It's the Constance Garnett translation

Nah. Garnett makes some mistakes, but she's pretty good. Her being trash is a meme.

based KG. do you think he has read any Russian lit?

This.

Garnett hate is mostly a meme started by Nabokov (he would have shit on legitimately any translator).

Her Tolstoy is the best and she translated all (?) of Chekhov's stories.

She is a legend

>it's an EZ Rewriter translation

>The Odyssey
>Translated from the Greek by Robert Fitzgerald

>It's a FAGles translation

>it's the Ohlmarks translation

how has one man started so many memes

NYRB had an article by the Queen defending CG a few months ago.

Garnett and P&V fuck about with formatting (like paragraphing) for no good reason. No one claims translation isn't hard but Russian translations just tend to be shit for no real reason.

>it's a Pope "translation"

When Borges was translating stuff and purposefully changing core plot elements as a goof he was still far closer to the original than Pope will ever be

>muh accuracy
What a cloudy age we live in.

Don't market it as a translation if that's not what you are doing.

Call it a remake or a remaining or whatever

We all know that translations can never be perfectly accurate, but if you are making it as inaccurate as you possibly can on purpose you have no right to call yourself a translator
He might as well have based his memery on an English version or just made things up based on common knowledge of the Iliad

>market
Oh dear

>muh semantics

Go home Pope, your "translation" is and always will remain pure and unredeemable garbage.

>>muh semantics
>muh my wordchices don't reflect my worldview

I would guess so

Is Dostoevsky's prose simple to read or is just Garnett? I swear I through his novels like nothing

Nah she's pretty trash. Her being good is due to a contrarian meme on Veeky Forums. I literally couldn't read her translation of BK.

she's the best writer of all the russian translators, so that's pretty weird that you found it "unreadable"

Her translation of BK is trash. Sorry to say.

Great translation. I just finished his Odyssey, and I can say it is definitely better than Fagles'. I've yet to read Lattimore so I can't make any final judgement.

mind showing me a paragraph you thought was bad? shouldnt be too hard if the translation is "trash."

how the hell do you niggers determine the quality of translations if you can't read the source language?

more like le fag (haha get it because i translated it into french)

>Her Tolstoy is the best

The go-to translators for Tolstoy are Aylmer and Louise Maude. They knew Tolstoy personally, and he gave their work his own thumbs-up.

i usually see if it reads well in english, and if it does, then i compare it with other translations to see if the reason it reads well is that it's loose. if it's very similar to other translations, but just reads better, and seems to use more precise language, then i think it's probably a good translation.

e.g. i dont read russian but by comparing the opening to the brothers karamazov, it seems to me like ignat avsey's is the best translation. at least for the opening. p&v write that fyodor karamazov's death was "dark and tragic," which sounds weird in english - a "dark" death - so then i go to constance garnett and see what she has. she writes that his death was "gloomy and tragic." so p&v and garnett agree that it was tragic, but garnett seems to clarify a bit what p&v mean, it was "gloomy," there was something obscure about it, but that still sounds weird. and i think, "dark" and "gloomy" - did dostoevsky perhaps mean "mysterious"? probably, because that's what ignat avsey has in his translation, so that's the translation im going to go with.

to add: i imagine that in russian the word dostoevsky used carries the image of darkness and gloominess and the definition of "mysterious," and so p&v/garnett were trying to capture the image or the surface, whereas avsey goes for the meaning. "mysterious" means "unknown," and i imagine the word in russian the word dostoevsky uses means "unknown because shrouded in darkness" or whatever.

i hear you, thanks, but i was wondering more about evaluating how well the translations preserve the general style and quality of the prose in the original text.

I have some facility with Russian. It would take me forever, though, to get through something like Karamazov. But I can interact with the Russian and in some measure get a sense for the quality of this or that translation

>complaining about literally the best translation of Homer

dat fitzgerald iliad doe

I'm not that user, but I will point out that there's a revision of Garnett's Karamazov done by Ralph Matlaw and published by Norton Critical Editions. He includes a nice essay about the issues that arise from Garnett's work and what he did in his revision to remedy it. One thing Garnett did -- and this applies to her work in general, not just TBK -- was add or omit as she saw fit, in effect moving past translation to commentary. Also she worked so quickly that she made mistakes and failed to understand some things.