The Great Translation Chart
When I was first reading the Russians in college I don’t remember being consciously aware that the books had even been translated. There was a Canon, there were Great Books, our college library was called “the Rock,” and our parents didn’t pay $25,000 a year (how quaint, right?) for us to read not-the-real Brothers Karamazov. Now, thanks to the Nabokovian Paris-based husband-and-wife team Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky—branded P&V—translation-jockeying is the new trainspotting… or something.
The couple’s War and Peace, published in October ’07 by Knopf, was the thirty-first best-selling book on Amazon.com the day before its release. It was widely reviewed, hotly debated, caused a public spat between two publishing houses, and inspired an unusually perky New York Times blog post. And even if all this hubbub is more thanks to capitalism than to P&V’s superior translation work, it does throw useful spotlight on translations. Herewith, our guide to the various filters through which our literary chai is brewed.
Mikhail BULGAKOV - Master & Margarita
First Published: Bulgakov died in 1940; the manuscript was finished by his wife in 1941; first published in the Soviet Union in a censored version from 1966 to 1967; a complete version appeared in 1973.
Scandal ranking (on a scale of one to five, with five being the most scandalous): Two. Relatively scandal-free, though ironically, there wasn’t an agreed-upon original Russian text until the 1990s.
Mirra Ginsberg (1967, Grove Press)
A beloved classic celebrated for accuracy and good writing—and also respected by P&V—that unfortunately worked from the censored Soviet version of the text.
Michael Glenny (1967, Harper & Row; 1992, Everyman’s Library)
“I always thought Mirra Ginsberg was a better writer but had a worse text. Michael Glenny had the full text but did a hatchet job. He tried to capture the liveliness of Bulgakov, but at great cost.”—Rachel May, author of Translator in the Text: Reading Russian Classics in Translation
Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor, annotation and afterword by Ellendea Proffer, (Ann Arbor, Ardis, 1993)
The academics’ near-unanimous choice, enhanced by commentary from a noted Bulgakov biographer and published by Ardis, an important American publishing house for dissident works in both Russian and English during the Soviet era.
“The commentary is thorough without being overwhelming.”—Susanne Fusso, professor of Russian Language and Literature, Wesleyan University
Pevear and Volokhonsky (Penguin, 1997)
Opinions on specific P&V translations tend to get drowned out in the general fanfare, a problem exacerbated by the fact that most academics claim not to have read them.
“The best-selling and perhaps most authoritative translators of Russian prose since Constance Garnett,”—David Remnick, in a November 2005 New Yorker story entitled “The Translation Wars.”
Michael Karpelson (Lulu Press, 2006)
Obscure effort from a 20-year-old Canadian, that, from rudimentary text comparisons, reads in a natural, lively way.
Translation violation: Overly literal translations of Bulgakov’s playful names, such as Mark Ratkiller for Krysoboi.
Fedor DOSTOEVSKY - The Brothers Karamazov
First published: 1880
Scandal ranking: Two. When an as-yet-unknown P&V tried to sell their translation in 1991, both Random House and Oxford University Press snootily turned them down. North Point Press eventually offered an advance of only $1,000.
Constance Garnett, (1912; currently available in a Norton edition revised by Ralph E. Matlaw)
The woman who single-handedly translated almost all of the Russian classics into English for the first time is now accused of sacrificing too much both factually and stylistically in order to make the books accessible. David Remnick writing in The New Yorker quotes Nabokov referring to her writing as “dry shit,” and repeats accusations that she skipped words she didn’t know.
“I love Constance Garnett. She’s a brilliant woman. Once in a while she would make a mistake when she translated idiom, but she had a fantastic sense of language, of the period, of class consciousness. I teach her Brothers Karamazov.”—Vladimir Golstein, Associate Professor of Slavic Languages, Brown University.
David Magarshack (1958; currently out of print)
Remnick calls Magarshack an “epigone” of Garnett. Ouch!
Author Rachel May offers a different view: “Magarshack was particularly good for Doestoevsky. He was the one most tuned in to the psychological nuances of what the characters were doing. If I just wanted the students to be interested, I used Magarshack. There was something more compelling about his writing.”—from Translator in the Text: Reading Russian Classics in Translation
David McDuff (1993, currently available from Penguin Classics)
Tried to follow Dostoevsky’s sentence structure and preserve the idiosyncratic wording.
Pevear and Volokhonsky (1990, North Point Press; republished by FSG in 2002)
The book that launched P&V as translators of Russian.
“P&V are good, but they aren’t as good as they think they are. They make mistakes,” says Golstein. He cites an incident in the Brothers Karamazov where P&V translate Biblical reference “Obrashenia Savla” as “the Speeches of Saul” rather than “the conversion of Saul.” But “Saul makes no addresses in the Bible!”
Translation violation: A version entitled The Karamazov Brothers.
Anton CHEKHOV - The Seagull; Uncle Vanya; The Three Sisters; The Cherry Orchard
First Produced: 1896, 1898, 1901, 1904
Scandal ranking: One. Plays can be translated either for literary value or to be used in performance, with widely varying results, and no one gets bothered when non-Russophone luminaries like Tom Stoppard produce a version from a Russian “literal.”
Michael Frayn (1988, Methuen)
“Ten years ago in London I saw a series of Chekhov plays translated by [English playwright] Michael Frayn. Those plays were so funny! It was a revelation to me how different the translation could be.”—Rachel May, author of Translator in the Text: Reading Russian Classics in Translation
The Seagull: A New Version by Tom Stoppard (1997, Faber and Faber)
Stoppard writes: “You can’t have too many English Seagulls: at the intersection of all of them, the Russian one will be forever elusive.”
The Three Sisters, adapted by David Mamet based upon a literal translation by Vlada Chernomordik (1990, Samuel French Inc)
Translation violation: David Mamet makes Chekhov sound like David Mamet.
Nikolai GOGOL - Dead Souls
First published: 1842
Scandal ranking: Three. The authoritative Russian text includes large swathes of an unfinished Part II that Gogol tried to burn before he died. Decisions about how much of this to include can be controversial. Also, Gogol’s anti-Semitism is pretty shocking.
Home Life in Russia (1854)
Recast by an editor as non-fiction, Dead Souls was used as anti-Russian propaganda in England at the time of the Crimean War.
Bernard Guilbert Guerney (1942, updated by Susanne Fusso, 1996, Yale University Press)
Persnickety Nabokov called Guerney’s version “an extraodinarily fine piece of work” and it’s still a classic. Fusso included only a few samples of Part II to give readers a taste without, in her view, violating Gogol. “To me, including Part II is damaging to Gogol’s memory. He didn’t intend for this to be part of the novel,” she says. Also, it’s not as well-written as Part I. Guerney elided some of the mean Jew references and Fusso let that decision stand.
Robert A. Maguire, (2004, Penguin Classics)
The academic gold standard.
“Mcguire’s translation of Dead Souls is a labor of love by one of the top Gogol scholars in the world. He took the time that few professional translators have, with a scholar’s deep knowledge of all the possible interpretations that one might have to weigh. It’s a cross between a work of art and a work of scholarship.”—Catharine Nepomnyashchy, Columbia University professor
Pevear and Volokhonsky (1997, Vintage; 2004, Everyman’s Library)
Translation violation: Pevear cites a case in Dead Souls where a maid comes out of a shed carrying a some-word-that-sounds-like-pogratina of honey. Pevear says it’s been variously inaccurately translated as a plate (“drippy,” he adds gleefully), jar and bowl. David Magarshack’s least elegant solution (1961) was to say that she was carrying “a round wooden vessel made for holding liquids.”
Alexander PUSHKIN - Eugene Onegin
First published: 1825 to 1832
Scandal ranking: Five! Edmund Wilson’s negative review of Nabokov’s literal, free-verse translation sparked a nasty public falling out between the two friends, played out in the pages of the New York Review of Books. Widely reviled, Nabokov’s version nonetheless had a chilling effect on the field, and subsequent efforts haven’t gotten as much attention as they perhaps should.
Babette Deutsch, (1935)
One of the earliest English translations, still praised by academics.
Walter W. Arndt (1963; version was published by E.P. Dutton in 1981)
Attempts to preserve the iambic tetrameter; won the Bollingen Prize for translation.
“Can a rhymed poem like Eugene Onegin be truly translated with the retention of its rhymes? The answer, of course, is no.”—Vladimir Nabokov
“I am sorry to say that, though Arndt is no great poet and that his effort to stick to the rhyme scheme sometimes leads him to a certain farfetchedness, his version is, in general, much closer to Onegin than any of the others I have sampled.”—Edmund Wilson
Charles Johnson (originally published 1977, currently available from Penguin Classics)
A poetic-prose version considered better than Arndt, which inspired Vikram Seth’s novel The Golden Gate.
“For me, if a translation can inspire a creative response, it’s accomplished what it has to accomplish.”—Vladimir Golstein
Vladimir Nabokov (1964, Princeton University Press )
A mad, four-volume folly bursting with commentary, perhaps designed to entwine the two men's names in history. Fascinating scholarship but otherwise nigh unreadable.
“It’s awful, but I like it”—Richard Pevear
James E. Falen (1995, originally with Southern Illinois Press, now available from Oxford World Classics)
A middle ground between the literal and poetic interpretations that’s considered to be the best.
“Certainly at Columbia, everybody uses the Falen to teach Onegin. For the first time, somebody has caught the spirit.”—Catharine Nepomnyashchy
Douglas R. Hofsteader (1999, currently available from Basic Books)
Wow! An anti-Nabokov translation by the cognitive scientist, Indiana University professor and Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Gödel, Escher Bach.
Translation violation: In the New York Review of Books, Edmund Wilson criticizes Nabokov for using too-obscure English words such as rememorating, producement, curvate, habitude, rummers, familistic, gloam, dit, shippon and scrab.
Leo TOLSTOY - War and Peace
First published: 1865 to 1869
Scandal ranking: Five. Tolstoy’s first draft, published by Ecco Press and marketed as an “original,” more-readable, “more peace, less war,” version without all the French was released in October 2007, at the same time as the P&V edition from Knopf. Pevear said the publication and associated marketing claims betrayed a “philistine attitude towards Tolstoy as an artist.” Ecco publisher Daniel Halpern responded nastily that perhaps Pevear was confused, since he doesn’t read Russian (which is sort of true). Pevear generated further controversy with critical remarks about a 2005 Briggs edition.
Constance Garnett (1904, currently available from Modern Library Classics)
The indefatigable Mrs. Garnett went blind while working on this book. Ernest Hemingway found that her take on Tolstoy made it more bearable for him.
Louise and Aylmer Maude (1923, currently available from Oxford World Classics)
The translators were friends of Tolstoy, so this version is often, though erroneously, said to have been “approved” by him. Preserves the original French.
Ann Dunnigan (1968, Signet Classics)
Recommended by Russian-translation scholar Munir Sendich and often cited by academics as a favorite.
“The book is small and fat—it’s not comfortable to hold. But I very much love this translation.” —Vladimir Golstein
Anthony Briggs (2005, Penguin)
Briggs supposedly wanted to rescue War and Peace, a book about man-stuff like war, from the Victorian ladies. So he uses the word fucking.
Pevear and Volokhonsky (2007, Knopf)
The New York Times blog presents more opinions on the quality of this translation than anyone could possibly desire. It includes all the French that Garnett and subsequent translators took out. Is this a pain in the ass to read? Yes. But gloriously authentic.
Andrew Bromfield (2007, Ecco)
The disreputable first-draft version by Boris Akunin and Viktor Pelevin’s not-at-all-disreputable translator.
Translation violation: “I could say quite a lot about the Briggs. He used modern slang. He mistakes the tone all the time. [In the Briggs,] Prince Vasily says of Kutuzov, “He has his head screwed on.
”That’s an idiom. It has nothing to do with what Tolstoy says and nothing to do with Vasily, who was an aristocrat.”—Richard Pevear
ReadRussia.com Exclusive: Leo TOLSTOY - Anna Karenina
First published: 1873 to 1877
Scandal ranking: Two. Quoth Nabokov with exquisite haughtiness: “Her name was Anna Karenin. She was not a ballerina.”
Notable translations:
Constance Garnett (1917, currently available from the cheap and hideous Barnes & Noble Classics)
Constance Garnett’s translations are still among the most readable. Some scholars feel that her language is closer to the 19th-century sense of the original.
Louise and Aylmer Maude (1918, Oxford University Press; currently available in a Second Norton Critical Edition)
The authorized Tolstoy biographers’ version.
Rosemary Edmonds (1954, Penguin Classics)
A translator who gets the voice and the spirit without Garnett’s Victorianisms.
Pevear and Volokhonsky (2004, Penguin Classics)
Oprah picked this for her book club, catapulting P&V into the sales stratosphere. She didn’t say much about the translation, but she did say, “Did you ever expect a 19th century Russian novel to be such a page-turner? What a saga!”
“The only P&V translation I’ve had occasion to use is Anna Karenina. I liked it. It’s very readable.”—Catharine Nepomnyashchy
“At once scrupulous translators and vivid stylists of English,”—James Woods, The New Yorker
Translation violation: Cursory text comparison shows that the Maudes stuck in some synonyms for “home” in the first paragraph. “Tolstoy opens Anna Karenina with his idea of the home. In the first paragraph, he uses the words with the root home 14 times. So it’s a big mistake for translators to try to diversify, improve or smooth over the wording.”—Vladimir Golstein
-Article by Valerie Stivers-Isakova