that experience, not just the sequence of signs on a page, that one needs to convey.

Thoughts?

>>12485283
Garnett is more expressive in my opinion. P&V falls a bit flat, and feels a bit too modern
Some comparisons if you care for them https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-pevearsion-of-russian-literature/

>>12458298
Google “Pevearsion”

>>12438706
Here is a criticism of P&V's translations, I think they are popular because they are the newest translation and their publishers sank some money into marketing them.
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-pevearsion-of-russian-literature/

P&V translations are now known as pleb and virgin translations. This is cyber-law.

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-pevearsion-of-russian-literature/

>>12301786
>https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-pevearsion-of-russian-literature/
Read this (goes specifically into P&V's Notes) and you should get why it's a bad translation.

>>12300443
This article (by a professor of Russian literature) might be of interest to you:
>https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-pevearsion-of-russian-literature/
>Bernard Guilbert Guerney accomplished the impossible with a translation of Nikolai Gogol’s enormously difficult and complex Dead Souls, conveying the weirdness, linguistic inventiveness, and perfectly timed humor that had eluded everyone else, even Garnett. To be sure, Garnett and Guerney have their flaws, including some errors in meaning, but editing byjudicious scholars has often corrected those mistakes. Ralph Matlaw thoughtfully revised the Garnett version of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, and Elizabeth Allen did the same with many works in The Essential Turgenev. Susanne Fusso’s recasting of Guerney is the only Dead Souls worth reading.
There's more on Gogol/Dead Souls later too.
>>12300557
This a shitty argument, because there have been plenty of these types threads in the past with anons giving helpful information on good/bad translations. Lot of rubbish too, but better answers than you'd get on places like goodreads or reddit.
>>12300559
That's odd, /lit/ usually (rightfully) shits on P&V

>>12289109
https://www.scribd.com/document/40906160/The-Pevearsion-of-Russian-Literature

this is the classic one, you can find it archived elsewhere.

>>12129532
Post the whole range of critique.

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-pevearsion-of-russian-literature/
http://www.thinkaloud.ru/feature/berdy-lan-PandV-e.html
https://www.librarything.com/topic/260074
https://readingroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/the-art-of-translation/#comment-206
http://languagehat.com/the-translation-wars/
http://languagehat.com/more-translation-wars/
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/06/23/socks-translating-anna-karenina/
http://languagehat.com/janet-malcolm-vs-pv/
https://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2013/06/01/why-i-dont-read-pevear-and-volokhonsky-vtranslations/
https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2013/01/the-pevearvolokhonsky-hype-machine-and-how-it-could-have-been-stopped-or-at-least-slowed-down/

>>12128969
Read this, OP:
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-pevearsion-of-russian-literature/

>>12128969
They don't have a system, they are amateurs who bet everything on their ability to guess the best variant. The only reason you know about them (How many translators do you know in general, by the way?) is marketing.

Enough links for the sapienti:
>>/lit/?task=search&ghost=&search_text=pevearsion

I know a professional translator who has recently had a meeting with readers. He brought some old work, and suggested to make a different translation. In the end, they spent all that time discussing the meaning, style, allusions, and effects of each line in just a couple of paragraphs of the beginning. This is what you should expect from any honest translator, let alone the ones who work with classics.

>>12123526
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-pevearsion-of-russian-literature/

>>11904145
In other words, you haven't personally compared their translation with any other one, and rely on cherry-picked set of positive comments without any knowledge of how faithfully they reflect the whole spectrum of opinions, but pretend to know the facts.

>>/lit/?task=search&ghost=&search_text=pevearsion