Who has read the McDuff translation of Crime and Punishment? How do you feel about it compared to the P&V translation? I've heard great things about both and can't decide which to get?
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Who has read the McDuff translation of Crime and Punishment? How do you feel about it compared to the P&V translation? I've heard great things about both and can't decide which to get?
I traded my McDuff translation at the bookstore for the P&V. I felt the McDuff translation was too unengaging and lifeless. The prose didn't grip me and hold onto me, I didn't have such difficulties with the P&V and parts of the book EFFECTIVELY hit me like a freight train (the proper places) so the P&V translation of the book served it's purposes something I can't place the same amount of confidence in the McDuff translation. The McDuff translation simply didn't impact me the same way and even seemed over melodramatic in manner rather than in a gritty realistic manner.Quote:
Originally Posted by skaterskagg1
The McDuff translation required more of my attention and ultimately dry prose. The P&V had much better flow in it's prose and requiring alot less concentration. In fact, I preferred the Garnett translation to the McDuff translation.
I never had any issues with the McDuff translation of Crime and Punishment, although I do feel P&V's translation of the Brothers K, which I'm reading now, to be a tremendous improvement upon McDuff's translation of the same novel. I found the McDuff translation of The Brothers K rather tedious at times to be honest.
Naturally, with any translated work I find one is bound to come across sentences that on their own don't seem to make a lot of sense, perhaps from an effort on the translator's part to literally transpose the syntax of one language onto another. Here's a sentence from the P&V version of The Brothers K: "What you're talking about," Smerdyakov suddenly spoke loudly and unexpectedly, "that if the deed of this laudable soldier was so great, sir, there would also have been no sin, in my opinion, if on such an occasion he had even renounced Christ's name and his own baptism in order thereby to save his life for good deeds with which to atone in the course of the years for his faintheartedness"
If one continues reading, then what's being said in the above sentence will be fleshed out, and it will make sense, but the sentence on its own is a bit difficult to comprehend, or am I just thick. I don't know. I'm certainly not having trouble grasping the novel itself. It's just that one sometimes encounters sentences that are a bit hard to read.