JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

I became familiar with the work of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky when I read their translation of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot five years ago. Reviewers praised Pevear and Volokhonsky’s fidelity to the original, right down to Dostoevsky’s “clumsiness” and all-around weirdness. I don’t know Russian so I can’t venture an opinion on their translation. However I can tell you that when Dostoevsky gets his grappling hooks into your brain you can’t not read him, even at his most infuriating. In fact fury is always part of my Dostoevsky experience. If Pevear-Volokhonsky are responsible for capturing that in the English versions, they’re brilliant.

In the last decade or so Pevear-Volokhonsky have been working their way through the masterpieces of Russian literature: Dostoevsky, Gogol, Tolstoy, Bulgakov, Chekhov. This is not a timorous duo. Their translations are widely praised and excoriated, as this NYT blog forum on The Art of Translation shows.

David Remnick wrote about P-V in 2005, in an insightful piece on how translations of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky spark feuds, end friendships (Vladimir Nabokov vs. Edmund Wilson), and create small fortunes (Oprah’s endorsement of P-V’s translation of Anna Karenina made Tolstoy a bestseller in America).

In his defence of their work on War and Peace, Pevear notes that “People keep saying that Tolstoy approved the Maudes’ (incidentally very good) translation of War and Peace. In fact, he died in 1910, some fifteen years before they translated it. What he approved was their translation of What is Art? and other late polemical works.” I, too, thought the Maudes’ version was authorized by Tolstoy himself, though I do not know if Tolstoy read English.

I’ve decided to take a crack at the Maudes’ translation next year, just because I have an old edition of War and Peace that has maps and illustrations.

I also plan on learning Russian, which people assure me is a devilishly tricky language that will likely drive me bonkers. How else could I decide whose translation I like?

Moscow subway line from flickr.