3 ms·
They do good translation work; their translations read naturally and are an improvement over the noticeably Victorian-sounding editions which preceded them. I'm
by julianeon 2y ago
They do good translation work; their translations read naturally and are an improvement over the noticeably Victorian-sounding editions which preceded them. I'm sure that, by the year 2200, their translations will be superseded too. But they are great for our time, which is what matters.
- currymj 2y agothe problem is for any given Russian novel, there are often other translations from the 1960s-1990s which use sufficiently modern language. maybe these are better than P&V or maybe not (in some cases yes to my taste), but good luck finding one in a bookstore.
- usrnm 2y agoThe language of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky sounds just as archaic to Russian readers as Victorian English does to you. In a sense, preserving this archaism is closer to the original than trying to modernise it
- giraffe_lady 2y agoBut it wouldn't have sounded archaic to a contemporaneous russian reader. So the translator's choice is to translate into modern english, as the original audience would have experienced it as modern russian for their time. Or to attempt to recreate a modern russian audience's sense of archaism in english. It's an artistic choice, neither is approach is inherently better than the other.