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How Chekhov invented the modern short story

newstatesman.com

41–50 of 51 posts

Re: How Chekhov invented the modern short story

#41
> Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s new translation of 52 Chekhov stories

Oh no, oh no, oh no. Their “method” absolutely disagrees with any author with a tight writing style, and Chekhov's tired narration with a tiny drop of irony is tight.

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/the-pevearsion-o...

http://www.thinkaloud.ru/feature/berdy-lan-PandV-e.html

https://www.librarything.com/topic/260074

https://readingroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/10/29/the-art-of-...

http://languagehat.com/the-translation-wars/

http://languagehat.com/more-translation-wars/

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/06/23/socks-translating...

http://languagehat.com/janet-malcolm-vs-pv/

https://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2013/06/01/why...

https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2013/01/the-...

Re: How Chekhov invented the modern short story

#42
post #39

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)

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

It.. generally is?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withnail_and_I#Reception

Re: How Chekhov invented the modern short story

#43
post #28
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…

I would argue that Strugatski brothers’ first sentence is harder to translate, because it’s a direct quote from Pushkin.

Re: How Chekhov invented the modern short story

#44

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

That’s surprising to hear. I’ve found P&V’s Dostoevsky translations very readable, and my understanding from reading reviews online was that P&V’s translations are well regarded in general. Which translation did you read/would you recommend? Edit: I did some reading online and found some criticism of P&V, such as: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/gary-morson/the-... https://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstt…

The first linked article (commentarymagazine.com) suggests that the Garnett/Matlaw translations of Dostoevsky’s "Notes from Underground" is a better translation than the P&V translation.

As an example, it says the following:

> ...His word for such acts of self-injury is, in English translations before P&V, “spite.” It is fair to say that to miss the concept of spite is to miss the work entire.

> But that is just what P&V do. Instead of “spite,” they give us “wickedness.” Now, the Russian word zloi can indeed mean “wicked.” But no one with the faintest idea of what this novella is about, with any knowledge of criticism from Dostoevsky’s day to ours, or with any grasp of Dostoevskian psychology, would imagine that the book’s point is that people are capable of wickedness.

From my copy of the P&V translation for this book, toward the end of the Foreword, Pevear says the following:

> There is, however, one tradition of mistranslation attached to Notes from Underground that raises something more than a question of “mere tone”. The second sentence of the book, Ya zloy chelovék, has most often been rendered as "I am a spiteful man." Zloy is indeed at the root of the Russian word for "spiteful" (zlobnyi), but it is a much broader and deeper word, meaning "wicked," "bad," "evil." The wicked witch in Russian folktales is zláya véd'ma (zláya being the feminine of zloy). The opposite of zloy is dóbryi, "good," as in "good fairy" (dóbraya feya). This opposition is of great importance for Notes from Underground; indeed it frames the book, from "I am a wicked man" at the start to the outburst close to the end: "They won't let me...I can't be...good!" We can talk about the inevitable loss of nuances in translating from Russian into English (or from any language into any other), but the translation of zloy as "spiteful" instead of "wicked" is not inevitable, not is it a matter of nuance. It speaks for that habit of substituting the psychological for the moral, of interpreting a spiritual condition as a kind of behavior, which has so bedeviled our century, not least in its efforts to understand Dostoevsky.

Translations are, by their very nature, open to interpretation and oftentimes small details and nuance gets lost. And then you get debates about things like the aforementioned comparison. As such, it's more practical to look for a good translation than the best translation.

Re: How Chekhov invented the modern short story

#45
post #43
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would argue that Strugatski brothers’ first sentence is harder to translate, because it’s a direct quote from Pushkin.

The allusion one can stick in footnote. Sticking Checkhov's style in a footnote is harder than putting Baby in a corner.

Re: How Chekhov invented the modern short story

#46
post #3

You can download a free high quality ebook of his entire short story corpus at Standard Ebooks: https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/anton-chekhov/short-fictio... Warning, it's very long! But, many of the stories are incredible. Constance Garnett is a very capable Chekhov translator, and her Chekhov translations were praised by writers including Hemingway.

+1 for Constance Garnett, she was by far my favorite translator for Crime and Punishment.

Re: How Chekhov invented the modern short story

#47
post #34
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: How Chekhov invented the modern short story

#48
post #43
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I would argue that Strugatski brothers’ first sentence is harder to translate, because it’s a direct quote from Pushkin.

[deleted]

Re: How Chekhov invented the modern short story

#49
post #42
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It.. generally is? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withnail_and_I#Reception

Most of those are British...cult classic is a decent epitaph but most people have not heard of it...

Re: How Chekhov invented the modern short story

#50
post #49
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It.. generally is? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Withnail_and_I#Reception

Most of those are British...cult classic is a decent epitaph but most people have not heard of it...

The early ones were predominantly, but did you keep reading?

* 2000 Total Film third greatest comedy film of all time

* 2004 Total Film 13th greatest British film of all time.

* 2014 readers of Empire 92nd greatest film

* 94% "fresh" rating from 34 critics, and an average rating of 8.48 out of 10 from critic website Rotten Tomatoes.

* 2009 Empire 118 in 500 Greatest Films of all Time list.

* 2009 American Pulitzer prize-winning film critic Roger Ebert four-star review, added the film to his "Great Movies" list

Unless their hobby is watching classics, regardless of anything else about the film, 'most people have not heard of' a lot of films in that region of 'greatest of all time' films.

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