Rate my college shelf

Depends on what you're looking for apparently. Pevear and Volokhonsky are usually said to be the ones who translate closest to the original Russian. But I cant back any of this up since I don't speak Russian.

Is Garnett that bad?

No. Anyone but P&V.

I just did my own research. Tolstoy personally asked Garnett to continue translating his own works. I don't care what P&V say; Tolstoy knew Dost better than Dost knew Dost, and I'm trusting his judgement here.

I see you have Ulysses, but where are Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ? Are they on your shelf of books you've already read ?

Thats good, it took me awhile and some de spooking before I managed to find a good balance.

don't read the back of that the edition of Ulysses, it tells you the last few sentences, completely tells you how it ends

To the right of the Brothers Karamazov

You are wrong. P&V are popular to hate on here, but they in fact translate better and closer to the original than anyone

Oh, I didn't notice that. But I still don't see Dubliners.

According to?

me

>JavaScript
Pleb.

Avsey is the best and the only one who knows proper English ("The Brothers Karamazov" doesn't even make sense).

What are your qualifications? They're considered by many people (i.e. not on this board) to be bad translators. I would take you seriously if you attempted to engage with the criticism. I'm not suggesting I know the 'best' translation, but after reading some of P&V, Garnett and Magarshack, and the criticism of P&V, they seem to be obviously the worst.

>"The Brothers Karamazov" doesn't even make sense
yes it does yfr

>yfr

yfr

>student and able to afford books
fuck off billionaires

This desu. I was almost more triggered by learning a shit-tier language than just owning a bunch of "visit's Veeky Forums once" books

Here's the problem with PV: they're great if you speak Russian. To that effect, a number of Russian authors have praised them for their very literal translations.
However, native speakers are not the target audience of a translation. I've read from Russian and Slavic literature professors (plenty of them native speakers) who bemoan how PV fail to make the text intelligible to English-speakers. Not only words but also concepts must be translated. The English speaker must be made to understood in relatable terms why Alexei chooses to write to the estranged Anna in French rather than choosing between Bы or Tы.

You're right but I still prefer The Mario Brothers over The Brothers Grimm.

Many reputable sources, such as the NYT. You can see for yourself -- compare the Russian original to P&V's and Garnett's, and it will be made apparent to you that P&V are better. It is more marked in Tolstoj than Dostoevskij, but it shows for both.

But what about the karamazov brothers versus the brothers karamazov?

Most of the comparisons I have seen here and elsewhere show only the Englishes side by side, but if you put them next to the original Russian, it becomes obvious how much Garnett et al. change. P&V is much much closer to the original works by the authors than any other English translation.
A lot of this is context. I was quite happy with the endnotes Pevear provided for War and Peace; they explained most of the ideas &c. rather well

Link, please?

Can you read Russian?

Yes. I have passed the C1 cert test for Russian, though my vocabulary isn't super literary, so I still have to look up words from time to time. Otherwise though I am pretty close to fluent (taking the C2 test in a couple months).

You seem to be arguing for literal translation. I suppose this is fine in a way but it's not what most readers are after. Slavic languages (I know one, not Russian though) aren't much like English and translating literally will produce a lot of awkwardness. It's not like translating from French.

Also it's worth pointing out that neither P nor V fully know both English and Russian. The idea that them working together will magically be like a single competent translator is pretty weird.

>Going to College
Why would anyone do this?

I'm not saying it has to be super loteral, just that the translation should do a reasonably good job of reflecting the original Russian. My concern with translations like Garnett's is that they fail to preserve the tone and voice of the original author. I.e. Garnett's Tolstoy and Dostoevsky sounds very similar tone-wise, even though in the original Russian they are very different, which difference P&V preserve quite well imo.

I do agree with you in terms of concern with their method; would that Pevear knew Russian better! I don't claim P&V are flawless: there are many ways they could be improved upon. But I do think their translation is better than anything else available now.

>le P&V is bad meme

It's for stem

>He fell for his guidance councilor's meme
Sucks to be you

?
It's a field I thoroughly enjoy, reading is just a hobby

>stem is a field.
o i am laffin

I should've clarified I was talking about my major, not stem as a whole
But keep replying

>They're considered by many people (i.e. not on this board) to be bad translators.
By fucking whom? I've had the exact opposite impression. Constance Garnett was the one who eschewed entire passages because she couldn't understand them.

Real Talk: P&V are the only acceptable translators of Tolstoy.

I'm currently reading that edition of C&P translated by Monas and I have no complaints. Ive compared a few passages between Monas, PV, and McDuff and the difference was negligible. It is Dostoyevsky, after all.
I bought that copy because it was the most ergonomic.

Do you think that while a translation may be an accurate transliteration of the text, P&V may have some disparity between the wording and the "spirit" of what the author is communicating? I read the P&V Notes from Underground and someone posted a passage from an unknown translation and the slight difference in wording seemed to speak to me more clearly, as though the archaic Russian were reupholstered for contemporary English speakers

What's the best edition on a kindle?
Only a few listings have the translators' names

>Constance Garnett was the one who eschewed entire passages because she couldn't understand them.

Do you have a source for this?

>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. Life is short, “The Idiot” long. Garnett is often wooden in her renderings, sometimes unequal to certain verbal motifs and particularly long and complicated sentences. The typescripts of Nabokov’s lectures, which he delivered while teaching undergraduates at Wellesley and Cornell, are full of anti-Garnett vitriol; his margins are a congeries of pencilled exclamations and crabby demurrals on where she had “messed up.” For example, where a passage in the Garnett of “Anna” reads, “Holding his head bent down before him,” Nabokov triumphantly notes, “Mark that Mrs. Garnett has decapitated the man.” When Nabokov was working on a study of Gogol, he complained, “I have lost a week already translating passages I need in ‘The Inspector General’ as I can do nothing with Constance Garnett’s dry shit.”

newyorker.com/magazine/2005/11/07/the-translation-wars

Yes, that is definitely one of my biggest misgivings about P&V. I have read a lot of their translations and compared them to the original Russian, and there is quite a disparity. Based on what I've read from them, I think their W&P>>>Brothers K>C&P>Master&Margarita=Demons>Chekhov=The Idiot>>NfU. NfU is the worst I've read by them b/c it is more subtle than many of D's other works and, despite this, they are unusually literal in their translation here. NfU is the only work I'd recommend someone else for; their Chekhov and Idiot are both probably about as good as other translations I've seen. Everything Demons and up tough, I would still recommend P&V over anyone else.

A bit off topic, but worth mentioning I think, is that their War & Peace is superb; it is honestly my favorite translation I have ever read and is the closest to the original I have seen for any translation into English. Truly do they capture the language and tone of Tolstoy in a way I have not seen any other translation of any work do. It is certainly their masterpiece.

Rate my college shelf

>JavaScript
Kill yourself. You're part of the problem.

>>/pol/

fuck

This is standard conservatism, not the fascism you see on /pol/

True. Still foolish though, and I say that as a conservative. Reagan is hilariously overrated.

What's wrong with more knowledge?
It's not like I have to choose only one language

I'm not that guy, but I own more than a couple autobiographies of people I loath. I wouldn't just assume that he's a huge Reaganite.

That's fair I guess. I assumed based not just on that but also on the Rand, other conservative theory books, and 48 Laws of Power.

Nice copy of Atlas Fugged you've got there.

Thanks for the insight.
What Bros. K translation would you recommend above PV, if any?

I am that guy, its actually the shelf of a friend I have who seems to love Reagan despite having a childs understanding of the cold war.

>Yeah Reagan was just one of our best presidents, his ramping of military spending and the soviet unions response totally crashed their economy.

Then I go to his house and thats the rest of his shelf. I still giggle about it.

P&V is the best I've read,, though admittedly I have only read that one and Garnett's the whole way through (and the original of course)> Nothing else I've skimmed has stuck out as better translated than P&V for me.

Thanks.
I've yet to make up my mind between Avsey and P&V. There seems to be a bit of tribal warfare between the fans of each.

Yeah, Avsey is supposed to be fine. I skimmed it and thought it was better than Garnett but still not as good as P&V.

Not as good in what sense? Literal translation, or communication?

Literality in the sense of matching what Dostoevsky actually says in the original Russian. Both are fine English, though Avsey admittedly a little more so.

It's well known that Garnett omitted occasional words, but that's a far cry from omitting entire passages. And even PV regard Nabokov's criticism as unrealistically harsh.

Bloodmeme, by Corncob Tortillas YeCarthy

meme/10

>it's ok to be a pleb

I leave Veeky Forums for a year and this is where we're at now