In your opinion what are the best translations of Classic Russian novels? I read the Pevear...

>awkward and clunky
There is an argument that that's because the writing is (deliberately) awkward and clunky in the original Russian and the P&V translation is just more faithful to that style.

Oxford's Revised Maude
Whoever they are they have shit opinions.
Giga cope.

lrb.co.uk/v30/n10/michael-wood/crabby-prickly-bitter-harsh
An interesting review of the P&V translation which touches on why it's worthwhile to read more than one translation.

>reading translations instead of producing them

Lazy bastard

Most English novels from the 18th and early 19th century are clunky and awkward too.

Shut up fag, you've already admitted to not even having read the book so your opinion is worthless.

Best translator of Dostoevsky is somewhat debatable but it’s definitely not P&V. There is some nostalgia around Garnett because that is the translation many in the English speaking world first read, but I don’t think it’s really true to Dosto. I personally think McDuff is the best.

For Tolstoy it’s really much more simple. Maude is the best translation. There is a revised version, but I didn’t notice any really change even comparing them a little bit, the revisions must be few and far between.

P&V is a modern translation, so obviously it will be advertised and promoted, people want you to buy the new book, not a used copy of the Maude translation you found in a second hand bookstore. They can’t make money off that.

commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-pevearsion-of-russian-literature/

The best way is to translate it yourself one word at a time using Google translate. It takes a while but it’s worth it.

Commentary is a monthly American magazine on religion, Judaism, and politics, as well as social and cultural issues.

Founded by the American Jewish Committee in 1945 under the editorship of Elliot E. Cohen

i'd love to see someone actually try this and how confused they'd get because google translate is awful and routinely produces random nonsense.

>not trusting infallible computers over human translators

my favorite part of the infallible google machine is when it replaces words with other words at random. it used to be that machine translation would translate each word correctly but fail on idioms but now with muh machine learning you can't even rely on any of the words being correct because it's just something a black box shits out based on god knows what. i can't wait for it to cause an international incident because it decided to translate "your help is appreciated" as "your face is revolting".

When I was in Japan a few folk communicated with me via Google translate, it was actually surprisingly not that bad for short questions and answers.

Weirdest for me is when it translates currencies into other currencies, eg yen into dollars, or language names into other language names (so 'Norkse' becomes 'English'). Assuming it works by people 'correcting' its translations, who are the idiots feeding it this idiocy ?

> lack of capital letters
Opinion discarded.

Paastin more links.

commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-pevearsion-of-russian-literature/
thinkaloud.ru/feature/berdy-lan-PandV-e.html
librarything.com/topic/260074
readingroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/the-art-of-translation/#comment-206
languagehat.com/the-translation-wars/
languagehat.com/more-translation-wars/
nybooks.com/articles/2016/06/23/socks-translating-anna-karenina/
languagehat.com/janet-malcolm-vs-pv/
kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2013/06/01/why-i-dont-read-pevear-and-volokhonsky-vtranslations/
firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2013/01/the-pevearvolokhonsky-hype-machine-and-how-it-could-have-been-stopped-or-at-least-slowed-down/

warosu.org/lit/?task=search&ghost=&search_text=pevearsion

This is the most complex task for which it can be used with languages not closely related to English. Try translating some Japanese websites and see if they make any sense (without guessing things you've already absorbed from annie mays).

Most people don't understand that their opinion about quality of machine translation is formed by promotional and semi-promotional media stories.