Anna Karenina

IA is ilx jargon for "irrationally angry"; silly subject to get heated or even snippy about. (of course it famously destroyed nabokov's friendship w edmund wilson.)

sure, the translator may not be as good as Tolstoy at coming up with new words, but surely they should try?

i agree w this -- and of course it won't have tolstoy's elegance cuz 1) tolstoy 2) in translation 3) in translation from russian which is structurally suited to this sort of thing, assembling words on the fly from constituent parts of other ones -- not that english is in last place by this metric itself tho! anyway, regardless, the fact that a neologism exists here is information, plus in the cited passage in partic it's important that the word is weird because stepan is delighted by it and repeats it later.

i was maybe unfair tho in representing malcolm as saying it should be omitted entirely. she champions garnett and garnett says here:

“Eh, Matvey?” he said, shaking his head.

“It’s all right sir; it will work out,” said Matvey.

“Work out?”

“Yes, sir.”

and this just about works i guess -- "work out" is now a familiar enough phrase that this reaction is weird but the reader probably thinks i guess it wasn't in tolstoy's day. (plus maybe it wasn't in garnett's. etymonline dates it to 1848 but that doesn't mean it was common -- tho it does probably mean that an english-speaking analogue to stepan would have heard it?) still there's a vivid goofiness to "shapify" -- the reader double-takes alongside stepan -- and without it the passage is staider. uglier no doubt but why would matvey speak with beauty, espesh when using the kind of florid neologism stepan would think was cool -- more importantly why would tolstoy of the omniscient+empathic prose style, post-war-and-peace, always and increasingly at inner ideological war w his own talent for/delight in beauty, want overridingly to write matvey's dialogue beautifully? it's still prettier in russian sure but you can't have everything.

too many words. only point is there are other criteria aside from beauty and even ease, both in a general aesthetic sense and in a case-by-case does-the-reader-understand-this-passage sense, and i don't think most of the p/v examples eschew beauty or ease to some impenetrable academic extent. again tho i suspect their choppiness is better-suited to dostoevskian feverishness than tolstovan ease and i did read some interview with them once (or some foreword?) where they confessed they were most at home with dusty.

(of course it famously destroyed nabokov's friendship w edmund wilson.)
Say what?

on the proust front i prefer "in search of lost time" just on the face of it, even! an image you're not used to and are forced to stop and parse -- the name of a quest -- some sense of anxiety -- the shadow of death. instead of oh cool a book about remembering stuff. in the moncrieff title nothing is perdu.

xp nabokov published a multivolume translation of pushkin's eugene onegin that worked via a meticulous word-by-word literalism (according to nabokov's sometimes eccentric judgment) and had an aggressive disrespect for meter or beauty; wilson reviewed it, saying prob justifiably that this was a bad approach to translation, maybe justifiably that nabokov intended it as a kind of polyglot's attack on the idea of translation itself, and unjustifiably that nabokov's translation of this or that was Obviously Wrong, when it was usually at least not obvious; they exchanged furious public letters; the friendship didn't recover. they hadn't been seeing much of each other lately anyway tho i think.

nabokov's translation of this or that was Obviously Wrong

i think this was what did it btw. critical eminence or no, old friend or no, to the finland station or no, i don't know how a new jersey boy ever works himself up to the point where he comes at vladimir nabokov on points of exactitude in russian translation.

http://www.literarymanhattan.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/f-scott-fitzgerald-wiki.jpg
The Russians are different, Bunny.

Does Garnett's prose reflect the originals she's translated? The article linked to would suggest that she was familiar with the form of English prose that the Russian writers were heavily influenced by.
I'm wondering if my expectations of the Russian material are different to the reality. After reading about work elsewhere I'm now wondering if I expected it to be a lot darker than it actually was. So what I read as bowdlerisation or watering down could be a closer reflection.
In short does Garnett maintain the original feel of the Russian?

still there's a vivid goofiness to "shapify" -- the reader double-takes alongside stepan -- and without it the passage is staider. uglier no doubt but why would matvey speak with beauty, espesh when using the kind of florid neologism stepan would think was cool -- more importantly why would tolstoy of the omniscient+empathic prose style, post-war-and-peace, always and increasingly at inner ideological war w his own talent for/delight in beauty, want overridingly to write matvey's dialogue beautifully? it's still prettier in russian sure but you can't have everything.

no wai.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wy7SvZQfeBM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTO7WVxjz3A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knF5Nis1K3c

What is your favorite translation?
― Moti Bahat, Friday, March 24, 2006 1:05 PM (eleven years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I hate you guys too.
― Moti Bahat, Monday, March 27, 2006 5:01 PM (eleven years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I got the Pevear and Volohosky. I was a bit underwhelmed by Middlemarch to tell the truth, so I hope I’ll enjoy this hella long novel. (The 700+ pager I read before that, “The Magic Mountain,” was, I thought, an incredible and transformative experience.

I feel like there's some sub-posting going on here...

Idgi. I just thought the first two posts were funny.

Sorry, bad joke. It's just that mordy revived the thread on War and Peace as well...

So you were sub-posting, like a sub-tweet. Get it? Get it?

Subtweets are veiled insults.

Yes

I like Mordy a lot, he’s one of the ilxors I talk to te most off board. I like Tolstoy too.