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Reviews
The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories by Larissa Volokhonsky, Richard Pevear, Nikolai Leskov
arirang's review
3.0
How wonderful to see a book marketed on the strength of the translation - "A Pevear and Volokhonsky translation" reads the blurb at the very top of the front cover, albeit in smaller print than the author/title, and the dust jacket on the inside rear contains not details of the author but rather a picture and bio of the translators.
The husband and wife team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have managed, via their wide-ranging versions of Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, Tolstoy, Gogol - and now of course Leskov - to become that very rare breed of translator, literary celebrities in their own right.
That being said, while I personally loved their versions of Dostoevsky in particular, which to me are the best done of his works, their style and method of working (*) isn't without it's controversial nature, and indeed their very prominence inflames the debate, as does their own active engagement, to put it politely, with their critics.
For more on the debate I would point anyone to this wonderful overview - the comments after the article include a robust response from Pevear and Volokhonsky.
http://xixvek.wordpress.com/2013/08/01/translation-comparison-stories-by-leskov/
In particular, and rather paraphrasing a lengthy and more subtle debate, they tend to lean away from using contemporary expressions and remain faithful to the style of the novel's time - in other words they tend to translate late 19th Century Russian into something closer to late 19th Century than early 21st Century English.
And in the case of Leskov, I found the result - to use a highly non-technical term - rather clunky: stories that I suspect read reasonably naturally to the original native readers, feel a little idiomatic in the translation. That said I certainly haven't checked the original - so this is based purely on my impressions, and a comparison to other translations, which I tend to prefer. Just to give a tiny example, there are various points when the story indicates that one character recounts to another the previous events - their preferred formation is the rather anachronistic "it happened thus and so".
Well, so far I've written a 300+ word review and haven't touched on the actual stories themselves - but given the usual lack of attention paid to translation, I make no apologies for that.
So to the stories: most are told as a tale within a tale, by a narrator introduced in a brief opening sketch - e.g. a stranger interrupting a discussion in a tavern to proffer a tale as an example, or often counterexample - typically involving "one of the three righteous men without whom no city can stand" as the original foreword to one of the stories presented Leskov's desired objective. The result is enjoyable but rather simple.
We're told in the publisher's blurb that Leskov "was Chekhov's favourite writer", "greatly admired by Tolstoy" and, by the wonderful Alberto Manguel, that "without Leskov there would be no Bulgakov, no Chekhov, but also no Garcia Marquez and Julio Cortazar".
The obvious retort is that while literature is then extremely indebted to Leskov, and I'm very glad that those authors all read him, I'd rather read their resulting work than his original efforts.
Overall - enjoyable but not vital.
(* It's rude to repeat, but a fellow and rival translator, Donald Rayfield provided the pointed if rather unfair summary "he with little Russian, she with her imperfect English).
The husband and wife team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have managed, via their wide-ranging versions of Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, Tolstoy, Gogol - and now of course Leskov - to become that very rare breed of translator, literary celebrities in their own right.
That being said, while I personally loved their versions of Dostoevsky in particular, which to me are the best done of his works, their style and method of working (*) isn't without it's controversial nature, and indeed their very prominence inflames the debate, as does their own active engagement, to put it politely, with their critics.
For more on the debate I would point anyone to this wonderful overview - the comments after the article include a robust response from Pevear and Volokhonsky.
http://xixvek.wordpress.com/2013/08/01/translation-comparison-stories-by-leskov/
In particular, and rather paraphrasing a lengthy and more subtle debate, they tend to lean away from using contemporary expressions and remain faithful to the style of the novel's time - in other words they tend to translate late 19th Century Russian into something closer to late 19th Century than early 21st Century English.
And in the case of Leskov, I found the result - to use a highly non-technical term - rather clunky: stories that I suspect read reasonably naturally to the original native readers, feel a little idiomatic in the translation. That said I certainly haven't checked the original - so this is based purely on my impressions, and a comparison to other translations, which I tend to prefer. Just to give a tiny example, there are various points when the story indicates that one character recounts to another the previous events - their preferred formation is the rather anachronistic "it happened thus and so".
Well, so far I've written a 300+ word review and haven't touched on the actual stories themselves - but given the usual lack of attention paid to translation, I make no apologies for that.
So to the stories: most are told as a tale within a tale, by a narrator introduced in a brief opening sketch - e.g. a stranger interrupting a discussion in a tavern to proffer a tale as an example, or often counterexample - typically involving "one of the three righteous men without whom no city can stand" as the original foreword to one of the stories presented Leskov's desired objective. The result is enjoyable but rather simple.
We're told in the publisher's blurb that Leskov "was Chekhov's favourite writer", "greatly admired by Tolstoy" and, by the wonderful Alberto Manguel, that "without Leskov there would be no Bulgakov, no Chekhov, but also no Garcia Marquez and Julio Cortazar".
The obvious retort is that while literature is then extremely indebted to Leskov, and I'm very glad that those authors all read him, I'd rather read their resulting work than his original efforts.
Overall - enjoyable but not vital.
(* It's rude to repeat, but a fellow and rival translator, Donald Rayfield provided the pointed if rather unfair summary "he with little Russian, she with her imperfect English).
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