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Comment by clipperton | Hacker News Reader

What sort of cultural points might be missed on a non-Russian person reading Dostoevsky? I just finished Crime and Punishment a couple months back and am curious, if you have the time.

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Not that guy, but, Dostoevsky is pretty frequently referencing thinkers and cultural currents that were important in Russia at the time he was writing, and there are references like the "yellow card" and "ordinary paper" that are just totally opaque unless someone explains them to you.

I'd be curious too. I read Crime and Punishment, Notes from Underground, The Double, and other short stories—and I found them to make quite a bit of sense.

I didn't get the sense that I'd extracted everything from "The Grand Inquisitor" (excerpt from The Brothers Karamazov), but I got the feeling it was just because it was more deep and compact, but would yield fruit with further study (even as an American).

GEB (Hofstadter's book) has a chapter about exactly this. Using Crime and Punishment as an example it is shown how different translations struggle with the lack of context.

ah shit. i also read C&P last year and GEB is on my shelf untouched. welp now i’m obligated...

Haha—this is the first thing I've heard about GEB in years that makes me again somewhat interested in reading it. There was a point when I was a teenager where it seemed like probably the most interesting book on the planet, and I'd read a decent bit of it then; but years later—after studying a bunch of math, CS, and philosophy stuff—when I'd consider reading it there just didn't appear to be enough new meaty stuff of interest (though it still looks like an enjoyable packaging of many already familiar things). I also disagree fundamentally with the possibility of a material 'strange loop' resulting in another ontological category, so I feel like I'd be missing drive to reach the conclusion.

I'd be curious to hear any opinions on GEB by those with decently strong math, cs, and/or philosophy backgrounds—might it still be worth reading? (I mean it's damn long...)

If you are interested in the context analysis in Crime and Punishment then you can read just those few pages. He goes over just the first couple sentences of the book if I recall correctly. It's not an explanation of the context for the entire book by any means but an example of how much context could be needed to read a simple sentence.

His essay about machine translation is quite illustrative of the issues of cultural context as well. Even the best translations lose a substantial chunk of meaning, because it’s often not just what the author said, but also how he said it, which particular words were used, and subtle other meanings and gradations attached to that particular choice of words (and, in Russian, the word order as well).

When I was growing up I read a ton of sci-fi. One of my favorite works is “Stranger in a strange land” by Robert Heinlein. I had two different translations of it. One was good, another one was a turd, and neither came anywhere close to living in the US for 15 years and _then_ re-reading the book in its original form. And that’s sci-fi, a relatively “shallow” literary genre.

Indeed, while a separate issue from cultural context of 19th century Russian literature, translation is a literary genre by itself. I also noticed that Americans are generally unaware of this. Not that I'd blame them. I wouldn't care about translation myself if I had been a native English speaker and enjoyed immediate access to the enourmous body of English literature :)

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