Well...I guess its not just me. I went to grab my next Dostoyevsky, which I'd picked up from the library a few days ago, and much to my surprise...
So NOPE.
And I went searching. First my bookshelves, because SURELY there was some unread Dostoyevsky lying about, right? Well...not that I could find. So I went online. And bumped into this: "Gave up on P&V's 'Idiot'"...which you can read here: https://www.reddit.com/r/dostoevsky/comments/w5o2bw/gave_up_on_pvs_idiot/
But the short version is Others Agree With Me That Pevear and Volokhonsky's translations are not very good terrible horrible and no fun to read.
So I headed online again to see what non Pevear / Volokhonsky I could find.
And after much deliberation, I settled on one of hoopla's versions of Poor Folk. It's 164 pages long. The translator isn't identified, but I know it's not P&V because they haven't translated PF, so that's good enough for me.
Day 1 (DDRD 2,227) December 6, 2023
Read to page 35.
In his April 12th letter, Makar refers to Barbara as his "little friend beyond price." Surprisingly, when I Googled this seemingly not uncommon phrase (in quotation marks), it came up with "Poor Folk." Which was disappointing, as I was hoping to find that this was an allusion to the 14th century poem, "Pearl."
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| Public Domain |
But it looks like it's more likely a Biblical reference, if anything.
In my search, I also found that it's likely that the translation I'm reading is the work of one C. J. Hogarth. Which might be a problem. Check out this bit from Wikipedia:
"Mr. Hogarth has a very poor knowledge of Russian but a rich fancy (I believe he, too, is a novelist), and decorates Gogol with such ornaments of style as to make him unrecognisable [...] It would be necessary to copy out practically his whole translation of Gogol's work to point out all the absurd additions and errors which it contains, as it contains them on every page." (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/C._J._Hogarth)
Hmm. That would be scanned.
Meanwhile, here's a cool word I'd never encountered before:
hoyden
noun
hoy·den ˈhȯi-dᵊn
Synonyms of hoyden: a girl or woman of saucy, boisterous, or carefree behavior
hoydenish ˈhȯi-dᵊn-ish adjective
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hoyden
So there's that.
Day 2 (DDRD 2,228) December 7, 2023
Read to page 65.
New word--or new usage, anyway:
cabal
verb
caballed; caballing
intransitive verb: to unite in or form a cabal
And unlike P&V, it actually IS a word, and not just something the translator made up. Speaking of, despite the forewarning, this translation seems okay to me. Admittedly I don't have anything to check it against, but I didn't need that to know that something was seriously fucked up with P&V, so I rest my case. For now, at least.
Day 3 (DDRD 2,229) December 8, 2023
Read to page 100.
I'm beginning to think that Barbara is a bit of a cock tease. She tells Makar that she just wants to be friends, but then she accepts presents from him, knowing that he can't afford them, and even calls him "sweetheart" in one letter, and "your friend and lover" in another. And it's pretty obvious that he's smitten with her.
= ?
🐓ttt
Day 4 (DDRD 2,230) December 9, 2023
Read to page 136. The poverty of these characters is crushing, and Dostoyevsky writes so convincingly of it that it's hard not to believe that he knew this kind of deprivation.
Only one more day for this book. And then? Well...for 99¢, I purchased this for my Kindle:
Speaking of R&L, when I went to check on the spelling of their last names, I ran into an article entitled
PEVEAR AND VOLOKHONSKY ARE INDEED OVERRATED: MY TWO ROUBLES
Expanding on my passing comment last week, because I have thought a lot about it.
by JOHN MCWHORTER
You can read it at
https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/pevear-and-volokhonsky-are-indeed
...but the gist of it is that R&L turn Tolstoy's War and Peace into "1200 pages of diligent and relentless awkwardness." (McWhorter also identifies this as "language that feels like English rendered through cheesecloth." And in the Comments section, a reader, one Sarah Chemiakine, says of R&L that "their translations read like Google Translate.") It's an enlightening article unit just about the Evils if R&L, but about the Art of Translation itself. Definitely worth a read.
Day 5 (DDRD 2,231) December 10, 2023
Read to page 168 = The End.
Kind of sums up life: "One seems to die to so little purpose!" (150)
Reminds me of Hamlet's bung-hole:
"Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till he find it stopping a bung-hole?"
The September 23rd letter seems to indicate that I'm completely wrong about the relationship between Makar Devushkin and Varvara Dobroselova. As in, despite their use of affectionate words, there was actually no romantic love between them. Hmpf. Also, I took notice (finally) that his "middle" name is Alekseyevich and hers is Alekseyevna, which means that they both had a father named Aleksey. Could it be that they share a father? Wikipedia says that they are third cousins twice removed, so I guess not. I must have missed something at the start of this story, then.
NOT A TYPO: sempstress, which Merriam-Webster identifues as a variant of SEAMSTRESS. (https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/sempstress)
P.S. Well...maybe u WASN'T wrong about the ice thing. Also...what an incredibly sad story!
Onward.
(1) Leviathan 63 days, 729 pages
(2) Stalingrad 27 days, 982 pages
(3) Life and Fate 26 days, 880 pages
(4) The Second World War 34 + 32 + 40 + 43 + 31 + 32 days = 212 days, 4,379 pages
(5) Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming 10 days, 572 pages
(6) The Great Bridge 25 days, 636 pages
(7) The Path Between the Seas 29 days, 698 pages
(8) Blake: Prophet Against Empire, 23 days, 523 pages
(9) Jerusalem 61 days, 1,266 pages
(10) Voice of the Fire 9 days, 320 pages
(11) The Fountainhead 15 days, 720 pages
(13) The Pacific Trilogy: The Conquering Tide 28 days, 656 pages
(14) The Pacific Trilogy: Twilight of the Gods 31 days, 944 pages
(16) Toward Jazz 18 days, 224 pages
(17) The Worlds of Jazz 13 days, 279 pages
(18) To Be or Not...to Bop 14 days, 571 pages
(19) Kind of Blue 4 days, 224 pages
(20) Kind of Blue: Miles Davis and his Masterpiece: 5 days, 256 pages
(21) Miles: The Autobiography 16 days, 445 pages
(21) A Love Supreme: The Story of John Coltrane's Signature Album: 8 days, 287 pages
(22) Ascension: John Coltrane and His Quest 8 days, 304 pages
(23) Living With Music: Ralph Ellison's Jazz Writings 11 days 325 pages
(25) Oliver Twist 16 days, 542 pages
(26) Nicholas Nickleby 27 days, 1,045 pages
(27) The Old Curiosity Shop 22 days, 753 pages
(28) Barnaby Rudge 24 days, 866 pages
(30) Martin Chuzzlewit 32 days, 1,045 pages
(31) American Notes 10 days, 324 pages
(32) Pictures From Italy 7 days, 211 pages
(33) Christmas Stories Volume I 10 days, 456 pages
(34) Christmas Stories Volume II 15 days, 472 pages
(1) Miscellaneous Papers Volume II 28 days (don't count, while reading BH), 494 pages
(2) Bleak House 37 days, 1,098 pages
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