THE PEVEARSION OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE

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THE PEVEARSION OF RUSSIAN LITERATURE Anonymous Sun Feb 10 10:51:43 2019 No.12571465 [Reply] [Original]

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?

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/lit/ - Literature