I've been thinking a lot about that man with the hammer from Gooseberries lately given the state of the world and my privileged position to ignore much of it when I choose to.
> Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s new translation of 52 Chekhov stories
Oh no, oh no, oh no. Their “method” absolutely disagrees with any author with a tight writing style, and Chekhov's tired narration with a tiny drop of irony is tight.
Warning, it's very long! But, many of the stories are incredible. Constance Garnett is a very capable Chekhov translator, and her Chekhov translations were praised by writers including Hemingway.
I do love Chekhov’s stories, but many years of humanities education has left me pretty jaded about “X invented the modern Y” claims. It’s a lazy formula and relies on the complete slipperiness of the term “modern” (oh and “invented” is kinda vague too).
Examples, based on ones I’ve heard:
“Shakespeare invented the modern self”
“Napoleon invented the modern state”
“Newton invented modern science” (Or was it Galileo?)
“Picasso invented modern painting”
Note that these examples span about 1600-1900. Perhaps we should just engage with the work on its own terms.
Yes, I don't see much serious argument on the claim in the article itself, more like a puff piece for this new translation of his stories. Also Pevear-Volkhonsky has oft received flak for their translations[0].
"Bastard asked me to understudy Konstantin in The Seagull. I'm not going to understudy anybody. Especially that pimp! Anyway, I loathe those Russian plays. Always full of women staring out of windows, whining about ducks going to Moscow"
Plays in general are probably the easiest form of writing to distill into stereotypes since they rely heavily on dialogue and that's bound to get repetitive when thousands of works are written. I can think of a dozen plays right now where there were similar moments of young adults arguing with relatives (usually not parents but aunts or grandmas) or someone monologuing about a death that happened offscreen but in a vague way. All of these moments can be deconstructed and I do find them repetitive if I read a few plays in a row... but I still feel like it's wholly a matter of preference. If you like those elements - sad women staring out of windows, for example - you'll like the plays.
The great thing about plays is that they can be interpreted and reinterpreted again and again by different directors, set designers, composers, and actors. It's possible to bring the play into our own time or to subvert its ostensible message or to add new layers and nuances. It's wonderful that the text of the play is only the skeleton which to hang the body of the performance.
The early ones were predominantly, but did you keep reading?
* 2000 Total Film third greatest comedy film of all time
* 2004 Total Film 13th greatest British film of all time.
* 2014 readers of Empire 92nd greatest film
* 94% "fresh" rating from 34 critics, and an average rating of 8.48 out of 10 from critic website Rotten Tomatoes.
* 2009 Empire 118 in 500 Greatest Films of all Time list.
* 2009 American Pulitzer prize-winning film critic Roger Ebert four-star review, added the film to his "Great Movies" list
Unless their hobby is watching classics, regardless of anything else about the film, 'most people have not heard of' a lot of films in that region of 'greatest of all time' films.
They are fun to argue about however! e.g. Montaigne invented the modern self. (Shakespeare was a student of Montaigne.) Bacon invented modern science – the huge enterprise of science and scientific research as we know it today is his program.
That seems irrelevant - I wasn't at all talking about which individuals were recognizably doing science, but where (the program of) modern science came from. Bacon didn't do science, didn't 'employ the scientific method', just wrote about and promoted a huge program of scientific investigation, which is what we call 'modern science'. From The Oxford Francis Bacon:
Before Bacon where else does one find a meticulously articulated view of [science] as an enterprise of instruments and experiment, an enterprise designed to restrain discursive reason and make good the defects of the senses? Where else in the literature before Bacon does one come across a stripped-down natural-historical programme of such enormous scope and scrupulous precision, and designed to serve as the basis for a complete reconstruction of human knowledge which would generate new, vastly productive sciences through a form of eliminative induction supported by various other procedures including deduction? Where else does one find a concept of scientific research which implies an institutional framework of such proportions that it required generations of permanent state funding to sustain it? And all this accompanied by a thorough, searching, and devastating attack on ancient and not-so-ancient philosophies, and by a provisional [science] anticipating the results of the new [science]?
But thanks, I didn't know anything about Ibn al-Haytham, e.g. that his Book of Optics (written 1011-1021) "was read by and greatly influenced a number of scholars in Christian Europe including: Roger Bacon, Robert Grosseteste, Witelo, Giambattista della Porta, Leonardo Da Vinci, Galileo Galilei, Christiaan Huygens, René Descartes, and Johannes Kepler"!
Ah, I have always associated Bacon with the scientific method and was not aware of the wider program he developed.
But I still do not see my comment as irrelevant. Would Bacon have been able to develop his program without learning from the efforts of scientists who worked to apply the scientific method in the real world?
I suspect the lesson here is: There are often people who have happened upon a valuable way-of-working but who have not yet thought enough about it to explain it in a way that many others can notice and scalably copy.
Then you also get into the problems of multiple independent discoveries, or convergent research. Or whether someone's discovery is relevant at all if nobody learns from it -- that is, what is the value of popularizing a method over its mere discovery?
Right, but that goes back to the original point, which I am in agreement with: it is usually tough to pinpoint a single, specific person who was responsible for a discovery or invention. And as you noted, it can also depend on how you frame the discovery and its impact.
That’s surprising to hear. I’ve found P&V’s Dostoevsky translations very readable, and my understanding from reading reviews online was that P&V’s translations are well regarded in general.
Which translation did you read/would you recommend?
Edit: I did some reading online and found some criticism of P&V, such as:
They are not without their detractors - part of it is they take on difficult work, some of which hasn't seen serious translator attention for a while. Personally, I find the results poor but obviously lots of people like them.
Chekhov's short stories are an English translator's nightmare though - there's a reason he's much more famous as a playwright in the English-speaking world.
I don't mean the reason is one aspect of his work is 'better' than the other, just that the difficulty translating his short stories makes them much less accessible to English readers than the plays.
I think the reverse is the case for Russian - Жалобная книга (The Complaints Book) is part of Russian idiom, the famous play Чайка (The Seagull) is not. Chekhov just occupies a different part of the English-speaking cultural taxonomy.
A (maybe more than a little over the top) way to put it is, it's like if in Russia, Newton was primarily known as a great theologian and alchemist.
Strugatski brothers' Monday Begins on Saturday is aslo a difficult translation from Russian. I really love Russian literature, especially modern writers like Vladimir Sorokin, it's so different.
Anything will be hard to translate between languages as distant as English and Russian, to be quite honest. Monday Begins on Saturday just has more contemporary cultural references that Russian readers understand. Chekhov's stories probably have just as many but they are just as lost to the contemporary Russian reader as they would be to an English translation one :)
On the other hand, I remember watching Russian translation of the Naked Gun and finding it extremely funny even though neither I nor the translator understood any references there so, I guess, it's still possible to enjoy art without the context.
There's a lot more runway, in a novel, to establish style and voice - both for the authors and for the translators. Monday Begins on Saturday begins:
"Я приближался к месту моего назначения. Вокруг меня, прижимаясь к самой дороге, зеленел лес, изредка уступая место полянам, поросшим желтой осокою."
Pretty much ez-mode compared to this opener, in the Gooseberries (Крыжовник) someone brought up upthread:
"Еще с раннего утра всё небо обложили дождевые тучи; было тихо, не жарко и скучно, как бывает в серые пасмурные дни, когда над полем давно уже нависли тучи, ждешь дождя, а его нет."
Two different translators' takes:
"The whole sky had been overcast with rain-clouds from early morning; it was a still day, not hot, but heavy, as it is in grey dull weather when the clouds have been hanging over the country for a long while, when one expects rain and it does not come."
and
"From early morning the sky had been overcast with clouds; the day was still, cool, and wearisome, as usual on grey, dull days when the clouds hang low over the fields and it looks like rain, which never comes."
The ‘Gooseberries’ excerpt sounds close to ‘stream-of-consciousness’ with the attempts to describe the inner mood—and indeed I can't think of anyone speaking or writing in English in the manner of that passage, except Nabokov. As a translator, you'd basically have to imagine maybe John Malkovich narrating your book, and then whack at the words until they sound natural coming from him.
The first linked article (commentarymagazine.com) suggests that the Garnett/Matlaw translations of Dostoevsky’s "Notes from Underground" is a better translation than the P&V translation.
As an example, it says the following:
> ...His word for such acts of self-injury is, in English translations before P&V, “spite.” It is fair to say that to miss the concept of spite is to miss the work entire.
> But that is just what P&V do. Instead of “spite,” they give us “wickedness.” Now, the Russian word zloi can indeed mean “wicked.” But no one with the faintest idea of what this novella is about, with any knowledge of criticism from Dostoevsky’s day to ours, or with any grasp of Dostoevskian psychology, would imagine that the book’s point is that people are capable of wickedness.
From my copy of the P&V translation for this book, toward the end of the Foreword, Pevear says the following:
> There is, however, one tradition of mistranslation attached to Notes from Underground that raises something more than a question of “mere tone”. The second sentence of the book, Ya zloy chelovék, has most often been rendered as "I am a spiteful man." Zloy is indeed at the root of the Russian word for "spiteful" (zlobnyi), but it is a much broader and deeper word, meaning "wicked," "bad," "evil." The wicked witch in Russian folktales is zláya véd'ma (zláya being the feminine of zloy). The opposite of zloy is dóbryi, "good," as in "good fairy" (dóbraya feya). This opposition is of great importance for Notes from Underground; indeed it frames the book, from "I am a wicked man" at the start to the outburst close to the end: "They won't let me...I can't be...good!" We can talk about the inevitable loss of nuances in translating from Russian into English (or from any language into any other), but the translation of zloy as "spiteful" instead of "wicked" is not inevitable, not is it a matter of nuance. It speaks for that habit of substituting the psychological for the moral, of interpreting a spiritual condition as a kind of behavior, which has so bedeviled our century, not least in its efforts to understand Dostoevsky.
Translations are, by their very nature, open to interpretation and oftentimes small details and nuance gets lost. And then you get debates about things like the aforementioned comparison. As such, it's more practical to look for a good translation than the best translation.
I second this in some way. I started reading their Crime and Punishment translation. It was boring, the words didn't flow. Kinda clunky. Kind of the same with their Brother's Karamazov translation. Some people recommend the following translations, by Oliver Ready and Ignat Avsey:
I've been thinking a lot about that man with the hammer from Gooseberries lately given the state of the world and my privileged position to ignore much of it when I choose to.