Russian literature from New York Review Books

[Robert Chandler]

Dear all,

Elizabeth Edmondson ( eedmondson at nybooks.com) recently posted the
following message on behalf of New York Review Books: "The Fierce and
Beautiful World_, Andrei Platonov
This collection of Platonov's short fiction brings together seven works
drawn from the whole of his career. It includes the harrowing, and long
unavailable, novella Dzahn, in which a young man returns to his Asian
birthplace to find his people deprived not only of food and dwelling, but
of
memory and speech, and "The Potudan River," Platonov's most celebrated
story."

I want to point out that this volume is a reissue, entirely unrevised, of
translations first published around 1970.  Joseph Barnes was using a
heavily censored text of Dzhan, about four/fifths the length of the
complete text.  There is barely a page without significant omissions, and
in most cases - unsurprisingly - it is the most interesting and unusual
passages that have been omitted. Together with Eric Naiman, Nadya
Prigova, and Jane Chamberlain and  Elizabeth Chandler I am at present
working on a translation of the complete text - to be published by
Harvill in 2001 or 2002.

As for the quality of Barnes's translations, I would like to ask readers
to compare his translations of "The Potudan River" and "The Return" with
those by Angela Livingstone, myself and Elizabeth Chandler in THE RETURN
(Harvill Press, distributed in USA by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux).

Yours, Robert Chandler

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