Which Translators do you Trust?

How do ppl here feel about Pevear and Volokhonsky? I want to read Anna Karenina this year, but the only version I currently own is the P and V translation and I know that it's 'controversial':

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/09/29/on-translation-tolstoy/

I am probably not picking P&V up and it's not do much to do with that piece. I don't know if it was the translation or the book but Demons did flag quite a bit for me.

I think I have a copy of Garnett.

Is Garnett regarded as a direct translation. I remember giving up on reading one of her versions of Dostoevsky in my mid teens cos I thought it had gentrified or bowdlerised something darker.
Have more recently heard that Dostoevsky was borrowing style heavily from British and other European authors which has left me wondering if that was actually closer to the style he wrote in than I imagined from hearing other people's reactions to his work.
I don't read Russian so can't tell.

I am suspicious of them

I just started the Maude translation (revised by Mandelkern) of War and Peace and it seems really good to me. I've found this version very easy to get into. The dialogue feels lively and natural. The Maudes did an Anna Karenina as well so I may seek that out. I remember trying the P&V Anna Karenina and hitting some clunky sentences early on.

It seems like there was a bit of a translation war between the Maudes and Garnett at one time.

Maude wanted to publish a complete collected works of Tolstoy and enlisted his friends and acquaintances to help campaign for funding and support. There were many competing editions of the more popular works, some of them "very incompetent," according to Bernard Shaw, since Tolstoy had waived his rights over translation. Shaw wrote to The Times asking readers to support the project by "spontaneously giving it the privileges of a copyright edition" and "subscribing for complete sets" to make up for the "miscarriage of Tolstoy's public-spirited intentions." Shaw's signature was followed by many more, including literary figures like Arnold Bennett, Arthur Conan Doyle, Gilbert Murray and H. G. Wells. Thomas Hardy added his own independent letter, offering support though he did not feel equipped to comment on all the points in the main letter.[24]

After a protesting letter from an admirer of Constance Garnett's translations, the correspondence continued, with Maude asserting that "Tolstoy authorized my wife's translation" of Resurrection and Shaw insisting on the need for a complete collected works, going beyond the "great novels" which were "sure to get themselves translated everywhere," since other translators had "picked the plums out of the pudding." He went on to compare Maude's "devoted relation" to Tolstoy with that of Henrik Ibsen's translator William Archer, or Richard Wagner's Ashton Ellis.

I'd just like to know if it was thought that Garnett kept her translations true to the original feeling she was translating from.
What I gave up reading just seemed too gentile and polite when i was expecting something rough and dark. BUt could be taht the original had a feeling I wasn't expecting it to have and just conveyed information and topics taht weren't otherwise being handled at the time.

P&V’s literalness generally makes then clunky and unreadable.

P’s solo translation of Three Musketeers is atrocious.

Idk I’m reading P+V’s Brothers Karamazov right now (my first exposure) and the literalness makes it defamiliarized and engaging to me!

Still got to finish Anniversaries but Damion Searls isn't waiting for me.

“The Other Name” — the first two volumes of Jon Fosse’s 1250-pg “Septology” — will be published in April by @transitbks. Fosse is a genius. Hoping to write something on this. pic.twitter.com/7RancGdC5s

— Dustin Illingworth (@ddillingworth) February 18, 2020

i'm a p&v skeptic, but the maude has been great as i work through w&p. i love some garnett translations though.

throwing these into the mix: charlotte mandell and adrian nathan west have built up some good will for me. nathanaël's work on hilda hilst makes me really curious about her other stuff. philip boehm did two of my favorite translations of last year (malina and the fox & dr. shimamura, both nd).

do yall have a favorite proust? i tried both moncrieff and davis this year and went through davis, but should i switch back to moncrieff for later volumes?

I read this, as a total noob---most sustained enjoyment found in Lydia Davis's Swann's Way (the perfecy gateway, of course) and she explained her approach (with kudos and some marvel re prev translations)--:

In Search of Lost Time (General Editor: Christopher Prendergast), translated by Lydia Davis, Mark Treharne, James Grieve, John Sturrock, Carol Clark, Peter Collier, & Ian Patterson. London: Allen Lane, 2002 (6 vols). Based on the French "La Pléiade" edition (1987–89), except The Fugitive, which is based on the 1954 definitive French edition. The first four volumes have been published in New York by Viking, 2003–04. And I think I've got the whole thing in Penguin Deluxe now? Anyway, got and read all those versions.

No idea how accurate they are, but really enjoyed David Magarshack's trans The Idiot, Ann Goldstein's version of the Neapolitan Novels, Natasha Wimmer's take on 2666, and Norman Thomas Di Giovanni's work with Borges. Borges does seem as close to translator-proof as possible, but NTDG mixes rule.

― dow, Thursday, October 15, 2015 1:03 PM (four years ago) bookmarkflaglink

His widow-executrix does not agree, on either count.

― dow, Thursday, October 15, 2015

i tried both moncrieff and davis this year and went through davis, but should i switch back to moncrieff for later volumes?

― vivian dark, Tuesday, 7 April 2020 bookmarkflaglink

That's what you see ppl say now and then, it seems there is a consensus on this but I love the multi-translator project although I think that's more to do with Davis. Her translation was just a fuel for me to read volume after volume till the last sentence.

"throwing these into the mix: charlotte mandell and adrian nathan west have built up some good will for me."

Both are very good on twitter. Mandell's twitter is: 1) transcription of Robert Kelly's just composed poems, 2) love the way she goes through picking sentences from a book (she did so many from Broch's Death of Virgil last year) she is slow-reading through 3) pictures and videos of nature.

Really looking forward to her translation of Genet's essays. And she is doing a version of Monsieur Teste!

West got me to read Juan Benet who I think is one of the great discoveries of the last couple of years.

Isn't Borges' widow's problem with the NTDG translations the fact that she got fuck-all money from them, whereas the newer, inferior translations get her royalties?

Seems plausible---anyway, good thread: Borges translation?

Even self-translators à la Sam Beckett are not to be trusted. Traduttore, traditore, etc.

RIP Edith Grossman

I loved her Mutis translations.

I have big plans to read through Scott Moncrieff's Proust once I'm finished my current French reading (almost done, phew). I'd like to complete all of the major English versions eventually, if I live long enough.

RIP, there’s a funny bit in her why translation matters book where she’s complaining about how little most reviewers care about translators & points out the tell that (if they mention it at all) they’ll just write “ably translated by”

Yup, most journalistic reviews lazily sign-off the quality of translation without knowing both source and target language, instead of trying to evaluate the music of the prose (whether translated or not).

Surely they know the target language?

something quasi ironic about retreading the prose of A La Recherche du Temps Perdu. Looking at all the angles covered in the retelling etc?

I just love the book, and I think it rewards the attention. If you take a couple years to read it, then enough time will have passed since the first volume that you can pretty much start again right away. The translations give you more to explore.

Surely they know the target language?

― Tsar Bombadil (James Morrison), Sunday, 10 September 2023 bookmarkflaglink

Maybe 🤣