Re: Brothers Karamazov

I second (is it third, now?) the recommendation of the Pevear/Volokhonsky
translation. It is true and good. I disclaim this endorsement, though,
with the comments below.

I have a short response/reaction to Jim, who said:
<< Quite a bit of the Dostoevsky I've read seems translated with stilted
English, but I think I've been using older translations. Seems like
translators forget to write good English sometimes and retain too many of
the elements of the original language's grammar. >>

I am compelled to speak briefly of the virtues, which can exist under some
specific (and sharply limited) circumstances, of a good, stilted, stiff,
cumbersome, poor-English "translation."

We cannot forget that such translations are plainly hard to read,
particularly if you're unfamiliar with the sytax of the original language.
They can thus suck the joy out of reading, for which reason I cannot endorse
taking such a translation as one's primary read. But in certain
circumstances -- ESPECIALLY with a highly-inflected "synthetic" language
(like Russian), with the resultant flexibility of syntax -- a translation
that is willing to sacrifice the niceties of English in order to preserve,
however awkwardly, peculiarities that are less problematic in the original
tongue can often allow a closer reading.

I count myself among the very few who have lost sleep over problems of
translation (O, how to say it!). I have spent many hours every week, most
every week for the past several years, translating between several different
languages and mired in the complexities and difficulties and impossibilities
of the task. (I planned to discuss this at some greater length in that
conversation a while back, perhaps walking through a particularly complex
and difficult translation as John O. walked through reading a piece of
Kafka, because I thought that -- as Kim and John O. a little later
mentioned, but unfortunately did not explore at depth -- the act of
translation was rather immediately important and insightful to the subject.
I shortly found myself with a dearth of interest in the conversation coupled
with a total absense of time, and this ultimately prevented me. A few of
the points from that post-that-never-was, though, seem pertinent here.)

The bottom line of translation, I think, is that translations always fail.
When one sits down with an original text and an intent to render it in a
language foreign to itself, he must from the first sentence know where his
allegiance lies -- he must know whom and what he will preserve at all costs
and whom and what he is willing to betray, to whom and to what he is willing
sometimes even to do great violence in service of his ends. The
significance of these decisions increases as the languages involved are more
distant from one another. This becomes most vivid when working with two
profoundly distant languages and literature from two profoundly different
cultures. If a translator avoids making such decisions, his translation
will be uneven and uncohesive, of little worth to anyone. If he knows he
must make them, but is pained by the necessity, he will write abundant
footnotes.

A "good" translation in the broadest sense is usually one that makes such
decisions and is unapologetic and unfaltering about them. After this, its
relative goodness is determined primarily by the particulars of the
translator's decisions and how well they correspond to the reader's needs.
No translation will give you everything. If you really want to read the
author's book, follow Seymour's advice and learn the damn language. There
really isn't another way to approximate this.

If you are looking for a translation to read and enjoy (maybe if you plan to
read and run), just go for one with English you like. If you want to get
closer to the book as it was written, short of learning the language you
probably ought to be working with at least two translations of disparate
styles. Without meaning to re-spark an old conversation, I'll add that you
might also want to consider your thoughts about authors and meaning, because
this might weigh on your thoughts about translation. How much does the
original matter to you? Suppose you had a reading of a book that hinged on
a few subtle uses of language, and it turned out that they were not
reflected in the original: would this be a disappointment to you? Would it
matter to you? Is it just as good to have a reading of Chapman's Homer that
appears not to apply to Homer's Homer?

I suppose that one might call a translation a fundamentally new piece of
literature, though founded to varying degrees in an old but essentially
different piece of literature, and that you can never read a book by
Dostoevsky but in Russian -- though you can read an English book that
approximates his while remaining nevertheless essentially different. I
suppose this might be a perfectly valid way to read, though it isn't the way
I read. (And this causes me no small trouble, since I'm perpetually
memorizing grammars and morphologies, and hardly getting enough sleep!)

Borges talks a bit about things like this in some of his essays. In one of
them -- I don't remember which -- he says that his knowledge of Spanish is
such that a translation of Don Quixote would be insufferable to him, but
that he is in the fortunate condition of total ignorance of Greek, so that
each new translation of Homer is for him a wholly new, though wholly
familiar, literary delight. I suppose there might be something to be said
in favor of this, though I suffer from a condition that prohibits me from
reading any translation without a tortuous, gnawing curiosity about what
lies behind it -- and an eternal suspicion of translators, because, being
one, I know that they are liars and scoundrels. (I also have with
translation something of the paternal eye, in which none other is so fair as
my own daughter, unless she IS more fair, in which case she has such other
faults of temperance and demeanor as to offer no comparison.)

Something close to these thoughts might also be found beneath the surface of
Borges's wonderful story of Pierre Menard, who, through the laborious work
of draft and revision attempts to write Don Quixote -- and not, we are told,
*A* Don Quixote, but *THE* Don Quixote, as Cervantes wrote it, word for word
and line for line, though not merely *COPYING* it, but writing it anew just
as Cervantes did, though not JUST as Cervantes by BEING Cervantes (for that
would be too easy) but as Pierre Menard by being Pierre Menard.

I've digressed a bit.

Languages with highly "synthetic" grammars have a great deal of freedom in
the arrangement of words since many (sometimes it's virtually all) of the
grammatical relationships that we English-speakers indicate with word-order
and particles are inflected in the words themselves. This makes syntax
serve much less of a grammatical function and much more of a literary one,
allowing the author to adjust his placement of words in a sentence to
manipulate subtleties of tone and emphasis, and to control the progression
of ideas and concepts. The classical Greek and Latin writers --
particularly the poets and Plato -- made great use of this power so
unfamiliar to us. Our control, compared to theirs, is quite feeble. In
some cases, in fact, cutting the last word from a sentence changes its
literal meaning -- thus the reader "hears" one meaning in a sentence before
he arrives at the end, and upon arriving there gets the "actual" meaning.
Most cases are more subtle than this, but in every case the richness of the
morphology and resultant syntactic flexibility allows an author to strictly
control the order in which ideas are received.

I don't think that the Russian authors have often made such use of this as
did the best of the Greeks and Romans, but it IS a tool in the repertoire of
a skilled Russian master. It is often impossible to maintain such artifacts
in translation, especially in translations into languages like English, but
those stiff, stilted translations often come from translators who decided to
betray certain "dispensable" aspects of English syntax in order to be truer
to the original. This makes for a tougher read but sometimes, under certain
circumstances, it extends the author's reach so slightly beyond the place
where the easier translations allow him to go no further.

-robbie
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Received on Wed Apr 16 03:32:27 2003