Best Dead Souls translation?

[Anonymous No.21275885]

Choose (blindly) the one that reads best. Will tell which is which after 15 posts.

[Anonymous No.21275961]

bump
come on guys :(
they're just 5 small excerpts

[Anonymous No.21276129]

Top right makes "the kind of carriage" appear to refer to "provincial capital", that just ain't right
I'll study all excerpts in full later when I have time

[Anonymous No.21276225]

I prefer the middle-right one, and judging by how it looks like a scan of an old book, I have a sneaking suspicion it's by Constance Garnett.
The middle-left one is awful. It completely alters the original sentence structure. And "The gentlemen in the barouche was no Apollo" wtf? And "In a nutshell" too. Terrible.
Top-left is probably the second best one.

[Anonymous No.21276242]

>>21275961
No one here reads.

[Anonymous No.21276285]

>>21276225
After scanning through them all once again, I agree that middle right reads the best. Top left is the worst for me; it's pretty tedious to read. At first I thought middle left was okay, but then I realized it inverts the order of the carriage entering the town and the types of people who would ride in it, which to me is nonsensical.
I plan on reading dead souls soon so I'm curious to see who did which translation. I was planning on getting the everyman library version, but the results of this might change my mind.

[Anonymous No.21276296]

>>21275885
they are all gay and shit except for bottom right

[Anonymous No.21276299]

>>21276296
kek

[Anonymous No.21276307]

>>21276296
now that's what I call shitposting

[Anonymous No.21276338]

>>21276285
Alright, since the thread will likely not reach 15 posts (fucking Euro hours) here are the answers:
Top left: Maguire (Penguin Classics)
Top right: Guerney (Yale University Press; recommended by Nabokov)
Middle-left: Rayfield (NYRB)
Middle-right: P&V (Vintage and Everyman's Library; I'm considering getting this one even though I dislike their Dosto)
Bottom-left: Hogarth (2nd translation ever, early 20th century)
Bottom-right:

[Anonymous No.21276350]

Top 3 most retarded moves in literature:
>Gogol intended the novel to be the first part of a three-volume work, but burned the manuscript of the second part shortly before his death.

[Anonymous No.21276355]

>>21275885
Top right obviously, it’s the translation Nabokov praised

[Anonymous No.21276424]

>>21276338
Nice, good to see the translation I preferred is the Everyman's Library version.
Good thread OP. I've heard a lot of people shitting on P&V in opposition of most critics. I have the Coulson translation of C&P in an old Oxford paperback, and it's miserable and tedious to read, so another thread like this comparing different translations of Russian works would be great.

[Anonymous No.21276439]

>>21276424
Yea, I've made other translation comparison threads in the past (Democracy in America, Beowulf, among others). Sadly with the death of z-lib it's harder to get the samples. But I'm glad someone enjoyed the thread.

[Anonymous No.21276461]

>>21276338
>Middle-right: P&V
Now that I know this I feel stupid for thinking it was done by Garnett lol. P&V and Guerney seem like the two best options for the entire text. Maybe leaning slightly more in favour of Guerney because of Nabokov's praise. It's hard to judge off just a few sentences.

[Anonymous No.21276526]

>>21275885
You can not determine quality of a translation through an excerpt, you need the full context to actually have a clue. Translations which read well in an excerpt almost always sacrifice nuance and sometimes even meaning, and translations which are autistic about preserving meaning and every single nuance often read terribly but are truer to the original. With most works we can find a middle ground.

You should probably pick a short work with many translations and spend a week or two studying them, you will learn a great deal about picking a translation, far more than any thread on 4chan can teach you.

[Anonymous No.21276532]

>You can not determine quality of a translation through an excerpt, you need the full context to actually have a clue

[Anonymous No.21276593]

>>21276532
How will I ever recover from such a scathing rebuttal?

[Anonymous No.21276600]

>>21276338
I'm happy to see that what I considered 2nd best is penguin as I have dozens of their books
>>21276225
I find I don't mind seeing awkward sentences in text as it means it is a close translation and just take it for what it is.

Good thread OP

[Anonymous No.21276602]

>>21275885
Middle right, without question.

[Anonymous No.21276731]

>>21275885
Thanks for quality thread OP

[Anonymous No.21276740]

>>21276225
>To the door of an inn in the provincial town of N. there drew up a smart britchka--a light spring-carriage of the sort affected by bachelors, retired lieutenant-colonels, staff-captains, land-owners possessed of about a hundred souls, and, in short, all persons who rank as gentlemen of the intermediate category. In the britchka was seated such a gentleman--a man who, though not handsome, was not ill-favoured, not over-fat, and not over-thin. Also, though not over-elderly, he was not over-young. His arrival produced no stir in the town, and was accompanied by no particular incident, beyond that a couple of peasants who happened to be standing at the door of a dramshop exchanged a few comments with reference to the equipage rather than to the individual who was seated in it.
Constance Garnett

[N E M O . !!GgBWHLRiayD No.21276847]

A perfect example of prose literature that should not be read "translated".