“We actually met because of Russian literature.”

November 21, 2015 10:25 AM

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, The Art of Translation No. 4 [The Paris Review]

Credited with starting a “quiet revolution,” Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear have joined the small club of major translators whose interpretation of a masterpiece displaces the one read by generations before. Volokhonsky, who is Russian, and Pevear, who is American, have been married thirty-three years. In that time, they have translated much of Russian literature as we know it. Their thirty or so translations include The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, Demons, The Idiot, Notes from Underground, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Hadji Murat, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories, The Master and Margarita, Doctor Zhivago, Gogol’s Collected Tales, Dead Souls, The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories by Nikolai Leskov, and Chekhov’s Selected Stories.

INTERVIEWER: “You translated four Dostoevsky works in a row—The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, Notes from Underground, and Demons. What is it like living in a world of toxic narrators and tortured murderers for five years? Does it affect you personally?”
VOLOKHONSKY: “No. It’s a professional thing.”
PEVEAR: “Oh, it does. I think it affects me, certainly.”
VOLOKHONSKY: “I never noticed.”
PEVEAR: “You didn’t see me twitching?”
VOLOKHONSKY: “We had two small children in a row. I had my blind old mother living with us. I had my own solid reality right there.”
PEVEAR: “I do live in the book, in the voice or voices. If you don’t enter into it, you can’t really translate it. But there is also a certain detachment. You keep having to step back and think, How do I say that in English? Translation isn’t done by principle or by a machine. The only way you can judge what you’re doing is by how it feels to you. Is that the life of it? And for that there has to be a lot of identification—not with the characters but with the art of the book, the art that went into it. You have to have that in order to choose your words. They have to feel right. It’s impossible to define. Writers know this feeling.”

posted by Fizz (19 comments total)

I enjoyed their translation of Anna Karenina quite a bit, though I do not know any Russian and so I lack the ability to compare various translations.

Waiting for Languagehat to chime in here, as I expect this is something he might be familiar with.
posted by Fizz at 10:48 AM on November 21, 2015

This article in The New Yorker: The Translation Wars by David Remnick is also relevant to this discussion on translations and reading.

To compare the Garnett and the Pevear-Volokhonsky translations of “The Brothers Karamazov” is to alight on hundreds of subtle differences in tone, word choice, word order, and rhythm. “These changes seem small, but they are essential. They accumulate,” Pevear said. “It’s like a musical composition and a musician, an interpretation. If your fingers are too heavy or too light, the piece can be distorted.” “It can also be compared to restoring a painting,” Volokhonsky said. “You can’t overdo it, but you have to be true to the thing.”

posted by Fizz at 11:05 AM on November 21, 2015

Yeah, P-V's Bros Karamazov really keeps all the narrator's little tics that, from what I've heard, Garnett smoothed over. So many 'as it were's. It was a bit jarring when I first started reading it, but it's how Dostoevsky wrote it, and it certainly gives a specific, kind of humorous, voice to the narrator.
posted by goodnight to the rock n roll era at 11:47 AM on November 21, 2015

Garnett is my ride or die
posted by prefpara at 12:10 PM on November 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

This is a great interview, thanks for posting. The work and politics of translating these books is interesting, of course, but it was also lovely to see how Pevear and Volokhonsky interacted with each other and with the interviewer--it's always nice to glimpse into relationships such as theirs in which romantic partners also share professional work, especially work as intimate and technical as that of translation.

There are so many times here when you get a sense of a deeply intelligent and deeply functional partnership: when the interviewer suggests “fatally in love” in place of Volokhonsky’s “mortally in love,” and Pevear immediately points out why this is suboptimal, or when they alternate speaking when explaining how various editors have disliked how faithfully they represent the text (“We think that sometimes inversions are very expressive and necessary…”), or this whole exchange near the end:

VOLOKHONSKY
....Working with Tolstoy’s text, I feel that I’m in good hands.

INTERVIEWER
What do you mean?

VOLOKHONSKY
I don’t know. Richard, help me.

PEVEAR
There is a whole, very solid world in Tolstoy.

VOLOKHONSKY
There is death. There is suffering. But there is also stability. You belong.

PEVEAR
You’re at home.

The whole interview makes me very happy.
posted by bergamot and vetiver at 12:19 PM on November 21, 2015 [2 favorites]

I've read their translation of Master and Margarita (twice) which I thoroughly enjoyed. Have copies of both Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamozov. Guess I'll push them up my TBR list.
posted by jgaiser at 12:32 PM on November 21, 2015

Can I just underline again the Paris Review is a G-- d--- national treasure and that in any rational world, it should be getting support from the National Endowment of the Arts? You can go back and read their interviews with Hemingway, Waugh, Kerouac - practically anybody you can think of.
posted by newdaddy at 1:14 PM on November 21, 2015

> Waiting for Languagehat to chime in here, as I expect this is something he might be familiar with.

Sorry, but I can't stand P&V. This has little to do with the quality of their translations, which taken as a whole are probably no better or worse than others (Russian literature has generally been lucky in its translators*), although I find their overliteral versions of perfectly ordinary Russian idioms annoying. What I can't stand is their overbearing attitude—"We are the only good translators, everybody else is wrong and bad"—plus their overbearing PR machine, which ensures that their self-deification is propagated throughout the media of the English-speaking world and makes them the de facto official translators of Russian lit for our day. I'd be a little more forgiving of that if they used their position to translate some of the many works that need it, but no, they insist on retranslating every fucking warhorse in the canon. Crime and Punishment already has dozens of translations? Never mind, ours will be better!

For Christ's sake, they even stoop to barging into quiet little blog discussions to try to bully people into accepting their godhood. As I wrote here:

It will not surprise you to learn I am entirely on Rayfield’s side here. The answer to “why give up such an expressive phrase as ‘spit on’, which also happens to be what Pasternak wrote?” is because we’re talking about English, not Russian. In Russian, it’s expressive; in English, it’s absurd and takes you out of the story. It’s obvious P&V have their own, in my view peculiar, theory and method of translating, which could be summed up as “if it’s in the OED, it’s fair game (even though it may not have been used for two centuries), and if it’s expressive, we’re running with it (even if no speaker of English has ever said it).” And that’s fine! Let a thousand translations bloom, say I; obviously, lots of people enjoy their work (though their vast sales are primarily a function of their publicity machine — very few people actually compare translations before buying one). The reason I dislike them is not their translation practice but their obsession with stamping out dissent wherever they find it. Something tells me Marian Schwartz (to name a translator I thoroughly respect) doesn’t spend her time writing furious letters-to-the-editor and blog comments defending every jot and tittle in her translations against anyone who dares to complain about them. (Of course, that could be because nobody finds anything to complain about, he snarked…)

For more, see this LH post from 2007 (and I can feel my outrage freshly rising as I reread it).

*Michael Glenny, however, is notorious for howlers—to quote Simon Karlinsky, "among other gems, he rendered 'dentist' as 'an expert on Dante,' 'saints' as 'swine,' 'squirrel fur' as 'protein,' and, mistaking the Russian word for bathtub, vanna, for a woman’s name, added a new character to Bulgakov’s cast."
posted by languagehat at 1:16 PM on November 21, 2015 [6 favorites]

I know beans about translating or Russian literature but I loved the dry wit and gentle ribbing back and forth between the two. Reminds me of another couple I know...
posted by jim in austin at 1:25 PM on November 21, 2015

There are some other people very down on P&V, also because of their weirdly literal translations of ordinary idioms (which give the impression, in English, that something extraordinary is being said). I'll see if I can ferret out links.
posted by kenko at 3:03 PM on November 21, 2015

Oh, it's the stuff collected here, which you can reach by following languagehat's links.
posted by kenko at 3:17 PM on November 21, 2015

Garnett 4 lyfe
posted by edeezy at 2:40 PM on November 21 [3 favorites +] [!]

So based on this comment, I decided to a do a little googling on Constance Garnett. Some interesting factoids discovered on her wikipedia entry:

• Constance Garnett translated 71 volumes of Russian literary works, and her translations received high acclaim, from authors such as Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence. Despite some complaints about being outdated, her translations are still being reprinted today (most also happen to be in the public domain).
• However, Garnett also has had critics, notably prominent Russian natives and authors Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky. Nabokov's criticism of Garnett, however, may arguably be viewed in light of his publicly stated ideal that the translator be male.

I'm a fan of Vladimir Nabokov, but seriously, WTF?!
posted by Fizz at 3:34 PM on November 21, 2015

• Constance Garnett translated 71 volumes of Russian literary works, and her translations received high acclaim, from authors such as Joseph Conrad and D. H. Lawrence. Despite some complaints about being outdated, her translations are still being reprinted today (most also happen to be in the public domain).
• However, Garnett also has had critics, notably prominent Russian natives and authors Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky. Nabokov's criticism of Garnett, however, may arguably be viewed in light of his publicly stated ideal that the translator be male.

I'm a fan of Vladimir Nabokov, but seriously, WTF?!

As far as I can tell what he said was he wanted the translator of his own Russian-language work to be male. Take that as you will.
posted by atoxyl at 5:41 PM on November 21, 2015

Nabokov's own practice of translation is incredibly weird.
posted by kenko at 6:10 PM on November 21, 2015

V&P seem to produce more accurate and certainly smoother translations, with far fewer outright errors than Garnett. But Garnett is just a much better writer. You read her prose and it just flows so nicely, while the occasional gaffs and literalisms just add a little spice in my opinion. Her Chekhov just feels more literary, even the cruder early stuff. It's really hard for me to point to exact moments where her translations are better, but the way the sentences flow and the attention shifts from word to word just feels more like real writing, whatever that means. I don't know a word of Russian, but if you read three translations side-by-side you get a very good sense of what the truth is, and how V&P are clearly hewing closer to it. But I read for pleasure, not accuracy, and so far Garnett can't be beat.
posted by chortly at 6:17 PM on November 21, 2015 [2 favorites]

It will not surprise you to learn I am entirely on Rayfield’s side here. The answer to “why give up such an expressive phrase as ‘spit on’, which also happens to be what Pasternak wrote?” is because we’re talking about English, not Russian. In Russian, it’s expressive; in English, it’s absurd and takes you out of the story.

Hmm. Looking at Rayfield's (corrected) example I don't find "drank them up" to be opaque at all. It's like how a contemporary English speaker might say "[the money] all went up his nose" to mean he spent it on cocaine. "Spit on the rugs and china" is also fairly readable though in English it comes off as showing a deliberately exaggerated contempt for those possessions. I don't know how it reads in Russian - such is translation obviously. Anyway so far I think I'm leaning toward their side.
posted by atoxyl at 8:03 PM on November 21, 2015

V&P read as ridiculous to me. I feel like I'm reading awkward, florid, workshoppy prose. To me it's like an analogy to buying the unwieldy, painterly hardcover version of a classic book instead of the paperback version that fits in your purse. It drives me up the wall.

Of course, I was reared on Garnett, so maybe dry and occasionally baffling is just what I associate with erudition.

I am actually not a fan of Nabokov on any level, so maybe this is all tied together in my consciousness...
posted by easter queen at 11:43 PM on November 21, 2015

Has anyone read Tolstoy's War & Peace? What translation would they recommend? Aylmer and Louise Maude seem to be fairly well praised and widely available.
posted by Fizz at 3:34 AM on November 22, 2015

> V&P seem to produce more accurate and certainly smoother translations, with far fewer outright errors than Garnett. ... I don't know a word of Russian, but if you read three translations side-by-side you get a very good sense of what the truth is, and how V&P are clearly hewing closer to it.

I'm sorry, but if you don't know a word of Russian, you have no business claiming that their translations are more accurate. Why not leave that judgment to those who can make it? And why do you say "far fewer outright errors than Garnett"? Can you point to any? You sound like you've swallowed P&V's press releases whole. I don't mean to come down on you personally, but this sort of thing is exactly what irritates me so much. Professional reviewers also accept their claims at face value, whereas it should be obvious that unless you know Russian you should not be making pronouncements about anything but how it reads in English.

> I'm a fan of Vladimir Nabokov, but seriously, WTF?!

Nabokov was a great writer, but that doesn't make him a great human being. He was raised a fabulously rich aristocrat, and he had most of the prejudices that implies. He thought of women as helpmeets (and took for granted his wife Vera's utter devotion and her dealing with all the messy requirements of daily life so he could write); he had contempt for homosexuals, including his own brother (which he repented after WWII); and on a gut level he thought well-bred, well-read people more important than "little people" (as did Tolstoy, another rich aristo, who of course promoted the glories of the peasant and ranted about how awful the upper classes were in his later years). His hatred of communism was such that he was deeply unfair in his attitude toward everyone who had the misfortune to live under Soviet power, making nasty remarks about Soviet writers who didn't deserve them. I know it's hard not to want good artists to be good people, but one has to get over that attitude in order not to have silly responses to either the art or the people.

> "Spit on the rugs and china" is also fairly readable though in English it comes off as showing a deliberately exaggerated contempt for those possessions. I don't know how it reads in Russian - such is translation obviously.

No, such is not translation obviously. Did you read the discussion? In Russian it's a perfectly ordinary, unremarkable phrase; Russians say "I spit on him" the way we'd say "I don't like him" or "I don't give a damn what he thinks." It involves no deliberately exaggerated contempt, and to translate it literally is to betray the first duty of a translator. What would you think of a translator who rendered "The hell with it" into their language with some highly marked equivalent of "I consign it to the eternal flames of damnation"? That's what's going on here. Enjoy P&V if you like, but don't valorize their every choice.

> Has anyone read Tolstoy's War & Peace? What translation would they recommend? Aylmer and Louise Maude seem to be fairly well praised and widely available.

I don't think there are any bad translations available; the advice I always give people is to read a few pages of all the ones they can find (which is easier than ever in this day of Google Books and Amazon's "look inside the book") and choose the one they most enjoy reading. There will probably be the occasional gaffe or unsatisfactory rendition, but if you want exactly what Tolstoy wrote, there's no substitute for learning Russian.
posted by languagehat at 7:51 AM on November 22, 2015 [5 favorites]