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Title: Stories by Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky ISBN: 0-553-38100-8 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 31 October, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $11.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.78 (9 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: 5 for Chekhov, 3 for Translators
Comment: These stories are dream-like glimpses into lives. There is no overarching philosophy behind them, only pathos. They say life is mysterious, transcient, often ugly, nevertheless beautiful. That's Chekhov, the consummate artist.
But I found the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation a little dry compared to the Garnett. Not familiar with Russian myself, I can't say if the P/V is truer to the original or not. It probably is because Garnett's Russian wasn't all too reliable, but she had a better ear. Her English is smoother, more idiomatic.
e.g. From "The Darling"
P/V : "tears occasionally came to her eyes. In the end, Kukin's misfortunes touched her, and she fell in love with him."
Garnett : "sometimes tears came into her eyes. In the end his misfortunes touched her, she grew to love him."
Sometimes is less stuffy than occasionally. "Kukin" instead of his is stilting. "She grew to love him" just plain sounds better.
Rating: 5
Summary: The Best Translation
Comment: I chose this selection of stories as a text for a Senior College course because it is frankly the best translation, true to the original, and with helpful endnotes. The collection is comprehensive and representative of the author's stages of writing from the brief and witty to the sensitive and profound. Besides it is a great bargain!
Rating: 5
Summary: Good, a little bloodless
Comment: I've read part of the Constance Garnett translation, and, as another reviewer mentioned, it's extremely hard going. The Pevear-Volokhonsky translation is much easier to read, but, honestly, it just feels very dry and mechanical a lot of the time. The introduction made it clear that it was his intention to make the writing as spare as possible, but was it really to this extent? I give it five stars anyway because for large sections it isn't readily apparent, and because it's always possible that this is indeed how Chekhov wrote or that the flow of the original is untranslatable (although the introduction also noted that his style is much easier to carry across than that of Dostoevsky or Gogol). This is a bit of speculation, but it's possible that Chekhov is something like Hemingway in translation: the spareness comes across, but the incredibly subtle fluidity which prevents it from turning into some sort of technical manual is lost. Having read a bit of Hemingway in French, I can verify that his style is much harder to translate than it would appear. But that's just speculation, and I'll leave it to you to decide. Despite the aforementioned problem areas, this does seem to be the superior English translation, and, of course, this is Chekhov we're talking about here, so the impressions gained will inevitably be worth a bit of eye-wandering here and there.
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Title: The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol by Richard Pevear, Nikolai Gogol, Larissa Volokhonsky ISBN: 0375706151 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 July, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: Dead Souls by Nikolai Vasilevich Gogol, Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky ISBN: 0679776443 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 April, 1997 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: Sketches from a Hunter's Album by Ivan Sergeevich Turgenev, Richard Freeborn ISBN: 0140445226 Publisher: Penguin Books Pub. Date: 01 December, 1990 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky ISBN: 0375702245 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 08 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, Diana Burgin, Katherine Tiernan O'Connor, Diana Lewis Burgin ISBN: 0679760806 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 March, 1996 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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