"Although he neither speaks nor reads Persian, he is a popular interpreter of Rumi, rewriting the poems based on other English translations" white liberals lmao (en.wikipedia.org)

submitted 10 months ago by privatized_sun@hexbear.net to c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net

32 comments fedilink hide all child comments

check out these categories:

American translators

Iranologists

Poets from Tennessee

Sufi poets

University of California, Berkeley alumni

this mf is a bit on Trillbilly's podcast lol

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] CantaloupeAss@hexbear.net 10 points 10 months ago

Wait, what's up with Pevear & Volokhonsky? My understanding was that they are both bilingual, he a native English speaker, and she a native Russian speaker, and that they work together in an iterative process.

I really liked their translation of Anna Karenina, or at least I read it and came away thinking it's a great book, and so I have several more of their translations on my shelf which I haven't yet tackled.... scared

[-] Wertheimer@hexbear.net 14 points 10 months ago

First, Volokhonsky, a native speaker of Russian, produces a complete first draft. Then Pevear, whose spoken Russian is not fluent, revises the draft, working to reproduce the writer’s style coherently in English—“what the French call the language of arrival,” he says. This process is repeated as necessary, draft by draft. “Translation is a craft that sometimes becomes an inspired craft,” Volokhonsky explains.

From here. I think I've read interviews, maybe from earlier in their career, in which he downplays his Russian abilities a bit more than merely "not fluent."

[-] CantaloupeAss@hexbear.net 15 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

U have no idea how deep of an internet hole I went down after your first comment, and so I have concluded that I want to check out these translations:

War and Peace tr. by Ann Dunnigan
Dead Souls by Gogol, tr. by Guerney and Fusso
Notes from Underground tr. by Garnett, edited by Matlaw

I simultaneously thank u & blame u for putting me to rethinking the Russian lit section of my bookshelf lol

[-] Wertheimer@hexbear.net 8 points 10 months ago

I should read the Guerney and Fusso Dead Souls, too - I read the P&V and based on that and their Master and Margarita translation I think humor is their weak point. Speaking of which, if you come across a good translation of Andrei Bely's Petersburg, please let me know - the one I have (the John Cournos version) sometimes betrays that a joke has been translated, but never in a way that lets you know what was funny.

Janet Malcolm demolishes (somewhat unfairly) P&V: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/06/23/socks-translating-anna-karenina/ (Pevear responds)

Several years ago I developed a translation theory obsession, so a few recommendations from that binge -

David Bellos's Is That a Fish in Your Ear? (the most casually readable one on this list)
George Steiner's After Babel (controversial but worthwhile)
Ezra Pound's The ABC of Reading (I know, I know, Ezra Pound, but he and John Dryden are the godfathers of translation theory for poetry and this predates his fascism)
Barton Raffel's The Art of Translating Poetry
Eliot Weinberger's Nineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei