simpson, garnett, p/v

[Michele A Berdy]

Colleagues:

I also read Mona Simpson’s “review” of Anthony Brigg’s War and Peace, and 
I must respectfully disagree with Ms. Hurst.  In fact I wrote a cranky 
letter to the editors about it.  Yes, it’s important to pay attention to 
the English text, since that’s what people hold in their hands.  But it’s 
a translation!  All Mona Simpson does is compare English texts and tell us 
which appeals to her – but the question is does Briggs capture the 
original better or worse than others?  She has no idea. 

I agree with those who wrote to defend Constance Garnett’s translations.  
Yes, she smoothes out the rough parts and her translation strategy is 
outmoded today, but when you actually sit and compare her translations to 
others, you discover that she didn’t make many mistakes of meaning.  And 
she translated 70 volumes!  Without a computer, or the dozens of 
dictionaries we have today, or the thousands of academic analyses of 
authors and genres, or internet forums and instant e-mail queries to 
colleagues.  And she was the first to translate these works in most cases -
- unlike Pevear, who explicitly admits to using other translations as 
guides.

I live in Moscow and was slow to pick up on the P/V phenomenon.  But I got 
curious and ordered all their translations.  A Russian colleague and I 
spent about 8 months analyzing them and just published an article in 
Russian about them and their work in a Russian translation journal (a 
short version will soon be posted on a Russian site).  What we found is 
that they are utterly inconsistent in translation strategy (sometimes 
literalist, sometimes not); use a mishmash of modern and archaic language 
(sometimes in one bit of dialogue); fail to understand the Russian (the 
texts are riddled with errors of comprehension of words, phrases and 
stylistic devices); are consistently unable to reproduce interjections 
(“How-what?”); have a tin ear for dialogue; and produce English so bizarre 
that when my colleague would send me text messages of snippets of their 
translations from his dacha, I would accuse him of making them up.  “Drank 
up his pants” is one of the most egregious examples.  If you didn’t know 
Russian, would you know what that means?  Using a strange expression in 
English would be justified if it were a strange expression in Russian, but 
it isn’t – it’s an absolutely run of the mill expression that means the 
fellow pawned his trousers to buy booze. 

We’ll be doing an English-language version (or perhaps two for different 
audiences), hopefully within the next couple of months.  I spotted the 
articles in the Tolstoy journal that colleagues mentioned and sent an 
email trying to get copies.  No luck.  Can someone advise me how one might 
get a hold of them from Moscow? 

Best
Mickey Berdy

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