Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have begun a quiet revolution in the translation of Russian literature. Since the publication of their acclaimed version of The Brothers Karamazov in 1990,[12] they have translated fifteen volumes of classic Russian works by Dostoevsky, Gogol, Bulgakov, Chekhov, and Tolstoy, restoring all the characteristic idioms, the bumpy syntax, the angularities, and the repetitions that had largely been removed in the interests of "good writing" by Garnett and her followers, and paying more attention (in a way that their predecessors never really did) to the interplay or dialogue between the different voices (including the narrator's) in these works—to the verbal "polyphony" which has been identified by the literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin as the organizing principle of the novel since Gogol.
It'll be a while before I even think of tackling War and Peace. I've still got to take another crack at Anna Karenina, which I bailed on for reasons of fatigue and bad timing. And I've got a few more Dostoevsky books to polish off to finish my Summer of Dostoevsky '06 project. (Right.) The Adolescent has just been pulled from the bottom of its pile and put up near the top, though.
None of which is happening until I finish my current Book Rock Block. Which started with Zeroville, which rocked. Which continues right now with Grant Bailie's new novel Mortarville, which I'm now halfway through, and it totally rocks. Which I'll then follow up with Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds, which I expect will also rock. After which I think I'll just lapse into a booked-out rockoma for the remainder of the year.
2 comments:
A very nice book list, by the way. Every one should have a Dostoevsky Project. And Drilling down that way is a superb practice too, no matter what the list.
For sure.
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