![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() A literal translation of all the author’s repetitions would be too tedious. It seems to me that the Russian ear is much more tolerant of repeated words and phrases than the Anglo-American ear. Nothing in his novels ever happens “gradually” or “slowly.”įinally, I have tried to distinguish between two kinds of repetition. His prose is impassioned, fiery, and intense. Translating Dostoevsky is different from rendering other authors into English. When Alyosha presents us with Zosima’s life and works in Book Six, or when he sees his miraculous dream during Father Zosima’s funeral in Book Seven, I tried to be mindful of this rich high-style source and render it with my own elevated language. Secondly, contemporary Russian draws upon two sources for its diction and syntax: so-called “Old Russian,” the spoken language of the East Slavs, and Old Church Slavic (or Slavonic), the language of the Orthodox Church, similar in a way to Latin and modern Italian. Each scene in which he plays a role winds up being a “ skandal” (just what it sounds like), and undercuts the seriousness of the action. In addition, the brothers’ dissolute father, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov, is an authentic buffoon. He uses impudent wit and sarcasm to paint a portrait of the “nice little family” living in the provincial town of Skotoprigonevsk (literally, a “stockyard.”) The narrator himself maintains an ironic stance to the action of the novel, right from its very first lines. What elements have I tried to highlight in my own version of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece?įirst of all, I try to do justice to the author’s dark sense of humor. In my translations, I try to achieve an evenhanded position on the continuum of accuracy/accessibility, somewhat closer to my readers-namely, the general public and students in high schools and colleges. If Garnett could come up with the perfect English counterpart, who was I to reject it and use a less appropriate phrase? I chose not to follow the translations of my predecessors however, on occasion I did engage with them critically, especially in the particularly complex passages, believing that literary translation is in reality an enterprise in which a translator builds on the work of his/her predecessors. I chose not to follow the translations of my predecessors however, on occasion I did engage with them critically, especially in the particularly complex passages. Of course, the novel had been translated previously, once by the indefatigable Constance Garnett, who translated more than seventy works of Russian literature into serviceable English, beginning in the early 1910s and by the popular Anglo-Russian pair, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, who had been translating many Russian novels since the early 1990s. Dostoevsky once wrote that his faith was “tempered in the furnace of doubt.” So was (is?) mine! It speaks to me and deals with the questions that I wrestle with in my profession and in my own life. Now, after many years of thinking, writing, and teaching about Dostoevsky’s final novel to many different audiences, I find myself just as awed by that section, and quite taken by the entire book. As a non-observant Jew, I was overwhelmed by the Devil’s temptation of Christ in the wilderness, imagined anew in the famous scene with the Grand Inquisitor (Book Five). Karamazov was an ambitious choice for a fifteen-year-old, but one that spoke directly to the questions that mattered to me. I first read Brothers when I was a high school student, puzzling over profound, religious questions: is there a God? if so, why does evil exist? And if not, how should we live our lives? I was studying the Russian language and had begun reading the great works of its literature in translation. Who knew how long it would take or how long the pandemic would last? I found myself in need of a project.Īfter having translated over twenty Russian novels into English, including three major works by Dostoevsky ( Notes from Underground, Devils, and Crime and Punishment), I decided to tackle Dostoevsky’s crowning achievement, his last and best novel, and one of the undisputed classics of world literature, The Brothers Karamazov. But then came the pandemic: the students had been sent home, the library was closed (books could still be fetched for faculty, but there was no browsing or schmoozing). I live in a small college town in central Vermont, where during a normal academic year, the college provides ample opportunities for cultural enrichment: concerts, plays, films, lectures, and so on. ![]()
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