Dostoyevsky's " Бе сы"plus Anna Karenina plus amour-propre

Tue Dec 14 17:58:09 UTC 2010

I thank you sincerely for your responses to my post, and I r
Dear All,

I thank you sincerely for your responses to my post, and I regret any offense I 
may have caused anyone during this very engaging exchange.  But before this 
thread degenerates hopelessly into maudlin praise and half-hearted gestures of 
"goodwill," I'd like to suggest that criticism of the sort I and others offer 
should be responded to professionally, not in a manner that betrays whatever 
loyalties people may feel towards others (which is utterly unproductive, sorry 
to say it) and which obscures matters more important to scholars and critics.  
That said, I'd like to return to my initial post (which, in fact, had nothing to 
do with the Robert Chandlers and Olga Meersons on this list).  I would like 
to examine one passage from the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of / intro to 
Dostoevsky's Notes for consideration (afterwards, I promise not to post anything 
further).  It comes from the passage I have already cited:  Peavear's intro.  He 
writes:

"There is, however, one tradition of mistranslation attached to Notes From 
Underground that raises something more than a question of "mere tone."  The 
second sentence of the book, Ya zloy chelovek, has most often been rendered as 
"I am a spiteful man."  Zloy is indeed at the root of the Russian word 
"spiteful" (zlobnyi), but it is a much broader and deeper word, meaning 
"wicked," "bad," "evil."  The wicked witch in Russian folktales is zlaya ved'ma 
(zlaya being the feminine of zloi).  The opposite of zloy is dobryi, "good," as 
in "good fairy" (dobraya feja).  This opposition is of great importance for 
Notes From Underground; indeed it frames the book, from "I am a wicked man" at 
the start to the outburst close to the end:  "They won't let me... I can't be... 
good!"  We can talk forever about the inevitable loss of nuances in translating 
from Russian into English (or from any language into any other), but the 
translation of zloy as "spiteful" instead of "wicked" is not inevitable, nor is 
it a matter of nuance.  It speaks for the habit of substituting the 
psychological for the moral, of interpreting a spiritual condition as a kind of 
behavior, which has so bedeviled our century, not least in its efforts to 
understand Dostoevsky.  Besides, "wicked" has the lucky gift of picking up the 
internal rhyme in the first two sentences of the original."

There is much balderdash here, but I will point to the most obvious offenses, 
namely:  the assumption of rhyme (no, "wicked" and "sick" do not rhyme, and 
if the Russian "Я человек больной... Я злой человек" naturally contains some 
sort of "poetic gift" it is not the one Pevear would like to bequeath to us); 
the discussion of fairies and witches has virtually nothing to do with 
Dostoevsky's Notes, but the bigger point here is that Pevear makes the 
assumption that one word means exactly another in a different language.  This is 
the mark of bad faith and fraudulence, for as any good translator knows, There 
is no one-to-one correspondence across languages.  To assume that zloi means 
wicked (which it doesn't) is to drastically limit and distort the range of 
meanings at stake in Dostoevsky's text (let's agree:  the valence of zloi here 
cannot even be delimited to "spiteful," let alone "wicked," which changes the 
meaning of the entire text; but even if we decide to be generous and allow 
"wicked," it is this kind of banal, "dangerous literalism" for which husband and 
wife have been praised and on which their enterprise rests); and finally, if 
anyone buys the criticism of the substitution of the "psychological for the 
moral" which informs Pevear's choice, I'll leave that to his or her discretion.  
If anyone is in need of an insanely comical read, take a look at page one of the 
text where Pevear renders "я ни шиша не смыслю в моей болезни" as "I don't know 
a fig about my sickness."  If anyone agrees that this is an acceptable English 
idiom, and not a calque, I will eat my lecture notes.  Poetic gifts indeed.

AK

________________________________
From: "greniers at GEORGETOWN.EDU" <greniers at GEORGETOWN.EDU>
To: SEELANGS at bama.ua.edu
Sent: Tue, December 14, 2010 7:39:22 AM
Subject: Re: [SEELANGS] Dostoyevsky's "Бе сы" plus Anna Karenina plus 
amour-propre

Dear Robert, Sarah, Alexei and others,

I wish I had had the time to focus my attention on Alexei's remark (about 
Robert's questions to the list) and respond to it earlier. Not only is sarcasm 
inappropriate but the whole idea does not make sense. What we were talking about 
was the quality of translations, not the process by which that quality was 
ultimately achieved.  It is not a matter of who can do a perfect translation 
single-handedly but who has the meticulousness and the "sense of one's own 
limitations", a.k.a. humility, to ask questions in order to make the translation 
perfect.  The Pevear and Volokhonsky team have the built-in capacity of two 
native speakers who can ask each other questions in order to achieve  perfect 
understanding of the text, and their process of reading each other's versions 
and asking more questions assures the ultimate accuracy and letting any silly 
mistakes slip. Robert does it by addressing an even wider group--more glory to 
him! Whether every choice Pevear and Volokhonsky make is t!
he!
most effective rendition of the original can be debated but the idea of using 
other people's expertise to get something right is the most indispensable 
principle a translator should have.  I have to say that in my years of teaching 
Russian literature in English I have seen a number of most amazing "flubs", but 
I have not run into any in the P and V "Anna Karenina" yet.  

By the way, I am now puzzled by the word "amour-propre".  I first heard it, I 
believe, in one of Prof. Robert Belknap's courses when I was a graduate student, 
and as far as I remember he did use it to talk about the Underground Man.  I 
just looked it up in Webster and it was translated as "self-esteem".  If anyone 
knows French and English well enough, could you please comment on whether the 
meaning is the same or different in the two languages?
Incidentally, Robert, how did you translate it in the "Queen of Spades", where 
it is said about Lizaveta Ivanovna: "Ona byla samoliubiva".  I remember that in 
the translation I used to teach it was "she was proud".  My impression is that 
in contemporary American English, at least, "pride" has more positive 
connotations than "samoliubie" has in Russian, although I think it is an 
adequate translation in a broader cultural context (say, Christian context). 

Sorry for such a long message!

Best to all, 
Svetlana

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