#figure it the fuck out or crab walk your ass back to dollar bin historical fiction martha

[deadpanwalking]

Re: your P/V translation rec - When I wanted to start reading Master & Margherita I went looking for translation forum discussions as usual and the overwhelming conclusion seemed to be that they sucked all the fluidity and enjoyment and subtlety out of the works they translated and were why many thought they didn't like Russian lit in school until they read a dif translation later in life, so I'm surprised to see you recommend them so effusively. What about their work stands above others to you?

Yes. We had yet another critic, at the very beginning, an old Russianémigré lady. When we first told her we were translating The Brothers Karamazov, she said, Oh,Dostoevsky, I hope you correct his awful style. I said, No, that is preciselywhat we’re going to keep. - Richard Pevear, in this dope ass interview for The Paris Review

Thisis a good question.  I think mypreference might come down to the fact that I read the books in Russian beforereading the English translations—remember: Russian language uses something like20%  fewer words and has a wealth of compounds,i.e. in English you have “corrode"; our equivalent is raz’est’ which breaksdown to ‘around-eat’ (raz=around; est’=eat). With that in mind, a lot of translators, wary of being too repetitive,either get too liberal with the synonyms or gloss over important parts of thetext—that arguably creates a sense of consistency for nonRussophone readers, but at the expense of critical aspects of the original work.

Meanwhile,P&V translations are like when you transpose a violin concerto to flute* (thekey changes but the phrasing remains the same)—I respond to that because it fundamentallypreserves the nuances in music that I already love.  I’m not sure if I’d feel the same way if they were my first introduction to Russian literature.

*Briggs’translations are like really good covers of a song, and on the other end of thespectrum, Garnett’s may as well be Kidz Bops.