The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts With Epilogue

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The husband-and-wife team works in a two-step process: Volokhonsky prepares her English version of the original text, trying to follow Russian syntax and stylistic peculiarities as closely as possible, and Pevear turns this version into polished and stylistically appropriate English. Pevear has variously described their working process as follows: Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have tried to restore, to recapture, some of the original Russian rhythm and nuance. They were not trying to make it simple, they were making it more ‘real.’” However, their work has not been without negative criticism. Writing in The New York Review of Books in 2016, the critic Janet Malcolm argued that Pevear and Volokhonsky "have established an industry of taking everything they can get their hands on written in Russian and putting it into flat, awkward English". [17] Some translators have voiced similar criticism, both in Russia [18] and in the English-speaking world. The Slavic studies scholar Gary Saul Morson has written in Commentary that Pevear and Volokhonsky translations "take glorious works and reduce them to awkward and unsightly muddles". [19] Criticism has been focused on the excessive literalness of the couple's translations and the perception that they miss the original tone of the authors. [18] [19] 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.

In my translations, I try to achieve an evenhanded position on the continuum of accuracy/accessibility, somewhat closer to my readers—namely, the general public and students in high schools and colleges. What elements have I tried to highlight in my own version of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece? Slater, Ann Pasternak (2010-11-06). "Rereading: Doctor Zhivago - The Guardian". The Guardian . Retrieved 2011-07-09.First published as a complete novel in 1880 following serialization in 1879 and 1880, The Brothers Karamazov was first translated into English in 1912. 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. I have no idea how Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation of The Brothers Karamazov came to be regarded as definitive. Let me rephrase that. I know why. Fourteen thousand copies a year, practically indefinitely, is why. There’s a lot of money at stake, for them and for their publisher. What I don’t know is how.Admittedly, their method is a publicist’s dream come true. A husband-and-wife team, Larissa makes a literal translation as close to word-for-word as possible and then Richard tidies up her copy. (He hasn’t mastered the language himself, not even at a conversational level, which is why I feel comfortable criticizing their work so harshly. I may not know Russian—but neither does Richard Pevear.) The result, as you might imagine, is a fairly close replication of the original. The promotional material practically writes itself. No one has ever offered a truer approximation of Dostoevsky’s prose! P & V are like Gillette razors—you just can’t get any closer! Among Garnett’s translations are Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed ( Demons), War and Peace, and Anna Karenina. About the Garnett translation of The Brothers Karamazov 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

She is a professor of Slavic languages and literature at Northwestern University. She has a BA from Stanford and a PhD from Harvard. She is the author of Redemption and the Merchant of God : Dostoevsky’s Economy of Salvation and Antisemitism. About the Garnett/Matlaw/Oddo translation of The Brothers Karamazov The Katz translation uses versions of the word ‘ecstasy’ twice as many times as the Garnett translation. “Garnett’s brilliance was bound up in the fluency of her prose, and she was prone to taking Dostoyevsky in hand when he became too crazed or inscrutable, fixing repetitions, cutting apparent non sequiturs and breaking up massive paragraphs into shorter, more readable portions. Mr. Katz has accepted ungainliness in return for greater intensity. His translation sharpens the sensation unique to Dostoyevsky, that of a man clutching your forearm and shouting something into your face.” Tanenhaus, Sam (2007-10-11). "Welcome - Reading Room - Sunday Book Review - New York Times Blog". The New York Times . Retrieved 2008-09-10.

Do they still sell audiobooks on CD?

For the solo recordings, I’ve marked which narrators sounded British and which sounded American when I listened to the audio samples.