https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/fyodor-dostoevsky/crime-an...
> “The reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that they aren’t reading the prose of either one. They’re reading Constance Garnett.”
> Garnett’s flaws were not the figment of a native speaker’s snobbery. She worked with such speed, with such an eye toward the finish line, that when she came across a word or a phrase that she couldn’t make sense of she would skip it and move on.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/11/07/the-translatio...
The big problem, though, is that we’re constricted by the supply of public domain translations. We simply can’t typically offer much more than Garnett, and if we could, they’re usually worse to read from a purely side-by-side English view, even if they’re more authentically Russian.
Certainly! If your reading is constrained to public domain works, you have basically no other option. I've read many books in translation and before I learned about the Constance Garnett controversy, I paid little to no attention to who translated the work that I'm reading.
I guess I'm trying to spread the word that the translation matters almost as much as the original work itself, and it may be worth doing research on various translations before picking one to read. And although the original works are still as great as ever, it seems to me that the translating profession has really come a long way since the 1800s. As a result I tend usually to look at more recent translations first.
> they’re usually worse to read from a purely side-by-side English view, even if they’re more authentically Russian.
I don't think I understand what you mean by this.
You can provide a sort summary of an argument you find compelling regarding Raskolnikov's motivations without adding about to the millions of words written on this subject. You are also free to describe your own interpretation without feeling obliged to add something novel or useful to what's already out there.
Considering how much I agree with you that Raskolnikov didn't "just need to keep his mouth shut" (a phrase that did show up in this thread), I'm actually and sincerely very interested in your interpretation.
https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/lost-in-translat...
And the article you cite is by David Remnick who was instrumental on spreading Iraq war lies at the New Yorker. Should we trust him now?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Remnick
"A lot of the people who made those mistakes are still occupying prominent positions, their credibility undamaged thanks to a new legend best articulated by New Yorker editor David Remnick, who later scoffed, “Nobody got that story completely right.”
Nobody except the record number of people who marched against the war on February 15, 2003 — conservative estimates placed it between six and ten million worldwide (I marched in D.C.). Every one of those people was way ahead of Remnick."
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/iraq...
Source: I'm Russian and have read Dostoyevsky.
Crime and Punishment, on the other hand, I found utterly compelling, and will probably re-read some day (which is a status few books achieve in my world).
I also really liked David McDuff's translation years ago.
Any of these are going to be miles better then Garnett, though.
https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/pevear-and-volokhonsky-...
One thing that struck me: two of the translation samples included the (correct/reasonable?) names for the street and bridge (Stolyarnyi Lane, Kokushkin Bridge). The others replaced the words with S-----i Lane, and K------n Bridge (or S. Lane etc).
I think I understand the problem. Cyrillic alphabet doesn't map to Latin alphabet, and there was no established English-language translation for the names in question. The two that attempted it even had slightly different spellings, akin to the problem we see with many Arabic names in English today.
This makes a big difference in readability, to me. The setting is supposed to be foreign and a bit unfamiliar to excultural readers, but K-------n looks like an error, a misprint, or an "(unintelligible)" in a transcription. That becomes part of the story, and it isn't intended as such by the author.
For this and other reasons, my vote goes to Sidney Monas, 1968. I'll add that note to my long and ever-growing TOREAD list. :)
The first line of the original is (asterisks mine, indicating where Dostoyevski intentionally did not write the name of a street or bridge):
"В начале июля, в чрезвычайно жаркое время, под вечер, один молодой человек вышел из своей каморки, которую нанимал от жильцов в **С — **м переулке, на улицу и медленно, как бы в нерешимости, отправился к **К —** ну мосту."
In English:
"On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge."
I assumed that the redactions were not in the original, and that the translators were avoiding complexity by presenting the English-speaking audience with a digstible form.
I guess I underestimated the translators, or the reading public. Thanks for the correction.
PS: I did not mean that Dostoevsky intended excultural readers to feel unfamiliar, but that excultural readers should expect (and maybe prefer) a certain amount of unfamiliarity in foreign works. I thought the translators were insulating their readers from it, which felt inauthentic.
I'm even more bothered by the idea of the translators "filling in the blanks" that were intentionally placed by the author. Curious that both translators who did so, used roughly the same names for each -- perhaps they are the real names that we know the author was referencing? Still, that's a bit presumptuous, I think.