/lit/ - Literature

>>20023981
He was so autistic in his conviction that Pan-Slavic Orthodox Christianity was right, he didn't want to promote it the lame way, by opposing his Pan-Slavic Orthodox Christian self-insert to some paper thin 2D villains, and so he inadvertently created some of the greatest and most psychologically tormented characters in the history of literature.

>>20025139
I can see your point with many of his most complex characters. What I find incredibly fascinating are his very evil characters, who have no apparent motives and exist just for the sake of chaos. Rogozin in the idiot and Petrusha in picrel for example, I always wondered what he was thinking when he structured characters like these

>>20025250
>very evil characters, who have no apparent motives and exist just for the sake of chaos.
Russia has aleays been full of such people

>>20023981
>Reading P&V
>Thinking Dostoevsky is the GOAT

>>20025278
>actually thinking any of the others are superior
If you understand even rudimentary Russian is easy to say how accurate p&v are. The only detriment is that they are uncompromising in their accuracy and sometimes it doesn’t come across as smooth as the original Russian because the dialect is so different from english

>>20025278
Lol what do u prefer, Garnett? You are just reading Dostoy in Garnetts prose

>>20025278
don't post whores, coomer simp.

>>20025308
The issue with P&V for me and most others is that it just reads terribly, they have 0 literary instinct and the difference between them and Garnett or Maude (who for instance Tolstoy personally approved) is stark in terms of quality. That's all that matters to me, if you've translated a great Russian writer and managed to make him sound like shit, I'm gonna pass on the translation.
>>20025315
Maude but yeah Garnett is fine too

>>20025347
Garnett is terrible, she routinely fucks up tense and dictation. Again the only drawback to P&V is that they are uncompromising in their dedication to the literal meaning of the original Russian. But they are hands down the closest to the original as has been achieved in the English language

>>20025374
It's the age old question of the balance between accuracy and artistry, P&V are totally accurate in a soulless way, like a step above Google Translate, Maude and Garnett might sacrifice some accuracy for greater artistry and readability, but obviously if they go too far it changes the meaning completely. My undrrstanding is that Garnett doesn't go too far, while at the same time the translation is super clean and readable. You seem more concerned with trivial things like "tense" being completely accurate, which I don't understand.

reminder that the Prince in the Idiot is his self-insert.

who are your 5
>stavrogin
>pyotr
>stepan
>kirilov
>??? shatov?

>>20025551
Stavrogin Petrusha Kirillov and Shatov are definite, Stepan is maybe

>>20023981
Dmitri K
Shatov
The friend in C&P
Sonya
Grushenka

>>20025651
good taste

>>20025495
He was pretty clear about who the Prince was meant to be, and it certainly wasn't that (although he probably did self insert while writing it)

>>20025495
>>20026639
The prince was meant to be a very Christ like character, the human with perfect moral judgement. The only self insertion was the bits about his epilepsy

>>20025412
It's obvious you haven't read P/V are are probably just parroting some article you read online. Anyone with two functioning eyeballs can read them and see they're perfectly readable. I really don't know who you're trying to fool here. Their prose for Dosto might be kinda clunky but that's because Dosto was a bad stylist. Their Tolstoy for example reads completely differently. Also Tolstoy's approval for Maude doesn't mean anything, the dude died in like 1910 without having read any of the modern translations. For all we know P/V could have been his favourite.

>>20027174
This. Some guy did a blind translation test with AK and had people vote on which sounded better, and p&v got like 70% of the votes. You can read the excerpts see see why, they sound good and flow better than the others. https://benjaminmcevoy.com/translation-anna-karenina-best-pevear-volokhonsky-vs-constance-garnett-vs-aylmer-louise-maude/

Idk what this guy is saying, p&v are great translators which is why they're popular, and in a blind test you would prob have a hard time distinguishing between them and someone like Mcduff or Maguire. There's that anti-pevear Morsen article which started this whole thing, but afaik that article isn't taken seriously in academia, which is why you only ever see it brought up in places like 4chan or reddit.

>>20027174
I don’t understand the Garnett defence, like you say the P/V Dostoys are only clunky because Dostoy himself was clunky, he liked to use repetition and abrupt phrasing for dramatic effect. Garnett smoothed much of it out in romantic style to make it more palatable to western audiences, but in doing this she excised much of Dostoy’s humour and minor drama, which imo p/v are well ahead of the old translations for recapturing.
For example, the governors speech in Demons is legitimately hilarious in the p/v translation as Dostoy intended. The humour is almost entirely lost in Garnetts translation and comes off as much more serious.

Every dosto book I’ve read has the same main character and vaguely similar supporting roles. The only one that was honest about it was the gambler. It’s straight up a better version of notes and demons.

None of the characters in Demons are "great characters"

>>20023981
Dostoyevsky was brilliant at character psychology and creating a realistic depth to his subjects, but his books are not well-written in the sense of beauteous language. I can’t say I enjoy the way that his words fit together, I don’t think he’s a good prose stylist. Am I shallow aesthete? Is there something I’m missing by reading them in translation? Maybe, but I would just rather read something else.

>>20026831
>all the women are oozing over this weird good boy Christian guy with epilepsy, whose only quality skill is writing well
sounds like self-insert

>>20026831
>Christ like character
How? He doesnt even do anything.

>>20028386
Read on you dumb retard, he explains himself in the very same sentence.

>>20028003
Dostoy is above prose imo. His writing is kind of an anti-prose, he ignores conventions on purpose to add dramatic effect

>>20027988
You’re legitimately an idiot if you don’t think there are. Stavrogin and Petrusha at the very least are inarguable

>>20027284
Anna kerinina is the only translation by them I've read and I quite enjoyed it, but When I read brothers k I compared translations side by side and I liked ivesey and mcduff more

>>20029524
Avsey*

>tfw no Kolya spin-off

Just finished part 1 of the Coulson translation from Oxford of Crime and Punishment. Is it worse than the others or should I keep going without missing much?

>>20030710
Honestly of Dostoy’s major novels c&p probably matters the least in terms of translation. I’ve only read p/v and some of Garnett but there isn’t a whole lot of dialectic nuance & subtlety that are especially important in Demons, the Idiot, and BK. If you are enjoying the one you’ve got I would say keep going, but I would definitely recommend p/v for Demons and The Idiot and either p/v or MacAndrew for BK

>>20023981
I've only just started in on Dosto, loved Brothers K and am moving onto Crime and Punishment next. I would say Ivan and Misha are excellent, excellent characters. Alyosha is likeable but he's obviously outshined by his brothers as far as complexity goes.

Who do you think Dosto's top 5 best characters are, full stop?

>>20030789
FUCK. *Mitka

Now everyone will know I'm a fool....it's over.....

>>20030789
Very hard pick and also I’ve just started BK so bare in mind that doesn’t factor, but from what I’ve read

1.Stavrogin
2. Parfyon Rogozhin
3. Petrusha
4. Porfiry petrovich
5. The underground Man

>>20023981
Jordan Peterson got a lot of people to read this book. It's like when Oprah got people to read Faulkner.

>>20028003
hello nabokov

>>20028003
no, nothing wrong with wanting words and sentences at their most well-chosen/-written when you're reading tens of thousands of them

>>20028301
>he didnt read brothers karamazov

>>20028003
You need to be slavic to appreciate it wholly

Self-inserts work better if you're self-loathing.

>>20031621
i have. I fail to see what that has to do with our conversation.

>>20031530
What baring does Jordan Peterson have on this discussion

>>20032436
The majority of people ITT read it because of him. Cope.

>>20031649
Because his "self-insert" in BK is the most repugnant character in the book. Quite the contrary to prince Myshkin

>>20033223
Is our criteria for a Dostoevsky self-insert just whichever character has epilepsy?

>>20029430
Don't worry, I can see why midwits might find the characters great, but they are hollow.

>>20032622
You’re a faggot

>>20034085
Go back

>>20032436
He lives rent free in pseuds heads, just like how it's impossible to talk about Wagner without someone bringing up Hitler

>>20034094
>>20034096
>>20034166
>nooooo not my holy cow

>>20027174
This. I haven't read their dosto but they did Chekhov and I think it's great. Perfectly readable and in fact quite stylish

>>20034171
Impressive, you managed to wait nearly 90 seconds before you seethed. You should probably read Demons next, you might learn something.

>>20034177
Yes, their Chekhov and Tolstoys are really quite stylish. People read their clunky Dostoys and Gogols and think they are bad translators, when in the original Russian both Gogol and Dostoy were clunky writers

>>20027174
>It's obvious you haven't read P/V are are probably just parroting some article you read online.
Fascinating how obvious that is to you when it isn't true at all and you have no reason to assert that it is. Completely faggot way to respond. Your intellectual integrity is on display with that and your post deserves no further engagement.
You can also try not using the same quirky "P/V" instead of P&V next time you try to samefag. Your emotional investment in this conversation is very peculiar considering I was never confrontational.
P&V read like trash and it's not a rare sentiment, sorry. Read Maude or kill yourself for being a soulless subhuman, if you want to take the gloves off and be serious.

>>20034452
>Nuh uh I din samefag naht me and ackshually and P/V and blah blah and so on

>>20034627
The devil you say! Well, it's really too bad for me that the whole of 4chan pulled up to commend you for your genius on a post in which you're obviously unhinged and idiotic, and run train on my bitch, and give me the finger, all while looking exactly you. On the other hand, not sure how keen I would be to find my IQ in conformity with the average. Needless to say your seethe is what happens when #45842580976431 of the masses meets a real life human being, and attempts to fulfill his side of an academic dialogue with sputtering fighting words. I retreat wiping my face and conceding the point. Whatever you say, just don't hurt my family. "We are Legion," you say. "This," you say, "and we all agree that you're a fucking retard! P/V da best! Tolstoy big fraud-man! Make big talk but die right quick like! Me make big talk no die!" The argument is settled. My family and I have fled the premises. Your cum drips from my bitch's twat. Such is life when a real life human being contests his middling wit with the venerable heft of the masses. From now on I'll have to confine myself, in cowardice, to others of my species.

>>20034636
which chapter of demons is this from

>>20034645
How can you forget such an iconic ending? The contemporary backlash was substantial

>>20034636
go to the devil!

>>20034094
Why does Peterson make you seethe so much? Calm down tiger.

>>20034166
>r-r-rent free
Who's head? Your head. Pseud.

>>20023981
oh no! you said who's instead of whose! the pseuds will surely attack!

>>20034096
seething :) But it's ok, there is a reason the book is super popular, appeals to lots of people who find the characters to be gread

What do you guys think of "Humiliated and Insulted". I don't think I've ever seen it discussed much here. I haven't gone trough all my planned Dosto readings, but this was in a way very saccharine.

>>20035091
What the fuck?

>>20035515
My only regret is that I have but one updoot to give!

>>20030810
Isn't it Mitya?

>>20035515
Do you realize how fucking stupid you sound? Discrediting one of the greatest novels ever written because bad pronoun man said he liked it. For your sake I hope this is bait

>>20036472
>one of the greatest novels ever written
lol

>>20036495
Lol post top 5 novels faggot

>>20025250
i don't think they're evil for the sake of it. i think they see their actions as good most of the time, but are just really confused

>>20034636
unironically meds now

>>20036600
I don’t think Petrusha was confused at all. He seemed to be doing what he did because he wanted to upset the order and make people suffer, even the narrator believed the whole Shatov business was solely because Shatov had once spit in his face rather than being politically motivated

>>20023981
>How does he get away with it?

Saturated psykhoemotionality.

>>20027284
I wouldn't put too much stock in that poll since the one thing Garnett is is definitely more Victorianesque, and people are biased against stuff that sounds more formal regardless of the flow of prose (like how high school students view Shakespeare as 'old English'). That's the problem with populism: like asking those who are not musicians trained in theory to evaluate classical pieces. What one needs is a poll involving those who have the adequate sense for style, like 1000 William Gasses or something. Which is plainly impossible of course.

Without seeing the names the first was obviously P&V because the writing is plainly more modernized and less formal. The other two clearly have a better sense of flow in terms of minute things like consonance and meter though.

>>20037058
>what is least popular is always better

>>20037065
I didn't say that. I said that it's useless to use polls for the sake of a full evaluation because most people will not be able to delve into the deeper qualities and will view the text reductively. Do you expect the average netizen to be able to sense and evaluate which text has better meter and music?

>>20037080
Not necessarily, but I also don’t think you are given people enough credit. They have legit lives and thoughts like you. When a lot of people from different backgrounds can agree that a book like W&P and TBK is great, it’s safe to say it is. Times change but there are some universal themes that anyone can relate to.

>>20037106
I'm talking about the ability to evaluate prose qualities though, not the content. Compare:

>there will be the same wall between my soul’s holy of holies and other people, even my wife,

>there will be still the same wall between the holy of holies of my soul and other people, even my wife

Aside from the fact that P&V just splices together like 3 different clauses in the same sentence, with Garnett's translation (the 2nd one) you can see how she arranges the words to have maximum heft and impact. Track the 'll' sounds and see how shifting 'the holy of holies' forwards builds off the harder 'th-' to have more grandeur, while P&V's "my soul's holy of holies" feels more inert, like the sort of casual writing you'd see in an imageboard like this.

>>20037131
I don’t speak Russian and I have no dog in this fight, but there is legit criticism that can be leveled against Garnett as well

>>20037143
What does that have to do with anything?

>>20037058
>>20037131
Great posts

>>20037161
You were criticizing p&v. I’m about to go to bed so I’ll sum up my view of Garnett like this: she is arguably the most important translator in modern history and that makes her of interest in her own. Translations have improved though as there has been more demanded of them, and they can always be challenged. I like Garnett for Chekhov and that’s it. She’s okay with Tolstoy but there are better out there. There is reason to read Garnett though. She brought the Russian giants to Europe and America. When you are reading Garnett, you are reading the thread between Tolstoy and Hemingway & co. Her influence was huge. I think there are better translators at capturing style and readability , which is probably what I look for most in a translation

>>20037179
I mean my whole point was Garnett is better than P&V in terms of style. Readability is something else that is harder to pin down (I think Garnett is more readable than P&V because of her flow). But any arguments about power of style or lack of has to be done through linguistic analysis rather than polls.

>>20032622
I’ll admit that I did. Heard him talk so much about crime and punishment that I decided to give it a go. Enjoyed it but brothers k is better imo. Halfway through demons now.

>>20025651
>>20025551
Stepan is my favourite character from all of Dostoy's work. The archetype of the paranoid, mediocre "genius" who overestimates his own importance was something I hadn't seen before in a book and it was fucking sick

>>20037131
You miss the problem though, garnetts is farther from the original Russian.
The worst thing about reading Garnett is that you are reading Dostoy through her prose, I don’t appreciate her embellishments at all.

>>20038498
Then learn Russian. This is just the literalists vs liberalists debate. In my view if you retain as much semantic meaning as you can but sacrifice stylistic power, you're also not reading anything close to the original Russian. Literature is all about the balance of semantic and stylistic.

>>20038523
Disagree. Borges got me thinking about this with his story Pierre Mernaud. At some point when a translator starts adding their own embellishments it needs to be asked at what point Are you reading more of the translator than the author. Imo the best translations are as close as possible to the original text, and for that reason I will always consider p/v superior for their commitment to verbatim.
And no I’m not going to completely learn a new language just to read some books you retard

dostoyevskiy is shit prose artist so translations don't matter much

>>20038543
You got the wrong message from Pierre Menard.

Also Borges has an essay on the translators of the Arabian Nights that better shows the act of translation in all it's complications and complexities, how embellishments can themselves energize entire literary movements and be far more culturally important than 'faithful' ones, how the spirit of literature itself doesn't really give a damn about the sides of the debate, and how as there are genius writers there are also genius translators. Ultimately it doesn't matter in the case of Dostoevsky since multiple TLs exist anyway and you can read your awkwardly prosed version if you want. Ultimately the ones who decide the debate are the ones who actually translate.

>>20038621
>muh prose

>>20038232
I was cheering for him the whole time. Poor Stepan...

>>20038727
Can you give me your interpretation? I thought the message was one of the clearest from Ficciones, but then again I tend to take completely left field derivations from Borges

Also what’s the name of the Borges essay? I’ve been reading a lot of his non fiction lately, would like to check it out

As for the debate, I don’t think the p/v translation having awkward prose is a bad thing, as I’ve said above the reason it is awkward is because Dostoy was an awkward stylist in the original Russian. P/v do not struggle with stylistic prose, their Tolstoys are no less than the other translators - I’ve read their AK and Bridges’ W&P and I would say they are equal in capturing Tolstoy’s prose. Again the message doesn’t change between translations, but if you prefer the more lyric prose of Garnett et Al for Dostoy you are preferring the prose of the translator, not of Dostoy himself.

Is the idiot worth reading bros? I'm tempted To fill my Dosto/Tolstoy void but I've heard nothing but bad things about it

>>20039184
Yes. It’s his best after BK and Devils

>>20036472
>>20036066
listen to yourselves, you know I am right

>>20039895
Wow, so I might eat a leaf of lettuce as opposed to a radish or fart. Love lettuce. Mmm lettuce.