The Language of Compromise
Is the translation you are reading any good? Does it matter? And what is ultimately lost (and found) in translation
As much as I love baked goods, right now I find myself eating some humble pie—which is of course my least favorite flavor. And it has to do with something I said in another forum about how the Pevear/Volokhonsky (P/V) translation of The Brothers Karamazov is the best. What I should have said is that I prefer it over the ubiquitous Constance Garnatt translation. Having very little knowledge of the Russian language, I am not in a position to say if any version honors the original. However, personal enjoyment counts for something when you are trying to get through a long novel, and I will always prefer more modern American phrasing when I can get it because I am a modern American. If you are the same way then you will probably prefer the P/V.
David Remnick from The New Yorker seems to support my choice of in this piece. However, you definitely have detractors like Gary Saul Morson from Commentary and Helen Andrews at First Things. (Ms. Andrews appears to favor Ignite Avsey’s version.)
The Remnick article is worth reading for those who want to know a bit more about the history of translating Russian literature into English. In fact, Garnett’s translations were probably the main reason why great Russian works had the profound influence they did on American literature in the early twentieth century. Of Garnett’s literary achievement, Remnick writes:
With her pale, watery eyes, her gray hair in a chignon, she was the genteel face of tireless industry. She translated seventy volumes of Russian prose for commercial publication, including all of Dostoyevsky’s novels; hundreds of Chekhov’s stories and two volumes of his plays; all of Turgenev’s principal works and nearly all of Tolstoy’s; and selected texts by Herzen, Goncharov, and Ostrovsky. A friend of Garnett’s, D. H. Lawrence, was in awe of her matter-of-fact endurance, recalling her “sitting out in the garden turning out reams of her marvelous translations from the Russian. She would finish a page, and throw it off on a pile on the floor without looking up, and start a new page. That pile would be this high—really, almost up to her knees, and all magical.”
Garnett’s productivity came at a cost though,
“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.”
What is translation? On a platter
A poet’s pale and glaring head,
A parrot’s screech, a monkey’s chatter,
And profanation of the dead.
- Vladimir Nabokov
The four lines above are taken from the poem Nabokov wrote to commemorate his failure to satisfactorily translate Pushkin’s Evgeny Onegin into English. He eventually had to throw his hands up in the air and cry uncle—or дядя as the case may be—publishing a literal translation as opposed to the desired English equivalent of Pushkin’s literary masterpiece. Vladimir Nabokov, highly proficient in both English and Russian, was humbled by the experience.
A translator has to make a choice: whether to stay faithful to the original author’s text at the expense of readability or sacrifice the art and complexity of the original in order to achieve clarity in English.
All languages are full of tone and pregnant with culture. Characters have different voices and dialects, which often betray class station and education. Sometimes the translator’s own biases and politics color word choices. Humor is a common casualty because wordplay and puns are nearly impossible to interpret well.
So in practical terms, let’s compare the same passage from The Brothers Karamazov. It is a moment that has importance later on, but the image of the carriage ride and geese stuck out in my memory and I wanted to see how each version approached it.
From Garnett’s Book 5: Chapter 7, “It’s Always Worth While Speaking to a Clever Man”:
“It’s a true saying then, that ‘it’s always worth while speaking to a clever man,’ answered Smerdyakov firmly, looking significantly at Ivan.
The carriage rolled away. Nothing was clean in Ivan’s soul, but he looked eagerly around him at the field, at the hills, at the trees, at the flock of geese flying high overhead in the bright sky. And all of a sudden he felt very happy. He tried to talk to the driver, and he felt intensely interested in the answer the peasant made him; but a minute later he realised that he was not catching anything, and that he had not really even taken in the peasant’s answer. He was silent, and it was pleasant even so. The air was fresh, pure and cool, the sky bright.
From Pevear & Volokhonsky’s , Book 5: Chapter 7, “It’s Always Interesting to Talk with an Intelligent Man”:
“So it’s true what they say, that it’s always interesting to talk with an intelligent man,” Smerdyakov replied firmly, giving Ivan Fyodorovich a penetrating look.
The carriage started and raced off. All was vague in the traveler’s soul, but he greedily looked around him at the fields, the hills, the trees, a flock of geese flying high above him in the clear sky. Suddenly he felt so well. He tried to strike up a conversation with the coachman, and found something in the peasant’s reply terribly interesting, but a moment later he realized that it had all flown over his head and, in fact, he had not understood what the peasant had replied. He fell silent; it was good just as it was: clean, fresh, cool air; a clear sky.
What is the difference between clever and intelligent? If someone is giving you a penetrating look, isn’t that more unnerving than a significant look? How can a soul be vague? The poet in me could take this apart and point to divergent paths of nuance, but then again… what did the actual Russian text say? I have no clue.
From what I can gather on the internet, one of the criticisms of Richard Pevear is that he doesn’t actually know Russian. Supposedly he knows a little, but his wife Larissa Volokhonsky is the native speaker and Russian literature expert. For those who don’t know, what they have is a completely acceptable arrangement.
In fact, if you wanted to try your hand at translation in his manner you can take a workshop through The Poetry Translation Center:
The PTC’s poetry translation workshops offer an inclusive, collaborative form of literary appreciation and cultural discovery through the act of translating. The workshops are open to everyone and participants don’t need any prior knowledge of the language, literature or culture that is translated. [emphasis mine] The process is thought provoking, with participants rethinking what it means to translate, and opening up wider questions about creativity, culture and language.
There is an example of a poem in Russian on their site if you wanted to see how it was translated from the original to the guide translation and then the finished piece.
His point of view can be summed up in this bit,
My approach, for all those years I was teaching the Russian stories in translation at Syracuse, was not to sweat too much over which translation to use, especially since, not being a reader of Russian, I had no real basis for preferring one over another.
I always felt like we could do useful work with even a crummy translation, since our work is about the form of the story itself. We could have a meaningful reading experience even with a less-than-wonderful translation, and, since we are mostly talking about that experience – about how a story makes its meaning - all is well.
And there you have it from someone who knows this stuff better than I do. For the purposes of reading and discussing these classics, most of the common translations will do.
And I will be reading the Pevear & Volokhonsky edition when I go on retreat next month. I look forward to writing about what that close reading experience is like.
Thank you to all of you, and especially for my paid subscribers. I am so happy to have your support!