Does any translator do a better job than this?

Does any translator do a better job than this?

Ch8 book 8 (the Karamazov brothers)

Constance Garnett omits the soldiers line.

What translation is it?

Avsey.

Memes aside, P&V seems to do poorly.

Thanks. I checked my copy too, and the Garnett revised by Yarmolinsky doesn't add in that soldiers line either.

Better version of P&V

McDuff probably has the best version of all

The translator that gets the prize for taking that unprintable rhyme and just going for it is Andrew MacAndrew:

>Soldier will be rough and blunt
>Always chasing after --------.

>Constance Garnett omits the soldiers line
That's very typical and Victorian of her

>that P&V rendering
Their refusal to even bother having that line scan properly, along with discarding the sexual aspect of the vulgarity, makes me shake my head about their popularity.

MacAndrew is exactly the same as this. Not sure which came first

That's not McDuff; this is:

>The soldier'll wear his bag of kit
>While I behind him wade through ...

Interesting that the content is so similar to P&V

While we're at it, here's the original Russian:

>Coлдaт бyдeт paнeц нecть,
>A я зa ним...

So, content-wise, McDuff and P&V adhere to the original
I assumed P&V had changed it; mea culpa

Translation anxiety is a subset of obsessive compulsive disorder.

I think it's warrented considering how different translators have rendered this song.

YO I HAVE A P&V OR GLENNY VERSIONS OF THE MASTER & MARGARITA. WHICH DO I GO WITH? I CANT GET BURGIN OR W.E CAUSE AUSTRALIA AND NOT PAYING 20 BUCKS WHEN I HAVE TWO COPIES ALREADY

'shit' doesn't sound as such an indecent word that it would produce 'a furore' even amongst 19th century audience desu

Can anyone explain this, please? Is the ellipsis supposed to evoke a vulgar word that the reader might guess by rhyming it with the line above? If so, what would that be in the original? Anyone care to do a literal translation of those two lines, please?

>Can anyone explain this, please? Is the ellipsis supposed to evoke a vulgar word that the reader might guess by rhyming it with the line above?

yes, and as you can see the translations try to follow it

>If so, what would that be in the original?

dosto (and the russian censorship of that time) was too prude and it's pretty hard to guess what it actually was supposed to be since unlike in these translations, the original line is broken too early, there should be more than one additional word in it

>Anyone care to do a literal translation of those two lines, please?

the soldier will carry his backpack
and i behind him...

i googled a bit and it seems the most people think that originally it should be something like 'в cpaкy лeзть' or 'в жoпy лeзть', 'crawl into the ass'

'ass' was a rather rude word back then. so, as you can see the version from follows the text pretty closely (i probably was wrong in my previous post too, a certain word for 'shit' could be quite rude back then too)

the version from the op's post follows the spirit of it more closely imo though

So which translation is the best?

We can see p&v and McDuff are much more literal in these examples. Perhaps if your going for accuracy they are a better choice, but I have read criticisms of McDuff that his English is unnatural as a result.

Avsey's objective was to effect Dostoevsky's style more than anything. So while his translation may be a little more lose in parts the outcome is still great and you see it in this example in the thread.

Garnett is outdated.

The rest I'm not sure.

The fact that the word cpaкa was used in Dosto times is hysterical. Жoпa I get, but I can't imagine a person of that time ever saying cpaкa

What about Notes from Underground? Garnett seems most common, is it decent there? I'd love to get into Dostoevsky, but from what I'm seeing here, how it's translated is really important to how much I'll enjoy it.

I have no idea. You'd have to find a really telling passage and compare them. This example for tbk is good because it really exemplifies the translators style. But you can always compare the first chapter

All of Garnett is pretty good

Hard to do when I haven't read it yet, but I'll look into just using first chapter comparisons.

I'll keep an eye out for Garnett then, thanks.

I haven't read TBK, but in trying to pick out a translation, Avsey's impressed me because it was the only translation I saw that, at the beginning, called Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov's death "mysterious."

The other translations I looked at (P&V, Garnett, McDuff) all used awkward words: McDuff called it a "fishy" death, Garnett called it a "gloomy" death, and neither sounded right to me. P&V calls it a "dark" death, which is even more awkward than the others. So, I thought, fishy/gloomy/dark, all these words don't seem to fit, but seeing them together, Dostoevsky must have used a word that had the same sense as "mysterious."

And Avsey's translation call his death "mysterious."

I see now that MacAndrew does the same, too, now that I look.

^ By the way, I don't speak Russian, when I said that the translation didn't sound right to me, I meant it was awkward in English.

"murky"

yes

probably

>So which translation is the best?

Good translations are provided by David Magarshack, an older but decent one; Ralph Matlaw's revision of Garnett, which addresses many of the problems with her work; MacAndrew, a fairly loose work that captures the spirit well; McDuff, a good newer choice; and Avsey, another good recent option from a translator who worked on Dostoyevsky exclusively.

>Notes from Underground
Magarshack is a good choice for this too. The next time I read it, I think I will get hold of the Jane Kentish translation. One quick test of a good translation is whether the book is properly understood in the first sentence in psychological/sociological terms (e.g., 'I am a spiteful man') and not moral ('I am a wicked man' is a red flag).

it's the ukrainian word for ass, and a pretty old one