Secondly, contemporary Russian draws upon two sources for its diction and syntax: so-called “Old Russian,” the spoken language of the East Slavs, and Old Church Slavic (or Slavonic), the language of the Orthodox Church, similar in a way to Latin and modern Italian. When Alyosha presents us with Zosima’s life and works in Book Six, or when he sees his miraculous dream during Father Zosima’s funeral in Book Seven, I tried to be mindful of this rich high-style source and render it with my own elevated language. Translating Dostoevsky is different from rendering other authors into English. His prose is impassioned, fiery, and intense. Nothing in his novels ever happens “gradually” or “slowly.” Her novels are Shadow of a Sun(1964), reprinted under the originally intended title The Shadow of the Sunin 1991, The Game (1967), Possession: A Romance(1990), which was a popular winner of the Booker Prize, and The Biographer’s Tale(2000). The novels The Virgin in the Garden(1978), Still Life(1985), and Babel Tower(1996) form part of a four-novel sequence, contemplated from the early 1960s onwards, which will be completed by A Whistling Womanin 2002. Her shorter fiction is collected in Sugar and Other Stories(1987), Angels and Insects(1992), The Matisse Stories(1993), The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye(1994), and Elementals(1998). All these are much translated, a matter in which she takes great interest (she is a formidable linguist). She is also the author of several works of criticism and the editor of The Oxford Book of the English Short Story, an anthology that attempts, for the first time, to examine the national character through its national writers; an exercise only flawed by the anthology’s modest omission of its editor’s own stories, as she is surely one of the most accomplished practitioners of the shorter form now living. Her status was officially recognized with the award of a CBE (commander of the British Empire) in 1990 and a damehood in 1999. The song is about a series of men who come courting the singers, and their reasons for accepting or rejecting their advances. The gypsy, for example, is a no-go because “ He’ll turn out to be a thief / And that, I’m sure, will bring me grief.” The businessman does better: “ To the wealthy merchant I’ll be wed / And a queen I’ll lie, all day in bed.” There’s a very strong picture in your second novel, The Game, of childhood creativity, but I have the feeling that there’s an element of the smokescreen to it. It’s quite an accurate portrait of what the Brontës got up to, isn’t it? McDuff: "Ivan's sights are set higher than that. Ivan would not be tempted even by thousands. Ivan isn't in quest of money, or peace of mind. He may possibly be in quest of torment."

Garnett has, apparently, been criticized for skipping some paragraphs and writing in a style very typical of Victorian England. I was worried about this at first, but then remembered that Dostoyevsky’s style – which, to some degree, was conspicuous in all the various Dostoevsky translations I’ve read previously – is, in my opinion, one of his weaknesses. At his best, the plot, characters and philosophy are all wonderful, but I’ve often found the prose a bit repetitive, not very beautiful and somewhat (forgive me!) adolescent in tone – which is quite jarring when the psychology is as insightful as it is. Finally, I found the translation by Ignat Avsey which I have heard many positive remarks about. Yes, he omits using the Latin Pro/Contra and uses Pros/Cons for Book 5, he calls Book 10 “Schoolboys” instead of just “Boys”, and he omits ‘Brother’ in Book 11 so it is called “Ivan Fyodorovich” instead of “Brother Ivan Fyodorovich”. But no translation is perfect, and he uses a language that appeals to me and many others:Earlier book covers for the Second edition had a brown, framed design; the current printings have the same cover image, but the design features a purple band across the bottom. Yes, this is true. It’s also something to do with what a man I once knew said to me about his sister. It was the only thing he ever said about his sister, and what he said was that she played an imaginary board game with imaginary pieces. That was like the thing Henry James said about going up the stair and finding the one needful bit of information. A lot of what I write is about the need, the fear, the desire for solitude. I find the Brontës’ joint imagination absolutely appalling. So, in a sense, the whole thing was, as you rightly say, a construct and a smokescreen. For some reason, this translation feels a bit awkward to me, and McDuff has a choice of words and a style that hinder more than help me. I know McDuff appeals to many who have English as their first language, but for me, it doesn’t take me all the way to a good understanding.

I live in a small college town in central Vermont, where during a normal academic year, the college provides ample opportunities for cultural enrichment: concerts, plays, films, lectures, and so on. But then came the pandemic: the students had been sent home, the library was closed (books could still be fetched for faculty, but there was no browsing or schmoozing). I found myself in need of a project. David McDuff is a British translator of Russian and Scandinavian poetry and prose, an editor and a literary critic. Penguin published his translations of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Idiot. About the McDuff translation of The Brothers Karamazov Her knowledge of Russian was not particularly good and she was apt to leave out the bits she could not quite get the sense of, but she adored her work and her style had a natural animation and flow…. [H]er version of Dostoevsky remained the standard one until fairly recently, though there were more accurate renderings by David Magarshak and others.” Lithub: “The Quiet Rebels of Russian Translation: In conversation with Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear” by Paris Review

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Fyodor Dostoevsky’s final novel, published just before his death in 1881, chronicles the bitter love-hate struggle between a larger-than-life father and his three very different sons. The author’s towering reputation as one of the handful of thinkers who forged the modern sensibility has sometimes obscured the purely novelistic virtues—brilliant characterizations, flair for suspense and melodrama, instinctive theatricality—that made his work so immensely popular in nineteenth-century Russia. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky are literary translators best known for their collaborative English translations of classic Russian literature. Individually, Pevear has also translated into English works from French, Italian, and Greek. The couple's collaborative translations have been nominated three times and twice won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize (for Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov). Their translation of Dostoevsky's The Idiot also won the first Efim Etkind Translation Prize.

This translation, published in two volumes, is out of print. You may be able to find copies second-hand. He believed profoundly in the translator’s role as a creative figure and leader of taste, and paid the price for this ideal in his unsuccessful lawsuit against the University of Westminster (settled out of court) for not crediting his translations as ‘original research’.” About the Avsey translation of The Brothers Karamazov Abramovich, Alex. "Russian-to-English translators turned Oprah stars", July 31, 2004, reproduced in EIZIE. Retrieved 2011-02-27.Their 2010 translation of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago met with adverse criticism from Pasternak's niece, Ann Pasternak Slater, in a book review for The Guardian, [20] but earned praise for "powerful fidelity" from Angela Livingstone, a Ph.D. and translator who has translated some of Pasternak's writings into English, in The Times Literary Supplement. [21] Bibliography [ edit ] Translations credited to Pevear and Volokhonsky [ edit ] a b http://www.thinkaloud.ru/feature/berdy-lan-PandV-e.html The Sweet Smell of Success? Russian Classics in the Translation of R. Pevear and L. Volokhonsky M.Berdy, V.Lanchikov Yes, I did. In fact, I wrote a lot, most of which I burned before I left boarding school. Somebody I went to school with wrote me a letter from Canada the other day saying she remembers me reading aloud a whole adventure story I was writing, which I also remember writing. It was a story about some disguised male figure getting into this girls’ boarding school. I had this terrible need for male figures.