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How Chekhov invented the modern short story

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Re: How Chekhov invented the modern short story

#31

Post by pandaman »

petre wrote: post #27
pvg wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean the reason is one aspect of his work is 'better' than the other, just that the difficulty translating his short stories makes them much less accessible to English readers than the plays. I think the reverse is the case for Russian - Жалобная книга (The Complaints Book) is part of Russian idiom, the famous play Чайка (The Seagull) is not. Chekhov just occupies a different part of the English-speaking cult…

Strugatski brothers' Monday Begins on Saturday is aslo a difficult translation from Russian. I really love Russian literature, especially modern writers like Vladimir Sorokin, it's so different.

Anything will be hard to translate between languages as distant as English and Russian, to be quite honest. Monday Begins on Saturday just has more contemporary cultural references that Russian readers understand. Chekhov's stories probably have just as many but they are just as lost to the contemporary Russian reader as they would be to an English translation one :)

On the other hand, I remember watching Russian translation of the Naked Gun and finding it extremely funny even though neither I nor the translator understood any references there so, I guess, it's still possible to enjoy art without the context.

Re: How Chekhov invented the modern short story

#32

Post by sjcsjc »

billfruit wrote: post #24
pvg wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean the reason is one aspect of his work is 'better' than the other, just that the difficulty translating his short stories makes them much less accessible to English readers than the plays. I think the reverse is the case for Russian - Жалобная книга (The Complaints Book) is part of Russian idiom, the famous play Чайка (The Seagull) is not. Chekhov just occupies a different part of the English-speaking cult…

May be like Victor Hugo is known to English readers as a novelist, while I have heard that French regard him more for his poetry.

Somewhat off topic, but interestingly Victor Hugo is regarded as a saint in the Cao Dai religion of Vietnam.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Cao-Dai

Re: How Chekhov invented the modern short story

#34

Post by aasasd »

pvg wrote: post #28
petre wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Strugatski brothers' Monday Begins on Saturday is aslo a difficult translation from Russian. I really love Russian literature, especially modern writers like Vladimir Sorokin, it's so different.

There's a lot more runway, in a novel, to establish style and voice - both for the authors and for the translators. Monday Begins on Saturday begins: "Я приближался к месту моего назначения. Вокруг меня, прижимаясь к самой дороге, зеленел лес, изредка уступая место полянам, поросшим желтой осокою." Pretty much ez-mode compared to this opener, in the Gooseberries (Крыжовник) someone brought up upthread: "Еще с раннего…

The ‘Gooseberries’ excerpt sounds close to ‘stream-of-consciousness’ with the attempts to describe the inner mood—and indeed I can't think of anyone speaking or writing in English in the manner of that passage, except Nabokov. As a translator, you'd basically have to imagine maybe John Malkovich narrating your book, and then whack at the words until they sound natural coming from him.

Re: How Chekhov invented the modern short story

#35

Post by BelleOfTheBall »

inopinatus wrote: post #10
libraryofbabel wrote: post #4

I do love Chekhov’s stories, but many years of humanities education has left me pretty jaded about “X invented the modern Y” claims. It’s a lazy formula and relies on the complete slipperiness of the term “modern” (oh and “invented” is kinda vague too). Examples, based on ones I’ve heard: “Shakespeare invented the modern self” “Napoleon invented the modern state” “Newton invented modern science” (Or was it Galileo?)…

"Bastard asked me to understudy Konstantin in The Seagull. I'm not going to understudy anybody. Especially that pimp! Anyway, I loathe those Russian plays. Always full of women staring out of windows, whining about ducks going to Moscow" ― Withnail & I (1987)

Plays in general are probably the easiest form of writing to distill into stereotypes since they rely heavily on dialogue and that's bound to get repetitive when thousands of works are written. I can think of a dozen plays right now where there were similar moments of young adults arguing with relatives (usually not parents but aunts or grandmas) or someone monologuing about a death that happened offscreen but in a vague way. All of these moments can be deconstructed and I do find them repetitive if I read a few plays in a row... but I still feel like it's wholly a matter of preference. If you like those elements - sad women staring out of windows, for example - you'll like the plays.

Re: How Chekhov invented the modern short story

#36

Post by throwawayu75rt5 »

mikekhusid wrote: post #12

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky are fucking terrible. Read any other translation

I second this in some way. I started reading their Crime and Punishment translation. It was boring, the words didn't flow. Kinda clunky. Kind of the same with their Brother's Karamazov translation. Some people recommend the following translations, by Oliver Ready and Ignat Avsey:

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/177606/crime-and-punishment/...

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-karamazov-brothe...

Constance Garnett seems good too. Most of her translations are in public domain.

Re: How Chekhov invented the modern short story

#37

Post by afarrell »

Cyph0n wrote: post #15
yesenadam wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems irrelevant - I wasn't at all talking about which individuals were recognizably doing science, but where (the program of) modern science came from. Bacon didn't do science, didn't 'employ the scientific method', just wrote about and promoted a huge program of scientific investigation, which is what we call 'modern science'. From The Oxford Francis Bacon : Before Bacon where else does one find a meticulously…

Ah, I have always associated Bacon with the scientific method and was not aware of the wider program he developed. But I still do not see my comment as irrelevant. Would Bacon have been able to develop his program without learning from the efforts of scientists who worked to apply the scientific method in the real world?

I suspect the lesson here is: There are often people who have happened upon a valuable way-of-working but who have not yet thought enough about it to explain it in a way that many others can notice and scalably copy.

Re: How Chekhov invented the modern short story

#38

Post by pradn »

BelleOfTheBall wrote: post #35
inopinatus wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Bastard asked me to understudy Konstantin in The Seagull. I'm not going to understudy anybody. Especially that pimp! Anyway, I loathe those Russian plays. Always full of women staring out of windows, whining about ducks going to Moscow" ― Withnail & I (1987)

Plays in general are probably the easiest form of writing to distill into stereotypes since they rely heavily on dialogue and that's bound to get repetitive when thousands of works are written. I can think of a dozen plays right now where there were similar moments of young adults arguing with relatives (usually not parents but aunts or grandmas) or someone monologuing about a death that happened offscreen but in a v…

The great thing about plays is that they can be interpreted and reinterpreted again and again by different directors, set designers, composers, and actors. It's possible to bring the play into our own time or to subvert its ostensible message or to add new layers and nuances. It's wonderful that the text of the play is only the skeleton which to hang the body of the performance.

Re: How Chekhov invented the modern short story

#39

Post by techer »

inopinatus wrote: post #10
libraryofbabel wrote: post #4

I do love Chekhov’s stories, but many years of humanities education has left me pretty jaded about “X invented the modern Y” claims. It’s a lazy formula and relies on the complete slipperiness of the term “modern” (oh and “invented” is kinda vague too). Examples, based on ones I’ve heard: “Shakespeare invented the modern self” “Napoleon invented the modern state” “Newton invented modern science” (Or was it Galileo?)…

"Bastard asked me to understudy Konstantin in The Seagull. I'm not going to understudy anybody. Especially that pimp! Anyway, I loathe those Russian plays. Always full of women staring out of windows, whining about ducks going to Moscow" ― Withnail & I (1987)

How this movie isn’t considered one of the best of all time is beyond me.
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