Dostoevsky
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jenks
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i read it in the P&V before i had read the criticisms of their translation. People i trust still rate the Garnett. I recently re-read her versions of Notes and The Double and felt they were pretty readable and didnt feel stilted or awkward - i'm thinking of doing a major re-read of him this year
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I've only read Notes and that one was by a guy called Wilks.
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Imagine The Beach had just been Leo deciding to stay in his hostel reading Brothers K.
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There's a clip in one of the Adam Curtis films where he's talking to a bunch of KGB guys and one of them claims when he started out his chief asked him if he'd read Dostoyevsky because Dostoyevsky would teach him psychology. No idea whether it's true, seems like he could be having fun with Curtis and pulling his leg, but who knows.
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41:36 - 42:37
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Go on.
jenks
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This gives you a flavour of the issues of each individual translations. https://www.patrikbergman.com/2017/07/23/choosing-best-karamazov-translation/
I remember a really good article by Julian Barnes in the LRB on some of the problems of finding a decent translation of Flaubert' Madame Bovary - the way certain words can snag and ruin the reading experience. Alex Bellos' book - Is That a Fish In Your Ear (awful Hitchhiker's title but excellent read) goes through the relationship between text and translation in detail and is worth anyone's time who reads alot of translated work
I remember a really good article by Julian Barnes in the LRB on some of the problems of finding a decent translation of Flaubert' Madame Bovary - the way certain words can snag and ruin the reading experience. Alex Bellos' book - Is That a Fish In Your Ear (awful Hitchhiker's title but excellent read) goes through the relationship between text and translation in detail and is worth anyone's time who reads alot of translated work
luka
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I think i was talking about notes from undergrounds attack on rationality and self interest. The stress on human perversity.
jenks
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Just finished a re-read of The Idiot. I think Dostoyevsky is like an anti -Dickens - he doesn’t do architecture- instead the text is always on the verge of collapse. Ramshackle narratives, wild digressions, seemingly pointless characters. At one stage I put it down and really did wonder what I was reading and was it worth it. There’s something wild eyed that sustains it. A kind of mania. I’m uncomfortable with the ending but I do wonder if he had any idea where he was going at any stage in its conception and execution
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I read Cynthia Ozick saying something similar in an interview the other day.
The author I came back to
My aversion to Dostoevsky was once enduring. His lurching from one extremist position to its opposite, his stubborn bigotries and fanaticisms, the untamed wilderness of his sentences, the freakishness of his protagonists, even, or especially, their feverish moral assertions, were all repellent – in contrast to Tolstoy, his contemporary, whose characters, however askew in temperament, are always instances of recognisable human truth. Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time turned me around. Through this masterly biography, I came to see that it is only by means of Dostoevsky’s anguished, surreal and delirious art that he can hope to rebuke the devil himself.