The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts With Epilogue

Product Information

Hunnewell, Susannah (Summer 2015). "Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, The Art of Translation No. 4". The Paris Review. Summer 2015 (213). McDuff’s translation is the most literal (even more so than P&V). This means “the dialogue is sometimes impossibly odd—and as a result rather dead.” Extract from the McDuff translation of The Brothers Karamazov

In this version, MacAndrew leads the way in portraying the mother and her daughter in front of me. The language is not a hindrance but his version is true to the original. For example, he describes the mother as “very pretty” instead of comely in appearance, or pleasant to the gaze. 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.Anyway, kudos to all who were involved in producing this work. Rendering one of the all time world’s best writer’s masterpiece unto sound is no small task, and you all rose to the very high occasion. I salute you! 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. The great strength of this new translation, despite its cerebral wordiness, is to look madness in the face. Only by surrendering to the horror can we engage with these Napoleons, murderers and femmes fatales of the St Petersburg slums, and see what makes Dostoyevsky’s world such a rich, dangerous and funny place.” I chose not to follow the translations of my predecessors; however, on occasion I did engage with them critically, especially in the particularly complex passages, believing that literary translation is in reality an enterprise in which a translator builds on the work of his/her predecessors. If Garnett could come up with the perfect English counterpart, who was I to reject it and use a less appropriate phrase?

All the readers of unabridged versions of The Brothers Karamazov happen to be male, except in the case of the collaborative Librivox recording, which includes female volunteers as well as male volunteers. Pevear and Volokhonsky have won the pen Translation Prize twice, for The Brothers Karamazovand Anna Karenina. Pevear, who has also translated French and Italian works, is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the American University of Paris. In addition to translating Russian contemporary poets, Volokhonsky, who attended Yale Divinity School, has translated theological texts into Russian. They have two trilingual children. Some critics praise the authenticity and accuracy of their work, while others find it rough and unappealing; much ink has been spilled in the debate. Our conversation took place over the course of five days in the summer of 1998 in the garden of her house in the south of France. We talked over champagne, by the side of a swimming pool rather like the one in her short story “A Lamia in the Cévennes.” As the hot day cooled into evening, our conversations had the feeling of relaxation on both sides. Dame Antonia spent the days working on The Biographer’s Tale, and I submitted to the rigor of cycling in solitude up the ferocious mountains that surround her house. One day, we took a day off and drove to Nimes, that beautiful Roman city: Dame Antonia’s pleasures—they seemed equal—in the dazzling glass palace of the Carré d’Art, old bullfighting posters, a ravishing Matisse nude in pencil, and a superlatively delicious lunch at that great temple of the art nouveau, the Hôtel Imperator Concorde, were contagious. Both of us, I think, enjoyed the conversations, however, as a break from more arduous activities, and although the interviewer should always try to keep the conversation to the point, it was not always easy to resist a feeling of delight as Dame Antonia moved onto evolutionary theory, non-conformism, F. R. Leavis, and dozens of other topics with a sure, swift movement of thought. There are few writers so rich in intellectual curiosity; none, perhaps, who so definitely regards the life of the mind as a matter of pleasure taken and given in equal measure.

Audible.com rankings

Hebert, James (7 February 2018). "With fresh look at 'Uncle Vanya,' Old Globe bringing something new to the conversation". San Diego Union Tribune . Retrieved 18 February 2018. McDuff has two or three times used words I've never heard and/or doubt exist. Perhaps he includes these in his note: '[The translation] also aims to reproduce the somewhat idiosyncratic nature of the wording of certain passages, which is not always the one that might be expected either in Russian or in English'. He has come across to me more idiosyncratic. People's speech gets so eccentric they make up words on the spot or wrench them to fit. No other translator has given me words I don't understand, but I perfectly believe D. does the Russian equivalent.

Criticism” offers a wide range of scholarly commentary on The Brothers Karamazov from American, Russian, and European authors, eleven of them new to the Second Edition and two of them appearing in English for the first time. Contributors include Ralph Matlaw, Valentina Vetlovskaia, Seamas O’Driscoll, William Mills Todd, Vladimir Kantor, Edward Wasiolek, Nathan Rosen, Roger B. Anderson, Robin Feuer Miller, Horst-Jürgen Gerigk, Vladimir Golstein, Robert L. Belknap, Ulrich Schmid, and Gary Saul Morson.Slater, Ann Pasternak (2010-11-06). "Rereading: Doctor Zhivago - The Guardian". The Guardian . Retrieved 2011-07-09. You can do that manually if you have the same translation, which is part of why it helps to know which audiobook uses which translation.