The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts With Epilogue

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In the early seventies, two young playwrights, Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato, collaborated on a satire about nineteenth-century Russian literature called “The Idiots Karamazov.” In their liberal interpretation of Dostoyevsky, Father Zosima is a gay foot fetishist. Which causes the angelic monk Alyosha to wonder, “How can there be a God if there are feet?” The main character is based not on any figure in Dostoyevsky but, rather, on his first and most enduring English-language translator, a woman of Victorian energies and Edwardian prose, Mrs. Constance Garnett. David McDuff is a British translator of Russian and Scandinavian poetry and prose, an editor and a literary critic. Penguin published his translations of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and The Idiot. About the McDuff translation of The Brothers Karamazov Extracts have been included below so that you can see how the different translations sound. The Brothers Karamazov: Other Info and Resources Pevear and Volokhonsky] have a clear idea of what the problems of Englishing Dostoevsky are: how to give some idea of the extraordinarily rich polyphony of voices, accents, undertones, and suggestions in the text; how to convey the novel’s marvelous construction, and at the same time its wholly “living” air of majestic dishevelment. They have succeeded amazingly well…. it may well be that Dostoevsky’s [domain], with all its resourceful energies of life and language, is only now—and through the medium of new translation—beginning to come home to the English-speaking reader.”

Their translation of Svetlana Alexievich's book The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II was published in 2017.Put simply, Avsey’s and MacAndrew’s languages make the text more direct and lands in my mind in another way that the other translator’s texts do. Pevear's book Translating Music (2007) contains his translation of Alexander Pushkin's poem " The Tale of the Preacher and His Man Bumpkin" (Russian: Сказка о попе и о работнике его Балде). A. S. Byatt lives and writes in her handsome west London house and, in the summer months, in her house in the south of France. Both are filled with art, predominantly by her contemporaries, libraries of extravagant, Borgesian range and curiosa of many kinds, hinting at her unusual fecundity of mind: exotic preserved insects, the intricate examples of Venetian millefiori glassware and objects rare and fascinating of all imaginable varieties. The impression given by her houses is confirmed by her conversation, which moves confidently between literature, biology, the fine arts, and theoretical preoccupations and displays a mind turned always outwards. She is not a writer one can imagine being tempted to write a memoir: solipsism is not in her nature. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s final novel, published just before his death in 1881, chronicles the bitter love-hate struggle between a larger-than-life father and his three very different sons. The author’s towering reputation as one of the handful of thinkers who forged the modern sensibility has sometimes obscured the purely novelistic virtues—brilliant characterizations, flair for suspense and melodrama, instinctive theatricality—that made his work so immensely popular in nineteenth-century Russia. If you want to learn about all the translations, please visit What’s the best translation of The Brothers Karamazov? Are any of the audiobooks abridged? Why are the running times different?

Secondly, contemporary Russian draws upon two sources for its diction and syntax: so-called “Old Russian,” the spoken language of the East Slavs, and Old Church Slavic (or Slavonic), the language of the Orthodox Church, similar in a way to Latin and modern Italian. When Alyosha presents us with Zosima’s life and works in Book Six, or when he sees his miraculous dream during Father Zosima’s funeral in Book Seven, I tried to be mindful of this rich high-style source and render it with my own elevated language. Translating Dostoevsky is different from rendering other authors into English. His prose is impassioned, fiery, and intense. Nothing in his novels ever happens “gradually” or “slowly.” I see P&V’s calculated evasion of Victorian English as eminently appropriate. Without P&V, I doubt I would have sweated with Levin at the reaping or walked dizzily through the city with Raskolnikov during my college years’ long hot summers of extra-curricular reading, some of the best and most intense reading experiences of my life.”Slater, Ann Pasternak (2010-11-06). "Rereading: Doctor Zhivago - The Guardian". The Guardian . Retrieved 2011-07-09. Wyatt, Edward (7 June 2004). "Tolstoy's Translators Experience Oprah's Effect". New York Times . Retrieved 2008-04-23. When I arrived in the United States, I stayed for a while with this professor, and she started matchmaking. Succeeded after a while. Not immediately. Whenever a McDuff phrase strikes me I look up the P&V, and McDuff has won in the great majority of cases. Without translators, we are left adrift on our various linguistic ice floes, only faintly hearing rumors of masterpieces elsewhere at sea. So most English-speaking readers glimpse Homer through the filter of Fitzgerald or Fagles, Dante through Sinclair or Singleton or the Hollanders, Proust through Moncrieff or Davis, García Márquez through Gregory Rabassa—and nearly every Russian through Constance Garnett.