Dostoyevsky's " Бесы"(The Possess ed) plus Anna Karenina

[helena goscilo]

Dear Svetlana and colleagues,

I currently am in the UK without my books, but shall identify the specific
instances when I'm back in the US. I don't remember the exact passages by
heart.

We used the P-V version (which my students dubbed "the Oprah translation")
in a general education undergraduate course devoted to the three major
19th-century novels of adultery (*AK,* *Mme Bovary,* *Effi Briest*) and
their various screen adaptations. There are a couple of spots in this
*AK *where
the English (unlike the Russian) makes no sense--sufficiently so that the
attentive readers in the group ("This is the best novel ever!") noticed that
something was awry.

In my view, to provide a fine translation of a text one needs to have not
only a native or near-native command of the target language and an excellent
knowledge of the language from which one is translating, but also a
sensitivity to style in both languages and sound judgment. The last is
what Nabokov lacked when he 'translated' *Evgenii Onegin,* and (exclusively
on the basis of their *AK)* I'm not convinced that the P-V team possesses
it. Michael Kandel, the inspired translator into English of Stanislaw Lem's
novels, is blessed with all the requisite abilities to such an extent that
'his' *Futurological Congress* loses nothing of Lem's witty,
paronomastic *Kongres
Futurologiczny.* Tellingly, Kandel edits--or, at least, used to--for the
PMLA. His renditions take my breath away.  But,then, I'm not a native
speaker of any language...

Helena






On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 11:19 AM, <greniers at georgetown.edu> wrote:

> Dear Helena,
>
> Could you please indicate those "flubs in their 'Anna Karenina'," on or off
> list?  I teach the book and think the translation is excellent but I have to
> admit that I have not read the whole thing through in translation.
>
> Thank you!
>
> Svetlana Grenier
>
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-- 
Helena Goscilo
Professor and Chair
Dept. of Slavic Langs. and Lits. at OSU
1775 College Road
Columbus, OH 43210
Tel:  (614) 292-6733
Fax: (614) 688-3107
Leverhulme Visiting Professor at University of Leeds, UK

Motto:
"It is my ambition to say in ten sentences what others say in a whole book."
Friedrich Nietzsche

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