How Chekhov invented the modern short story

I put together Garnett’s Crime and Punishment translation for SE at https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/fyodor-dostoevsky/crime-an... if anyone wants to read it.

And I would argue that Muslim scientists such as Ibn al-Haytham employed the scientific method before Bacon.

Plato invented the modern IngSoc: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24069572

Bacon invented the modern (bitstream) cryptographic encoding: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24339584

Plays in general are probably the easiest form of writing to distill into stereotypes since they rely heavily on dialogue and that's bound to get repetitive when thousands of works are written. I can think of a dozen plays right now where there were similar moments of young adults arguing with relatives (usually not parents but aunts or grandmas) or someone monologuing about a death that happened offscreen but in a vague way. All of these moments can be deconstructed and I do find them repetitive if I read a few plays in a row... but I still feel like it's wholly a matter of preference. If you like those elements - sad women staring out of windows, for example - you'll like the plays.

How this movie isn’t considered one of the best of all time is beyond me.

They are not without their detractors - part of it is they take on difficult work, some of which hasn't seen serious translator attention for a while. Personally, I find the results poor but obviously lots of people like them.

Chekhov's short stories are an English translator's nightmare though - there's a reason he's much more famous as a playwright in the English-speaking world.

The first linked article (commentarymagazine.com) suggests that the Garnett/Matlaw translations of Dostoevsky’s "Notes from Underground" is a better translation than the P&V translation.

As an example, it says the following:

> ...His word for such acts of self-injury is, in English translations before P&V, “spite.” It is fair to say that to miss the concept of spite is to miss the work entire.

> But that is just what P&V do. Instead of “spite,” they give us “wickedness.” Now, the Russian word zloi can indeed mean “wicked.” But no one with the faintest idea of what this novella is about, with any knowledge of criticism from Dostoevsky’s day to ours, or with any grasp of Dostoevskian psychology, would imagine that the book’s point is that people are capable of wickedness.

From my copy of the P&V translation for this book, toward the end of the Foreword, Pevear says the following:

> There is, however, one tradition of mistranslation attached to Notes from Underground that raises something more than a question of “mere tone”. The second sentence of the book, Ya zloy chelovék, has most often been rendered as "I am a spiteful man." Zloy is indeed at the root of the Russian word for "spiteful" (zlobnyi), but it is a much broader and deeper word, meaning "wicked," "bad," "evil." The wicked witch in Russian folktales is zláya véd'ma (zláya being the feminine of zloy). The opposite of zloy is dóbryi, "good," as in "good fairy" (dóbraya feya). This opposition is of great importance for Notes from Underground; indeed it frames the book, from "I am a wicked man" at the start to the outburst close to the end: "They won't let me...I can't be...good!" We can talk about the inevitable loss of nuances in translating from Russian into English (or from any language into any other), but the translation of zloy as "spiteful" instead of "wicked" is not inevitable, not is it a matter of nuance. It speaks for that habit of substituting the psychological for the moral, of interpreting a spiritual condition as a kind of behavior, which has so bedeviled our century, not least in its efforts to understand Dostoevsky.

Translations are, by their very nature, open to interpretation and oftentimes small details and nuance gets lost. And then you get debates about things like the aforementioned comparison. As such, it's more practical to look for a good translation than the best translation.