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WAR And PEACE
Avec:
I doubt it'll be as biased as I have been, but this thread is about opinions and I'm telling you mine. It doesn't fucking compare.
Avec:
прочитанный перед мысли.
Uber Ritter:
To be fair, the Garnett is ancient and generally considered less than faithful. I've heard that for Dostoevsky she likes to polish out the rough edges, avoiding the sometimes deliberate ugliness of Dostoevsky's language for something more conventionally pretty.
Joseph:
Garnett is not well respected at all among contemporary translators and fans of literature. It's likely going to be the worst of all those translations I listed above when it comes to faithfulness.
She was fairly ubiquitous when it came to dawn of the 20th Century Russian translations, and no doubt exposed many people to some brilliant works, so props for that. But an accurate translator she was not.
TheFuriousWombat:
I think the whole "oh man, how can you read that book in translation?? The original is so much better!" is as tiring an argument as the whole book to film adaptation one. Y'know, we get it. The words that we're getting in translations are not the same words that the author wrote. Clearly. And it's quite possible that in most instances the original is "better," whatever the fuck that even means. But basically I think you should look at the translation as its own thing, its own related yet unique piece of art. Most of us can't and never will be able to read the great Russian writers in Russian. That doesn't mean their books aren't brilliant and don't make us feel anything and don't have wonderful characters. I loved 'Dead Souls' and 'Hero of Our Time' and 'Eugene Onegin' and 'The Idiot' and...I could go on and on but I won't. The point is it's a silly and frankly somewhat obnoxious argument to insist that we're all missing out by not reading the Russian. Even if we are missing something, the world play or the colloquialisms or the subtle, untranslatable turns of phrase, there's still a tremendous amount to be gained from exploring these works in various forms, through the pens of various translators, some more gifted than others to be sure, and there's not much point in denigrating that experience.
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