The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts With Epilogue

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However, their work has not been without negative criticism. Writing in The New York Review of Books in 2016, the critic Janet Malcolm argued that Pevear and Volokhonsky "have established an industry of taking everything they can get their hands on written in Russian and putting it into flat, awkward English". [17] Some translators have voiced similar criticism, both in Russia [18] and in the English-speaking world. The Slavic studies scholar Gary Saul Morson has written in Commentary that Pevear and Volokhonsky translations "take glorious works and reduce them to awkward and unsightly muddles". [19] Criticism has been focused on the excessive literalness of the couple's translations and the perception that they miss the original tone of the authors. [18] [19] Heartily recommended to any reader who wishes to come as close to Dostoevsky’s Russian as it is possible.”–Joseph Frank, Princeton University I repeat, it was not stupidity —the majority of these fantastical fellows are shrewd and intelligent enough—but just senselessness, and a peculiar national form of it. Another example is the last sentence of the first paragraph in the book, describing Fyodor’s muddleheadedness. No novelist, perhaps, has done so much to widen the range of English fiction. The current, almost bewildering gusto of inquiry in contemporary English writing owes an enormous amount to the example of Possession, which is the first, grandest and best example of that alluring form, the romance of the archive; the scientific fantasy of “Morpho Eugenia,” too, has proved enormously instructive to younger writers. If English writing has stopped being a matter of small relationships and delicate social blunders, and has turned its attention to the larger questions of history, art, and the life of ideas, it is largely due to the generous example of Byatt’s wide-ranging ambition. Few novelists, however, have succeeded subsequently in uniting such a daunting scope of mind with a sure grasp of the individual motivation and an unfailing tenderness; none has written so well both of Darwinian theory and the ancient, inexhaustible subject of sexual passion.

So, if Garnett has shortened the sentences and written in a formal, complex-yet-flowing manner, it sounds to me like she hasn’t compromised the original, but rather made it better (!). Yes, this is true. It’s also something to do with what a man I once knew said to me about his sister. It was the only thing he ever said about his sister, and what he said was that she played an imaginary board game with imaginary pieces. That was like the thing Henry James said about going up the stair and finding the one needful bit of information. A lot of what I write is about the need, the fear, the desire for solitude. I find the Brontës’ joint imagination absolutely appalling. So, in a sense, the whole thing was, as you rightly say, a construct and a smokescreen. There’s a sense from the very beginning of your work of what you want to do. It’s not every novelist that would write a first novel about a successful novelist. This translation, published in two volumes, is out of print. You may be able to find copies second-hand. Hm, is that two against one? But - and even though I can't read the original - I like McDuff's 'quest': I am convinced that Alyosha spoke in this old-fashioned, high-flown way, at this moment; besides, the 'torment' goes with the chapter titles where Mitya is first investigated (where the torments are a specific Christian metaphor).

She was a prolific translator of works from Russian into Edwardian English. Some consider her translations classic while others consider them outdated, but the importance of her role in bringing Russian classics to an English-language readership cannot be denied. I repeat: here there was no question of stupidity; the bulk of these madcaps are really quite sharp and clever – but plain muddle-headedness, and, moreover, of a peculiar, national variety. And, as George Steiner says, at the rows of students sniggering automatically at every mention of the Sunday supplements. Pevear and Volokhonsky] have a clear idea of what the problems of Englishing Dostoevsky are: how to give some idea of the extraordinarily rich polyphony of voices, accents, undertones, and suggestions in the text; how to convey the novel’s marvelous construction, and at the same time its wholly “living” air of majestic dishevelment. They have succeeded amazingly well…. it may well be that Dostoevsky’s [domain], with all its resourceful energies of life and language, is only now—and through the medium of new translation—beginning to come home to the English-speaking reader.” Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have tried to restore, to recapture, some of the original Russian rhythm and nuance. They were not trying to make it simple, they were making it more ‘real.’”

Yes, I did. In fact, I wrote a lot, most of which I burned before I left boarding school. Somebody I went to school with wrote me a letter from Canada the other day saying she remembers me reading aloud a whole adventure story I was writing, which I also remember writing. It was a story about some disguised male figure getting into this girls’ boarding school. I had this terrible need for male figures. For the solo recordings, I’ve marked which narrators sounded British and which sounded American when I listened to the audio samples. Pevear and Volokhonsky’s playful engagement with the characters’ language respects Dostoyevsky’s solecisms and inconsistencies and ‘as it weres’, and the result is earthy, colloquial and occasionally wordy.” Wyatt, Edward (7 June 2004). "Tolstoy's Translators Experience Oprah's Effect". New York Times . Retrieved 2008-04-23. Finally, I have tried to distinguish between two kinds of repetition. It seems to me that the Russian ear is much more tolerant of repeated words and phrases than the Anglo-American ear. A literal translation of all the author’s repetitions would be too tedious.All the readers of unabridged versions of The Brothers Karamazov happen to be male, except in the case of the collaborative Librivox recording, which includes female volunteers as well as male volunteers. Dostoyevsky’s response to this question comes in the form of a speech by Father Zosima, an elder at Alyosha’s monastery. Zosima preaches a sermon on brotherhood to his fellow-monks: “You should know, my dear ones, that every individual is undoubtedly responsible for everyone and everything on earth, not only with respect to general guilt, but also each individual is responsible for every single person and all mankind on earth.” Zosima urges the monks, as Dostoyevsky urged readers, to see ugliness as a trait shared by the entire human family. We are all our brother’s keepers. No one, not Dmitry or anyone else, should ever stand trial alone. U PDATE: I forgot to mention the bawdy song the innkeeper’s girls sing just before Dmitry’s arrest. It’s a good test for any translation, because one of the rhymes is left unfinished—the narrator breaks off halfway through the second line and simply says, “There followed a most unprintable rhyme.” Even P & V realize that a literal translation won’t do in this case. The English version has to imply how the verse would have ended , leaving the translator no choice but to decide what he thinks the missing text is, using context clues and his own intuition (mostly the latter).