The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts With Epilogue

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Penguin McDuff Audible edition of The Brothers Karamazov “Can I get a free audiobook of The Brothers Karamazov?” 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 Storiesby Nikolai Leskov, and Chekhov’s Selected Stories.

And, as George Steiner says, at the rows of students sniggering automatically at every mention of the Sunday supplements. 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.” Pevear and Volokhonsky] have a clear idea of what the problems of Englishing Dostoevsky are: how to give some idea of the extraordinarily rich polyphony of voices, accents, undertones, and suggestions in the text; how to convey the novel’s marvelous construction, and at the same time its wholly “living” air of majestic dishevelment. They have succeeded amazingly well…. it may well be that Dostoevsky’s [domain], with all its resourceful energies of life and language, is only now—and through the medium of new translation—beginning to come home to the English-speaking reader.” 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? 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? 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? First of all, I try to do justice to the author’s dark sense of humor…. Secondly, I tried to be mindful of this rich high-style source [Old Russian] and render it with my own elevated language. Finally…. I eliminated what I considered unnecessary repetition of words [while retaining] essential repetitions, those that have semantic importance…. I hope to have produced a version of The Brothers Karamazov that will engage the general public and students for some time to come.”

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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.

Finally, I found the translation by Ignat Avsey which I have heard many positive remarks about. Yes, he omits using the Latin Pro/Contra and uses Pros/Cons for Book 5, he calls Book 10 “Schoolboys” instead of just “Boys”, and he omits ‘Brother’ in Book 11 so it is called “Ivan Fyodorovich” instead of “Brother Ivan Fyodorovich”. But no translation is perfect, and he uses a language that appeals to me and many others: 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? The wild idea strikes me to go straight on with McDuff's Karamazov, while the P&V is in my memory, to determine to my own satisfaction what translations are for me... In the first production of “The Idiots Karamazov,” at the Yale Repertory Theatre, Garnett was played by a student at the drama school named Meryl Streep, who portrayed the aged “translatrix” as a muddled loon. The mangling of the translator’s craft is a main plot point. The Russian for “hysterical homosexual,” Mrs. Garnett insists, is “Tchaikovsky.” When she recalls for the audience the arduous process of translating “Karamazov,” she confuses the four brothers with the “Three Sisters,” a stumble that leads inevitably to the musical number “O We Gotta Get to Moscow!” Mrs. Garnett closes the proceedings by reciting a conjugation of the verb “to Karamazov.” The novel contains a famous chapter-long prose poem called “The Grand Inquisitor”. The chapter has been published separately a number of times.

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 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. 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

When reading a long Russian novel, I always start with an Excel spreadsheet of families and their members and relationships. This printed out and folded into the book is very valuable, particularly with Tolstoy who has many characters. I mention this because if there are variations in the titles, I believe a table of translators and titles might be valuable. I know it would be to me. Her knowledge of Russian was not particularly good and she was apt to leave out the bits she could not quite get the sense of, but she adored her work and her style had a natural animation and flow…. [H]er version of Dostoevsky remained the standard one until fairly recently, though there were more accurate renderings by David Magarshak and others.”

On the thread of Dostoevsky translations, are the titles ever translated differently? If so, is it possible to put together a list of equivalent titles in the novel-length works. I have Brothers K., Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and The Possessed, and a compilation of 5 short novels. I also have a book on Dostoyevsky: A Writer's Life by Geir Kjetsaa. I cannot find a reference to The Demons mentioned in some of the recent posts. My best guess is that Constance Garnett translated the title of The Possessed (possibly) differently from the other translators mentioned. A final version of the above writing is from Andrew R. MacAndrew and the Bantam Classic version, which also is pleasing to me: Dostoevsky’s greatest novel is a story of murder told with hair-raising intellectual clarity and a feeling for the human condition unsurpassed in world literature. Avsey has aimed ‘to be as faithful as possible to Dostoevsky’s style’ (p.xxix). However, the problems begin with his permutation of the title as The Karamazov Brothers…. Avsey’s translations of several book and chapter headings are unsatisfactory, imprecise and defective.”