The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts With Epilogue

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Without translators, we are left adrift on our various linguistic ice floes, only faintly hearing rumors of masterpieces elsewhere at sea. So most English-speaking readers glimpse Homer through the filter of Fitzgerald or Fagles, Dante through Sinclair or Singleton or the Hollanders, Proust through Moncrieff or Davis, García Márquez through Gregory Rabassa—and nearly every Russian through Constance Garnett.

Abramovich, Alex. "Russian-to-English translators turned Oprah stars", July 31, 2004, reproduced in EIZIE. Retrieved 2011-02-27. 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. 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.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. Washington Post: “ The Brothers Karamazov is a classic, but it’s not beyond criticism” by Michael Dirda Larissa goes over it, raising questions. And then we go over it again. I produce another version, which she reads against the original. We go over it one more time, and then we read it twice more in proof." [7] However, Garnett also has had many critics, notably prominent Russian natives and authors Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky. Brodsky notably criticized Garnett for blurring the distinctive authorial voices of different Russian authors[1:]:

The main thing is that you stop telling lies to yourself. The one who lies to himself and believes his own lies comes to a point where he can distinguish no truth either within himself or around him, and thus enters into a state of disrespect towards himself and others. Respecting no one, he loves no one, and to amuse and divert himself in the absence of love he gives himself up to his passions and to vulgar delights and becomes a complete animal in his vices, and all of it from perpetual lying to other people and himself. On the fateful day, Smerdyakov urges Ivan to go see about some business in a town called Chermashnya, before outlining how heated the conflict between Dmitry and his father had become—indeed, that it was likely to come to a head that night. “So why did you,” Ivan asks him, “after all this, advise me to go to Chermashnya? If I leave, see what happens here.” Smerdyakov answers cryptically: “Precisely so, sir.” Sensing a plot, Ivan has a spasm and breaks into a fit of laughter, a sound associated in the novel with the Devil. Still, he goes. Constance Garnett has: "Ivan is above that. He wouldn't make up to anyone for thousands. It is not money, it's not comfort Ivan is seeking. Perhaps it's suffering he is seeking?" A translation that has gained a lot of attention, positive as well as negative, is the one from Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Their version of the same text is: Well, he was Russian, and Russians use the Cyrillic alphabet, not the Latin/Roman alphabet. The author’s name looks like this in Cyrillic:I have loved Dostoyevsky since I was young, yet had never read the Brothers Karamazov, which I had heard was one of his masterpieces, combining all the themes of his earlier works. 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. 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.” Join Book Club: Delivered to your inbox every Friday, a selection of publishing news, literary observations, poetry recommendations and more from Book World writer Ron Charles. Sign up for the newsletter. 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!

P&V: "Ivan aims higher than that. Ivan won't be tempted by thousands either. Ivan is not seeking money, or ease. Perhaps he is seeking suffering." Put simply, Avsey’s and MacAndrew’s languages make the text more direct and lands in my mind in another way that the other translator’s texts do. There are large swaths of “The Brothers Karamazov” in which Dostoyevsky’s vices are on full display. His chauvinism and antisemitism (Fyodor’s avarice is attributed to his time in the Ukrainian city of Odesa, a Jewish enclave of the Russian Empire), dressed up in the language of Christian love, threaten to weigh the novel down with the flaws of its creator. But the structure of the book gives it a greatness that transcends the author’s smallness. The form of the detective story forces readers to look closely for clues, to pay attention to characters or objects we might be conditioned to ignore. You do not want to make the mistake that the Karamazovs made, of overlooking what was right under their noses—the forgotten son, the disregarded brother, Smerdyakov. Did he feel slighted, rejected by his father, to the point of murder? The prosecutor does not take him seriously as a suspect. “What was his motive? What did he hope to gain?” Kirillovich asks. After all, an illegitimate son cannot inherit. But Dostoyevsky himself attends to Smerdyakov, granting him, arguably, the central role in the family drama. Pevear and Volokhonsky’s playful engagement with the characters’ language respects Dostoyevsky’s solecisms and inconsistencies and ‘as it weres’, and the result is earthy, colloquial and occasionally wordy.”Garnett’s flaws were not the figment of a native speaker’s snobbery. She worked with such speed, with such an eye toward the finish line, that when she came across a word or a phrase that she couldn’t make sense of she would skip it and move on. Life is short, “The Idiot” long. Garnett is often wooden in her renderings, sometimes unequal to certain verbal motifs and particularly long and complicated sentences. The typescripts of Nabokov’s lectures, which he delivered while teaching undergraduates at Wellesley and Cornell, are full of anti-Garnett vitriol; his margins are a congeries of pencilled exclamations and crabby demurrals on where she had “messed up.” For example, where a passage in the Garnett of “Anna” reads, “Holding his head bent down before him,” Nabokov triumphantly notes, “Mark that Mrs. Garnett has decapitated the man.” When Nabokov was working on a study of Gogol, he complained, “I have lost a week already translating passages I need in ‘The Inspector General’ as I can do nothing with Constance Garnett’s dry shit.” The Brothers Karamazov is the first work they translated together. They had a hard time finding a publisher to sponsor the project, but eventually got an offer from North Point Press and a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Separately, Pevear has also translated works in French, Italian, Spanish, and Greek, including The Three Musketeers. About the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of The Brothers Karamazov Constance Garnett’s versions of the great Russians inspired Hemingway but outraged exiled writers. Illustration by Edward Sorel Tanenhaus, Sam (2007-10-11). "Welcome - Reading Room - Sunday Book Review - New York Times Blog". The New York Times . Retrieved 2008-09-10.