Anna Karenina

the point about messiness and inelegancce is made by i think pevear himself in his intro.

Dinner party impressed by your bullshit.

But no English translation of Tolstoy ever seems to read, even for a paragraph, like anything anybody would ever have written unless they were translating a book written in another language.

janet malcolm, in defense of constance garnett:

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

she's right about p/v's serious error in that krasivii/khorosho passage. imo the correct modern translation here is "she looked good", which 1) is an effortless 21c english colloquialism but also 2) captures the moral implication in passing more perfectly even than malcolm thinks garnett's prim and shallow "nice" does. (maybe the modern tone of "she looked good" would introduce a dissonance similar to that in the "steve oblonsky" nabokov used to insist on -- are these 19c russian aristocrats or not? -- but i think that ship sails the moment you decide to read a novel in the doomed form of a translation; there will be dissonance.)

lotta room to attack p/v probably, esp as they seem to have annexed the entire field. their prose is choppy and weird and maybe not choppy and weird in sufficiently different ways from dostoevsky to tolstoy to gogol to chekhov -- but idk, is garnett's prose meticulous and victorian in particularly different ways amongst the same set? genuinely asking because i haven't actually read much garnett. anyway if i were on more solid ground (read: if i really spoke russian) my criticism of p/v might be that they render all russian prose as if (their version of) dostoevsky wrote it.

found myself getting IA at malcolm in places re: the translator's duty to the reader, the nature of translation, the nature of prose fiction--

I am speaking here of translations of fiction. Poetry and humor are untranslatable in the view of some readers. But surely novels can be successfully translated. The basic myths they transform into stories of their time belong to all cultures and can be retold in any number of languages.

it's a weird definition of the novel that includes neither poetry nor humor; also don't call me shirley

i guess i'm just a member of the joyless masochistic tribe she identifies? i want all my untranslatable jokes rendered with awkward literalism and then meticulously footnoted; i certainly don't want them ignored, the way malcolm says we can ignore the neologism with which matvey infects stiva. if i wanted jokes that worked and words that flowed and prose i could engage with at maximum fluency and sophistication i'd read a book in a language i can understand; there are millions of em

what does "the reader of simple wants" want with a 150-year-old novel about the dead aristocracy of a country with a half-alien linguistic heritage? is the answer "basic myths"? if janet malcolm needs i can torrent her the despecialized fan edits of the original star wars movies by dinner

The reader should not be misled into thinking that I know Russian

no worries

Think the rich and happy couple jibe speaks to the feeling that the story of this well-meaning, elderly, long-time married couple having been given the Russian canon to translate and doing so diligently like they have is not as straight forward and warm and fuzzy as it seems. What if all of it is a pile of shit?

In a lot of ways the arguments as to how should we translate also mirror this exchange around ankylosed. I think I was a brief member of joyless masochism club (LOL I missed Malcolm's footnote so) but in many ways I am not looking for fiction (or poetry, not sure I do humour unless it comes with tragedy) but for new visions. Malcolm could be seen as condescending in her notion of the simple reader but that bit she quotes from the P+V interview is damming to me: are these archaisms necessary with strong narration and psychology like Tolstoy? Does it impede us from seeing more of what he does (I have always struggled with Tolstoy but I haven't read him in Garnett's translations), how he saw and sensed things? I'd probably divide this argument between the 19th century canon and a lot of writers in the 20th. You have to mimic the awkwardness of Proust or Platonov's language (whose phrasing - and vision - are pretty unique).

Coincidentally came across this just now: https://anathanwest.com/2016/06/04/translation-reviewing-isabel-fargo-cole/

“Fidelity to the original” is invoked at times to justify the awkwardness of a text, ignoring that rhetoric is not ideal, but instead embedded in historical and cultural circumstances that are not always transferable. Due to interference from Euskera, many Spanish speakers from the Basque country and Navarre place their verbs at the end of clauses. Were this reproducible in a target language, that would not make it advisable. At best, it would require a footnote providing the reader with a bit of pedantic trivia. English has a genius for combining words (cankles, frenemy) that carries over poorly into other languages; the same is true of the German yen for ponderous neologisms. Attempts at “fidelity” to the specific resources of the out-language, which also partake of the unique way its speakers think and live, may exhibit brilliance, but they run the danger of yielding something ugly and unshapely, and there are already too many ugly and unshapely books.

I've tended to avoid Garnett after trying to read Crime & Punishment in my teens and thinking it seemed very bowdlerised or something.
I haven't managed to read the book yet. Wonder fi I'm missing something in not reading her.
THis article makes it look like she is somebody worth reading.

I'm also intrigued considering the time she was working, was she working against a lot of male negativity. Would think any female writer of the time would be fighting an uphill battle. Is she seen as an icon by later women writers in managing to get published so widely?

there are already too many ugly and unshapely books.

nah

I speak Russian, though it's seriously rusting now. I enjoyed the NY-er article and it made me want to do a three-way comparison. I haven't read anything in Russian in forever, and it would now probably take me forever to get through it. Maybe I'll find the shortest possible Chekhov short story that's been tackled by both Garnett and P&V (so if anyone knows what that's likely to be...)

ah for the days I wanted to learn Russians so I could read Platonov in the original

found myself getting IA at malcolm in places re:

― le Histoire du Edgy Miley (difficult listening hour), Saturday, June 4, 2016 1:55 AM (5 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

What does IA mean in this context?

Anyway, I recently read Anna Karenina for the first time, in the P & V translation, and was happy with it in that I enjoyed the book, but who knows how much more or less it would have meant to me in another translation?

I feel like whenever I read anything about these issues in translation I'm convinced by whoever is talking - I read the P & V interview a week or two ago and it made me want to read more of their translations, but now I will have vague doubts next time I read a clunky sentence. I think I still lean towards literalism - "In search of lost time" instead of "Remembrance of things past" for sure, but in an ideal world I would have a translator I trust to take very slight liberties where they feel it will make things a bit easier.

I don't buy the argument that the neologism is unnecessary however - sure, the translator may not be as good as Tolstoy at coming up with new words, but surely they should try?

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.