Love them or hate them, this couple reign in Russian literature
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
What makes it inflammatory?
It is not a particularly high-brow debate, as HP, unlike Dostoyevsky in en-world, is read by everyone. People usually concentrate on proper names. Rowling uses a lot of “meaningful” names like Snape, Sprout or Ravenclaw, and translator have a choice of adapting them or leaving them be. Either choice leaves somebody unhappy. The same problem was with LotR a generation before. (LotR broke through the iron curtain only in 90s).
When I read HP in original, I realised that the “proper” translation is also extremely bad. I don’t know what I should do when/if I have children. Either I’ll start working on my own translation during the pregnancy, or I’ll teach them English from the birth.
Maura Labingi Frodo Baggins
Banazîr "Ban" Galpsi Samwise "Sam" Gamgee“Darth Vader” was sometimes translated as “Dark Father”, but that his role as Luke’s father too obvious - a role the initial translators didn’t know existed.
Strange, because my understanding is that The Hobbit was well-accepted by soviet authorities.
Edit: America has a lot of bottoms, apparently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_geographical_bottoms
Nowhere as grand as Aunt Mary's Bottom but South Dakota does have a Big Bottom.
btw, there are likely more HP books sold then all books by all these authors combined.
Children stories may have a long life. For example, the brothers Grimm stories are still with us.
Their edition of The Brothers Karamazov [0] (translated by Susan McReynolds) stands in my memory as being a pleasure to read and ponder...definitely a book that stays with you over time.
0: https://wwnorton.co.uk/books/9780393926330-the-brothers-kara...
Personally I'd highly recommend reading Michael R. Katz's translation of The Brothers Karamazov instead.
Then I recommended Anna Karenina to a friend and I started going over the pros and cons of the various translations when he stopped me and reminded me that Russian is his first language. That's when it clicked for me. It's like people who obsesses over which cut of a movie is the best, except in this case the "true" author's vision is available and many people can access it, just not them. I understand why people fixate on finding the "best" translation.
In general, I think there's too much emphasis on language barriers for the layperson. It's the classic problem where passionate people introduce considerations that aren't relevant to the casual user ("Don't use that brand/thing! This brand/thing is 0.1% better!").
I'm fluent in English, but still am capable of missing subtle uses of the language. Yet, we treat foreign (to us) languages as if all of the subtly is obvious to anyone who is fluent in it. I honestly don't think that the average Russian reader is going to see much more in the language than an English person with a good translation. An expert will see it, but not me.
In my opinion the return on investment is much higher for increasing your understanding of both the culture and historical moment, not the language.
"The original was unfaithful to the translation."
BORGES AFFIRMED, in earnest, that an original can be unfaithful to a translation. He vehemently objected to claims that certain translations he admired are “true to the original” and derided the presuppositions of purists for whom all translations are necessarily deceitful in one way or another. Borges would often pro- test, with various degrees of irony, against the assumption – ingrained in the Italian adage traduttore traditore – that a translator is a traitor to an original. He referred to it alternatively as a superstition or pun. For Borges the Italian expression, unfairly prejudiced in favor of the original, is an erroneous generalization that conflates differ- ence with treachery. The idea that literary translations are inherently inferior to their originals is, for Borges, based on the false assumption that some works of literature must be assumed definitive. But for Borges, no such thing as a definitive work exists, and therefore, a translator’s inevitable transformation of the original is not necessarily to the detriment of the work. Difference, for Borges, is not a sufficient criterion for the superiority of the original.
( The Swedes used 66 years, but according to the Norwegian translator, it is no harder than Shakespeare's sonettes. Begun 2016, ETA 2030. )
It's a great line _if_ one hasn't had much experience with lovers or thought deeply enough about such experiences or thinks of lovers casually. :(
Basically, we love someone because we're attracted to them, because beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We also often love someone for their character which is why we are charmed by them.
It's really difficult to love someone who is unfaithful because our obsession with them merely affirms our own lack of character, and our lack of good judgement, and our inability to discern good character over and over.
Ah, I rant, sorry for that :), but my point is, it's a bad analogy because it doesn't tell us anything true about translations nor of lovers.
Many share the same sentiment, and some do that more strongly than others. Interestingly, it never had that effect on me, however, though I cannot speak Russian, except read, but my vocabulary is extremely limited. I think it's important to distinguish between current events and the culture, literature, and art that spans centuries.
Events shape cultures. You can find cultural remnants of past events that impacted a group decades later (especially traumatic events).
And, cultures shape events, because cultures shape the people that cause (at least some of) the events. And cultures shape peoples' response to the events.
So when you see a pattern that looks fairly similar across centuries, then you have at least some ground for suspecting that there is a stable system there - that events keep happening that shape the culture in a consistent way, and the culture keeps shaping events in ways that will give rise to the same kinds of events happening.
I wouldn't go as far as "deterministic". I don't think that much involving humans is ever truly deterministic. But there does seem to be a pattern of history, if not repeating itself, at least rhyming.
Russian here, living in Russia. Not surprised about this at all. Actually, I predicted that this would happen. By starting the war, Putin has wiped out multiple perceived notions about Russia (the myth of the defender nation, the second-strongest army, and the "Tolstoyesvsky"-centered culture among them).
Paraphrasing Anton Chigurh: "If your culture brought you to this, of what use was the culture?"
I think this is a temporary sentiment. In my mind Bach and Beethoven are in no way associated with the Nazi regime, for instance.
From my point of view, if you discard artist because of country he was born in, it's only your loss.
“Joe Biden acknowledged in 1997 that eastward NATO expansion into the Baltic states would cause “the greatest consternation,” which could “tip the balance” and result in a “vigorous and hostile reaction” by Russia.”
Unfortunately his dementia may have erased these thoughts.
"The United States stands firmly with the Ukrainian people in defense of the NATO alliance." -Kamala
When two powers think they are defending themselves, war typically breaks out.
The soft power that Russia may have once wielded in the Western mind was fragile and easily dismantled. It became an easy target for Western propaganda. Just days before the invasion, I explained to a colleague that if it were to happen, the media would likely present a simplistic narrative of the conflict, creating a classic good-versus-bad dichotomy. This would undoubtedly lead to the resurrection of old clichés and propaganda that the British, French, Germans, and more recently, the Americans have historically crafted about Russia.
A Bulgarian asks a Spaniard:
– What does “mañana, mañana” mean?
– It’s when your life is mainly drinking wine, relaxing, eating good food, and having loads of fun. And what is Айляк?
– The same but without all this tension.
It is quite easy to forget that there are lots of common people like you living their lives in Russia now who are similarly quite unhappy about the current situation, but mostly powerless to change anything.
But this too shall pass.
https://old.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/3d1h59/did_n...
I don't really like them for this reason. I imagine they have merits which I am not equipped to evaluate.
I find it sort of frustrating that they have a near monopoly. It can be pretty tough to find a non-P&V translation in a bookstore these days.
I think this near monopoly, and therefore the financial/career/publishing industry implications, might be why some of the critiques and takedowns seem oddly vicious. It's not just about literary taste.
but I guess it's a valid choice and might actually be better in certain contexts (plausibly this is true for a university class about Russia and Russian literature).
I have been reading a copy of P&V Crime and Punishment that I found laying around, and it does not have quite the intensity that I was expecting. Will probably try another translation - deciding on which one to read is half the fun for me anyway.
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/20/movies/dostoyevsky-transl...
Regarding P&V:
> "The Pevear-Volokhonsky versions of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Chekhov, and Bulgakov have earned rapturous reviews by James Wood in the New Yorker and Orlando Figes in the New York Review of Books, along with a PEN translation award. It looks as if people will be reading P&V, as they have come to be called, for decades to come.
> This is a tragedy, because their translations take glorious works and reduce them to awkward and unsightly muddles. Professional writers have asked me to check the Russian texts because they could not believe any great author would have written what P&V produce."
https://www.commentary.org/articles/gary-morson/the-pevearsi...
Katz is more enjoyable. Would highly recommend Katz's translation of Devils. Captures the chaotic-ness of the story really well
P&V was a harder read, and I've still not finished reading The Idiot, but it felt much richer, even if reading it required having notes at hand.
Idk man, if it feels like I'm in a classroom again it starts to blur the boundary between work and leisure
Free versions available via standard ebooks and Gutenberg are often based on the copyright of the translation and so can be dated or just considered lower quality than other, more recent, translations.
Can you run the older translations through an AI to jazz them up a bit and maybe secretly steal the IP from other translations?
Or, since we're fudging the IP issue anyway, are the underground book pirate rings issuing AI translated versions of Harry Potter (or a more recent equivalent) into niche markets yet?
So while certainly not the case for most books, if you have a pirate Harry Potter then there's a fair chance that an actual human did the translation.
Unrelated, sometimes I'd get a fake unofficial chapter and then I'd have to decide on-the-fly whether Draco undressing Harry felt in line with J.K. Rowling's universe so far.
While I find AI impressive, I think the demonstration proof that it isn't yet at that level is that ChaosGPT etc. have not already destroyed civilisation.
(OTOH, that someone made ChaosGPT and set it running, is reason to try to stop anyone publishing any better models until they can be proven safe: we don't want to find out something has passed this threshold, whatever that means, via it ending civilisation).
Previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36760010>
Were you expecting something else from a link labeled "Previously"?
> People say, for example, you can't read The Count of Monte Cristo unless it's Buss's translation published by Penguin, or you can't read Garnett's Dostoyevsky. Well, okay, but when pressed about what the purportedly less faithful versions [...] get wrong, I've only ever heard mimetic regurgitation of nonspecific claims (on par with "don't read K&R; it's awful") or when someone actually articulates something concrete and falsifiable, it doesn't hold up—"That actually was in the 19th century translation that I read, so..."
If that's not "something to support your pov", I'm not sure what you want. It's a comment that (a) antedates yours on the same topic (literally using the phrase "mimetic regurgitation"), and (b) explains exactly the issue of nonspecific claims that I've run into with people who offer criticisms of the earliest translations into English. Aside from all that, even at worst—if you're not satisfied by any of this, for whatever reason—it contains no less support for my position than the support you provided for yours.
I get that underground is supposed to sound more erratic, but there's this sort of clunkiness behind P&V that other translations don't have. I usually compare translations before buying and I notice it there too
Katz and McDuff were good. Garnett not bad. But P&V is just feels god awful to read, prose is just too unnatural sounding
I would not want that all the time, but one doesn't read Russian lit all the time either. Becomes part of the experience for me.
But they do have great marketing.
Lots of interesting stuff of translating jokes and references into a foreign language
> In American English, collective nouns almost always take singular verb forms (formal agreement). In cases that a metonymic shift would be revealed nearby, the whole sentence should be recast to avoid the metonymy. (For example, "The team are fighting among themselves" may become "the team members are fighting among themselves" or simply "The team is infighting.") Collective proper nouns are usually taken as singular ("Apple is expected to release a new phone this year"), unless the plural is explicit in the proper noun itself, in which case it is taken as plural ("The Green Bay Packers are scheduled to play the Minnesota Vikings this weekend").
I guess "couple" may be one of the exceptions?
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/is-couple-singular-o...
> When writing of a couple getting married, it is more common to use the plural form ("the couple are to be wed"). When writing of an established couple, it is more common to use a singular verb ("the couple has six puppies, each more destructive than the next").
So according to MW we're a bit more right than NYT.
Strange things happen to American writers who read lots of Russian novels translated by Brits.
(joke)