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Comment by slackfan | Hacker News Reader

The Pevear and Volohonsky "translations" are an affront to english prose, russian literature, and the craft of translation in general. A heavily quantized LLM with an aneurism would provide the reader with a better translation than that trash.

(I used to be a professional translator for the relevant languages, so I have opinions™)

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Which translations would you recommend for Crime and Punishment or Dostoyevsky in general?

When I'm starting to read a non-English novel, the process of deciding which translation to use is half the fun. The Kent and Berbera (revised Garnett) version of Anna Karenina was mesmerizing.

Garnett (and editions of) are (quelle suprise) just fine.

Agreed on Garnett- but you might also like McDuffs

As a matter of tangent-(ial relation), have you ever come across or read any of Silverman's translations of mathematics or science from Russian? Supposedly they were slanted by opinion, a mis-informed Westerner's perspectives, and had a number of liberties such as re-arrangement (in a mathematics text!). I wanted to read the (more recent) original and asked a classmate to buy it on an exchange but have not met up afterward.

I have not, but you can verify for yourself - https://github.com/nika-skybytska/fa/tree/master/books has a copy of Komogorov/Fomin's text that's well known vs Introductory Real Analysis in his translation available on the Internet Archive. A cursory glance at the respective TOCs shows that there is reordering.

First couple of chapters match up, then it diverges heavily.

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