As if our shelves weren’t sagging with Russians
Nikolai Leskov’s The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories, a Pevear & Volokhonsky translation. Hardcover, Php1395 at National Bookstores.
There have been many great translators. There’s Gregory Rabassa, who translated Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. With our friend Chus we plotted to write a novel, have it translated anonymously into Spanish, and then have it translated into English by Mr. Rabassa. And C.K. Scott Moncrief, whose English Proust is still highly-regarded, even with the recent translations by Lydia Davis et al.
But the team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky are the first superstars of translation: their names on the cover will sell books. For instance, we had never heard of Nikolai Leskov, but if Pevear-Volokhonsky did the translation then we had to get it.
Granted, the words “Russian author we’ve never heard of” will make a book seem almost unbearably attractive to us.
Read Done With Tolstoy at Humanities.
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