Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

This, it's in the process of becoming a shitty meme. I asked somebody to provide actual scholarship on why P&V are shit compared to others, and they only cited an article about some moron comparing their translation to other translations only in English, because the writer didn't speak Russian. It was all based on the assumption that whatever randomly chosen translation was better.
I'm not a strong reader in Russian, so I asked my Russian profs what they thought of various translations, and for most major works they thought P&V were best. They said it captured the spirit of the language and work better than others, while still being accessible. One of profs hadn't read much of the translations for obvious reasons, but the other taught a Russian lit course in translation from time to time, so he'd read their translations of Dead Souls, Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov, and Anna Karenina fairly recently.

> accessible

Thank you, you've just explained to me why P&V are worthless.

I want something that reads like a Victorian novel. Also, of course it's going to be a question of which is better English prose - if we read Russian, we wouldn't be looking at translations, would we?

How are they that different? I've read a few side by side comparisons or Garnett and P/V and there were just a few very minor syntax differences. I don't see how people can say that one is "butchering the book" or stuff like that

You mean Richard (((Pevear))) and Larissa (((Volokhonsky)))

The scoop on P&V is that they foreignize the prose. So they leave in literal stuff that makes little sense, prose that gets clunky, strange idioms, etc. some people like this, they say "So much closer to the Russian!" when clearly they have no idea. it definitely "reads russian" more so than standard translation

one of their innovations is leaving the French untranslated in Tolstoy, which is now standard.

they are neither as great as the marketing machine suggests nor as horrible as Veeky Forums suggests.

I think they use Nabokov as their model of a translator but might be making that up

Dos their Judaism affect their translation?

>Don't read their work, OP. They've been heavily marketed, but their methodology (and output) is seriously flawed, despite (really because of) the seeming advantage of having two people. First, Volokhonsky, not a native speaker of English, makes a crude and wooden gloss into English; then Pevear, who proudly has avoided fluency in Russian, makes it grammatical. Among other things, they often murder Russian idioms by doing this, and their wording is often really stiff and stilted.

>Would you trust a translator who can't speak the language he is translating?
>Then why trust Richard Pevear?

>>“I’ve never been curious to see Russia,” Pevear said during one of our conversations in Paris. “I’m not curious to see the city of Moscow. Should I be?”

Just a friendly reminder that Pevear & Volokhonsky are hip hacks, and Constance Garnett's version is the one that actually influenced Western readers in the 20th century, so if you find your favorite writer gushing about Dosto, they read the Garnett version.

Well, they can't butcher Tolstoy. At least, he's that enjoyable, and I've also read the Maud translations which seemed as good, although I should return to them.

They fucked up Dostoevsky hard though.

I posted this article here before but here it is again. Gives has the knowledge and the credentials to make a reasoned judgment and he endorses P&V. On top of that, every one of their translations that I have read has been excellent. They capture the true voice of the various authors instead of making all the Russians sound the same.

nybooks.com/articles/2007/11/22/tolstoys-real-hero/

>one of their innovations is leaving the French untranslated in Tolstoy

Are you fucking retarded? How is an editorial choice an "innovation?"
My Magarshack translations do the same thing.
I swear P&V goons will literally say anything.

How did they fuck up Дocтoeвcкий?

hey, americucks. post some the same passages from the three translations so I can judge

There's no objectively "good" or "bad" translation. The recent trend in translations which Peaver and Volokhonsky are a part of has been to avoid overly smoothing or "Englishing" a text and instead to try and preserve something of the author's style as it appears in their native language. Whether this is desirable or even possible is a philosophical debate, or one of taste.

Here's a good article about Don Quixote translation that touches a bit on these issues, do a search for "Volokhonsky" to find the passage where they talk about their translations:

believermag.com/issues/200407/?read=article_wimmer

I don't see the point of people reading P&V over the Maud's, when the latter worked and lived with Tolstoy and his translations approved by them. Plus, Tolstoy was a polyglot, so there's an obvious avantage in terms of translation.

The question isn't the the "avoid overly smoothing" but that P&V have no perspective to know what they are or are not smoothing over.

Fuck. Figes, not "Gives."

They're academics who have taught and studied Russian literature for decades, so I think "no perspective" is rather strong.

Yeah in the copy of Devils translated by garnett she leaves it untranslated. I also have an copy of Mann's Magic mountain published in 1999 that has whole pages in French that aren't translated.

>implying we should trust academics over experts on Veeky Forums posting from the basement

P&V are great. Pevear writes great introductions and notes too. McDuff is great, aswell as other modern translators. Just avoid the really old translations.

Solid argument:
nybooks.com/articles/2016/06/23/socks-translating-anna-karenina/

For me personally, there's not much of a difference. The vitality of Dosty and the music of Tolstoy sing through in the characters and the wolrds built around them. Garnett has not failed my reading of Dosty (C and P, Brothers K round 2) but P+Vs Notes and Brothers K were just as enchanting as whatever semblance of Dosty Garnett first introduced.

P+V's Anna felt a bit more awkward, or fake Victorian and foreignized, so perhaps there their true colors showed a little; but, ultimately, that was a transformative reading experience.

About to re-read all of Tolstoy in a few weeks, and I'll probably go with the Garnett just because of their accessibility in the B+N classics (there aren't many bookstores in my parts, and I don't want to go with P+V because, like one post said, the Tolstoy praised by Faulkner would have been Garnett or Maude, the latter of which seems to have vanished from popular production so I have no reason to hold out for a copy).

Though, above all, I think the common sense logic of "these fuckers don't know the language they're writing in" is a good guidance for my future approaches to Russian lit in general. There seems something too homely, too silently driven by fame with a false humility, too put on by P+V for me to trust them anymore.

Are you Magarshack's son or something? Good lord pal relax

Shit.

Basically translating every word literally and then building something out of that that they think sounds nice, the worst possible way you could translate anything.
This is me fumbling my way through Latin in high school

Hacks like this are the reason people shitpost about translations

Try the revised Garnetts for Tolstoy. order em online unless you dont have a mailbox

Literally not even close to the case.

He doesn't speak Russian and that's really all you need to to hear to dismiss them completely.

Americans like them because of the marketing though

Stupid and uninformed.

The argument in the article you linked is interesting, but it seems ultimately flawed since each side-by-side comparison of the translations is useless without the original Russian

Does Richard Pevear speak Russian?

Not fluently. He's probably B2-C1ish

nybooks.com/articles/2016/06/23/socks-translating-anna-karenina/

The NYRB just had an article on this. Pretty good stuff, and they are not a fan.

are you retarded? yes he does

he speaks professional fluency russian (one step below native fluency) and is much more fluent than the "basic russian" that gets tossed around by people trying to discredit the duo

Compare to I think the analysis in the Figes article addresses why it sometimes seems less fluid.

Same reason I read the Muir Kafka - that's the version that gave him a reputation in the English-speaking world.

Not so - this is always a question of which makes the best English prose.

> Tolstoy praised by Faulkner would have been Garnett or Maude, the latter of which seems to have vanished from popular production so I have no reason to hold out for a copy).

Exactly. Could you try Abebooks?

> Though, above all, I think the common sense logic of "these fuckers don't know the language they're writing in" is a good guidance for my future approaches to Russian lit in general. There seems something too homely, too silently driven by fame with a false humility, too put on by P+V for me to trust them anymore.

This.

That's not the case, in my opinion. It is important both to be readable and to reflect the language of the original.

Nope. No real reader reads ugly translations just because they're more accurate. The literary translator must be able to produce literature, not just copy across the phrases.

A good translator does both.

as much as Natasha Wimmer speaks Spanish

>scholarship
>needing to read Russian
Is it not enough to just say something's badly written? I don't know Russian, but a lot of their M&M felt like the work of an ESL student. It was just badly written, and it seems safe to assume that Bulgakov was at least fluent in writing Russian, which to my mind also means it's a bad translation.

>Figes
Kek, he's the guy who sock puppeted bad reviews of other Russia historians' work on Amazon.

Then when he was caught he blamed his wife.

you're retarded

Do you guys think he puts his P inside her V? XD ;)

i read their translation of master and margarita and enjoyed it, with no basis for comparison

i read the first book of war of peace of theirs and didn't like it nearly as much as the maudes or rosemary edmonds

no u