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The Vosgian Beast posted:You know a goon made an interesting post on this elsewhere https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3728926&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=50#post464107869 Yeah, that's worth repeating: I'm sure that they mean well. But we all know how the road to Hell is paved. There are really only two things wrong with Pevear and Volokhonsky: They can't do the one thing that they've set themselves to, and the credulity of the literary establishment and the reading public marginalizes the people who can - which is just about anybody else translating Russian literature. You go to a bookstore to buy some Russian classic, and you'll be lucky to see one other translator besides Constance Garnett (who wasn't terrible, but who's almost never going to be your first choice, and even then only with later revisions... which aren't public domain, so you won't see them anyway). Dostoyevsky has this the worst; I've seen displays with all of his major works, all in P&V translations. And even on Amazon, where you can buy any translation you care to, nine times out of ten, theirs are going to be perched at the top of your search results, basking in endless hopelessly naive five-star reviews. P&V are a loving cancer, but if I wrote that in Russian, they'd probably translate it as "a cancer that copulates". Here's how they translate. Volokhonsky is a native Russian speaker who just about knows English. Pevear does not know Russian. Volokhonsky goes through the Russian text and translates it word-by-word, with Pevear rewriting the resulting English into syntactically intelligible sentences. To what should be nobody's surprise, they manage to miss the most basic points of whatever they translate. Here are some examples that come quickest to my mind: Notes from the Underground is about a spiteful man. He is animated by his spite. P&V, bravely defying a century of tradition, have him describe himself as "wicked". Short of "bad", there could not be a more simple-minded rendering of the idea; in fact, it becomes all but meaningless in context. I'm not calling Volokhonsky simple-minded, but I am saying that her grasp of English is insufficient for her Dostoyevsky to be anything else. (I once saw a staff-written blurb in a bookstore for the P&V translation that called it "a powerful depiction of modern urban depression" - a pleasant enough description that has nothing at all to do with the book's philosophy. If that's the kind of impression you get from it, you might not actually be reading Dostoyevsky's book.) In War and Peace, one of the characters is a teenaged girl who already has hairs on her upper lip. Any translation prior to 2007 will tell you that. In P&V's, she has a moustache. The Brothers Karamazov has a scene where the abusive Fyodor Karamazov mocks his son Alexey for his reverence to his dead mother. When Alexey breaks down sobbing, his brother Ivan, himself enraged, reminds Fyodor that Alexey's mother is his mother too. P&V's version reverses this, with him instead saying that his mother is Alexey's too, as if Fyodor had been thinking of her as "Ivan's" mother. This pivotal moment becomes complete nonsense. I could go into more detail, but other people already have (and they cover my Dostoyevsky examples, but I swear I found them myself). Honestly, though, most of the time they don't so blatantly mistranslate; it's usually a matter of being technically correct but bungling tone, a generalized numbing effect. It's still terrible. Don't read them. Also see https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-pevearsion-of-russian-literature/ https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-pevearsion-of-russian-literature/ Perhaps you should try again with a different author and translation team?
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Feb 20, 2017 00:17
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| # ¿ May 16, 2024 17:49 |
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