Garnett is shit

[Anonymous No.16518369]

Garnett counted among her admirers Ernest Hemingway and D. H. Lawrence. Joseph Conrad, in a 1902 letter to Edward, lavished special praise on her version of Anna Karenina. “Of the thing itself I think but little,” he wrote, “so that her merit shines with the greater lustre.”

Not everyone thought so. “I shall never forgive Conrad this crack,” vowed Vladimir Nabokov, years later, in his seminal Lectures on Russian Literature. “Actually, the Garnett translation is very poor.” An émigré novelist who, like Conrad, wrote as brilliantly in English as in his native tongue, Nabokov loathed Garnett’s treatment of Tolstoy and saw it as his responsibility to defend his country’s literature from its most authoritative and celebrated translator. Having spent years painstakingly wresting Pushkin’s verse novel Eugene Onegin into English (many translators—Pevear and Volokhonsky included—regard the task of modifying Pushkin’s poetry as too complex to be attempted), Nabokov felt a kind of curatorial protectiveness of great works in their original languages. The mortal sin of the translator, he wrote, was to sacrifice what he called “absolute accuracy ” for the sake of readability. “A schoolboy’s boner is less of a mockery in regard to the ancient masterpiece than its commercial interpretation or poeticization,” he wrote. “The clumsiest literal translation is a thousand times more useful than the prettiest paraphrase.”

Nabokov lambasted Garnett’s linguistic errors, her inability to preserve complex syntactical flourishes, and apparent tendency to simply excise passages that she could not translate. Among Russian writers especially, the impression developed that she had churned out her translations with a meat grinder—timeless prose from writers as diverse as Dostoyevsky and Turgenev went in, but all that came out was the insipid narrative voice of Constance Garnett. Worst of all, she failed to satisfy Nabokov’s standard of slavish correspondence to the original work. “The person who desires to turn a literary masterpiece into another language,” he concluded, “has only one duty to perform, and this is to reproduce with absolute exactitude the whole text, and nothing but the text. The term ‘literal translation’ is tautological since anything but that is not truly a translation but an imitation, an adaptation or a parody.” In his lights, the labors of Garnett and many like her, measured in years spent sequestered in libraries with foreign usage guides, did not even rise to the level of translation.

[Anonymous No.16518398]

Based. Fuck Garnett. Those are the worst Dostoyevsky translations

[Anonymous No.16518407]

Garnnets decedents should unironically pay some sort of price for what their grandfather or whatever relation he is did. He can't get away with it.

[Anonymous No.16518429]

> The mortal sin of the translator, he wrote, was to sacrifice what he called “absolute accuracy ” for the sake of readability. “

yeah Nabokov is an idiot, translation is a compromise between many things inc. absolute accuracy and readability. To entirely sacrifice one for another is the act of a fool.

[Anonymous No.16518449]

>>16518429
>muh readability
Shut up nerd. Nabokov is right. Either a translation is completely literal or it doesn’t even qualify as a translation. This is why P&V are the best translators of Russian literature, because they translate exactly what the authors said without bothering to redo the jokes or style for an English audience. And Pevear never apologizes to his gay ass critics, making him extra based.

[Anonymous No.16518456]

>>16518369
Garnett's English "adaptations" are better than anyone else's because they're better written by a narrow margin or by a wide margin, thus producing a better novel. Whether they're more or they're less accurate translations than the alternatives isn't interesting to me; I'm not an historian or a Russian lit enthusiast, I care primarily about reading the best possible art available to me

[Anonymous No.16518475]

>>16518449
If P&V are the best translators of Russian literature then I have no interest in the quality of Russian translations. And if they have captured Dostoevsky's or Tolstoy's work better than anyone else, then neither Dostoevsky or Tolstoy were good writers, and I'm thankful that they've been massively improved by based Garnett

[Anonymous No.16518485]

i read all of Dosty's main works as a kid and loved them all, i didn't even consider translations back then, turned out they were all by Garnett, the only one i didn't enjoy as much was by P+V

[Anonymous No.16518492]

FUCK THIS FUCKING SHIT ADS THAT YOU MISSCLICK ON BECAUSE THE PAGE RANDOMLY UPDATES AND MOVES AROUND SO THAT YOU LOSE WHAT YOU WROTE.
Anyway. The meaning of the text and image you conceive in your mind as you read a text is what should be reconveyed in a translation. The prose poetry of the original is inherently connected with the sound of the language and is therefore always lost, just like my original and far better post is. The words have no relevance, a translator shouldn't care about the text beyond the image/meaning chronology as they occur when reading. This is even how the original author wrote the book, it's hoe you can rewrite the same line yet retain meaning.
A translator is meant to capture this pre-linguistic intuition.
This is also how a translation can even be, in theory, superior to the original if the prose never was good in the first place.

[Anonymous No.16518497]

If a translator isn't a good writer, they shouldn't be read.

[Anonymous No.16518502]

>>16518475
>calling Dostoevsky and Tolstoy bad writers on lit
I see you’re a supplier of the finest bait.

[Anonymous No.16518510]

>>16518497
Agree
>>16518485
>turned out they were all by Garnett, the only one i didn't enjoy as much was by P+V
Unsurprising. P+V can't write

[Anonymous No.16518818]

>>16518502
That's not what he was saying, you autist.

[Anonymous No.16518864]

>>16518475
P&V themselves specifically say that garnett's translations were generally the best.
1:03:56 timestamp on this vid
https://youtu.be/H2ykytca6Y8