The Brothers Karamazov: Translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky

Product Information

I live in a small college town in central Vermont, where during a normal academic year, the college provides ample opportunities for cultural enrichment: concerts, plays, films, lectures, and so on. Despite his imperfect, book-learned Russian, Wilson betrayed no doubt that he was capable of taking on Nabokov. The doctor was just coming out of the room, already wrapped up in his fur coat and with his hat on his head. One head is good, but two are much better, but he did not meet another head with wits, and his wits went.

The translation is… fine, though I’ve had to read some sentences multiple times, and some word choices strike me as off (e. Mornings, she made porridge for her son David, and then, according to her biographer Carolyn Heilbrun, “she would go round the garden, while the dew was still on the plants, to kill the slugs; this was a moment of selfindulgence. Or they never get that far: until the King James commission, English translators of the Bible were sometimes burned at the stake or strangled—or, as in the case of William York Tyndale, both. I have no idea how Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation of The Brothers Karamazov came to be regarded as definitive. And then I remembered my happy youth, and a poor boy in the yard without any shoes, and my heart turned over, and I said: ‘You are a grateful young man, for all your life you have remembered that pound of nuts I brought you in your childhood.

I am a spiteful man”), but the sheer vitality, the thirst for life, that characterizes all the Karamazovs sweeps the reader irresistibly along.

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. The Brothers Karamazov” is, to use Mikhail Bakhtin’s famous term, the most polyphonic of Dostoyevsky’s novels, the one with the most voices, tones, and textures braided into the text. This award-winning translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky-the definitive version in English-magnificently captures the rich and subtle energies of Dostoevskys masterpiece. Pevear and Volokhonsky told me that they considered Nabokov’s “Onegin” one of the great triumphs of translation, even though it is nothing like their own work.Pevear and Volokhonsky are famous for reinventing Dostoyevsky’s translated language, and we can sense it in just this small text. We moved to France illegally on a tourist visa, and it was finally a policeman who told us that we needed to ‘regularize our situation,’ as he put it. Despite the stubbornly eccentric and unlovely texture of Nabokov’s “Onegin,” the work was generally well reviewed, especially by those who understood and accepted his intention and did not go looking for an English poem. He gives us, for example, rememorating, producement, curvate, habitude, rummers, familistic, gloam, dit, shippon and scrab.

Let me repeat: it was not stupidity, for most such eccentrics are really quite intelligent and cunning, and their lack of common sense is of a special kind, a national variety. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. Tolstoy made the writing of Stephen Crane on the Civil War seem like the brilliant imagining of a sick boy who had never seen war but had only read the battles and chronicles and seen the Brady photographs that I had read and seen at my grandparents’ house.I repeat, it was not stupidity —the majority of these fantastical fellows are shrewd and intelligent enough—but just senselessness, and a peculiar national form of it. In the emotionally lacerating “Rebellion,” Ivan tells Alyosha that he has collected news clippings of the tortures inflicted upon small children. In translating slushat’ shum morskoy (Eight:IV:11) I chose the archaic and poetic transitive turn “to listen the sound of the sea” because the relevant passage has in Pushkin a stylized archaic tone. This award-winning translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky—the definitive version in English—magnificently captures the rich and subtle energies of Dostoevsky’s masterpiece. When it came to Russian literature, the correspondence between Nabokov and Wilson was rather like that between an amused, patient teacher and an eager, overreaching student.