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scottw
10-29-2010, 06:28 AM
I am reading Crime and Punishment and finding it very unsatisfying. I am at the start of Part IV, having just read something else to get away from it for a while.

I have enjoyed Dickens and Joyce before, so the length and density of the text do not phase me. I find the characters very difficult to relate to. They seem impenetrable. I do not care either way for any of them. I also find the dialogue jars. "There are ellipses...everywhere..., (brackets are also used while people speak), and when they laugh, haha, it is done mid-speech." I've never seen this in a novel before.

I picked up War and Peace to browse through the other day, a novel I would like to read one day. Seeing ellipses...in the text... (haha), it made my stomach turn and I put it down again.

I am reading the Wordsworth Classics translation by Constance Garnett. Are there great differences between the different translations available? Is it possible I have a bad one?

C&P. Starts with a crime and the rest is just punishment?

kiki1982
10-29-2010, 08:11 AM
Constance Garnett was deemed by Nabokov as accomplishing the feat of no difference at all between Tolstoy and Dostoyevski's prose... She just translated in serial, skipping aything she could not comprehend and making her own version of it, even her own prose! I don't think that's a good thing, though English and Russian are very different, but she, I believe, also censured for her Victorian or still very Victorian-minded public. And very heavily, see discussions on here, among which the word 'zloy' which she severely (mis)interpreted and that is only the question of a simple word. I dread to think what she made of more intricate things like allusions.

Pevear & Volkhonsky are deemed the best by specialists, but not always by readers, as their translations are very maticulous. That said, though, they do not simplify.