The Brothers Karamazov: Translated by Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky

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The main character is based not on any figure in Dostoyevsky but, rather, on his first and most enduring English-language translator, a woman of Victorian energies and Edwardian prose, Mrs. There's something about the P/V Dostoevsky in general that I find off-putting, though I think it's part diction (word choice) and part (perhaps less frequently) syntax. Mrs Khokhlakova, a wealthy lady, always dressed with taste, was still quite young and very comely in appearance, somewhat pale-skinned, with very lively, almost completely black eyes. Well, speaking as a fan of Pevear/Volokhonsky for many things, I find them too difficult for this book.

Tolstoy and Chekhov are far clearer, more serene; perhaps, among the main nineteenth-century texts, only Gogol’s “Dead Souls,” with its singular vocabulary and jokes, is as difficult for a translator. Elsewhere they have “stupid” where Avsey has “absurd,” “brief” where he has “direct,” and “be healed by you” where he has “be redeemed through you.Nabokov, who regarded “The Gift” and “Lolita” as his best novels, thought that his “Onegin” was perhaps the most important project of his life and, at the same time, like all translation, innately futile. Mrs Khokhlakova, the mother, a rich lady who always dressed with taste, was a person still quite young and very pleasant to the gaze, somewhat pale, with eyes that were very lively and almost completely black. There’s a note about that, plus a full introduction by Richard Pevear (I didn’t read it all, he’s not my fav introducer), and a character list. After she emigrated, in 1973, she translated “Introduction to Patristic Theology,” by John Meyendorff, a Russian Orthodox priest and thinker. The majority of pages are undamaged with some creasing or tearing, and pencil underlining of text, but this is minimal.

In particular, Richard Pevear emphasized the joke/pun of the doctor saying “Be pre-pared for any-thing” which was immediately followed by the doctor himself “prepared to step across the threshold to the carriage. In the following chapter, “The Grand Inquisitor,” Ivan then relates the gist of a poem he has composed.I've tried probably five or six different versions and the one that reads most smoothly to my inner ear is David McDuff. 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.