The Master and Margarita question

[naiman at BERKELEY.EDU]

There is at least one more translation, by Michael Karpelson.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Master-Margarita-Mikhail-Bulgakov/dp/1411683056

Several years ago, I taught a graduate seminar on Master i Margarita.  For
one of the final meetings, I gave the seminar participants (seven or 8
Berkeley graduate students) unidentified passages from five of the
translations (Glenny, Ginsburg, Burgin & O'Connor, Pevear & Volokhonsky,
Karpelson) and asked them to rank them, considering both readability and
fidelity.  P&V came out on top, with B& O'C second.  Interestingly, P&V
were not always ranked first for the passages, but they were all but once
first or second.  Karpelson was erratic, once or twice the best, but with
some disqualifying mistakes.  Glenny is very readable and for a generation
of undergrads in survey courses, he may have provided the hook that led to
a major, but as the grad students quickly noticed, he skips things he
doesn't understand; as Simon Karlinsky noted in a NYTimes review, at one
point he turns a bath into a female character.  (Not even Woland could do
that).
    This sort of thing, by the way, might be an interesting thing to try
at an AATSEEL panel.

> I was able to identify 5 English translations by 7 translators:
> Michael Glenny, Mirra Ginsburg, Diana Burgin & Katherine O'Connor, Pevear
> & Volokhonsky, Hugh Alpin.
>
>

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