In my days as a literature major and later as a bookseller, I’ve found that it takes a certain type of person to really be excited about sinking their teeth into a Russian novel. Maybe they’re a little dark or maybe they just kind of enjoy being mired in doomed love affairs and the problems with muzhiks.
If you are ambitious in your literary ventures, think about picking up (Is it too early to start thinking of New Year’s 
resolutions?) one of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translations. After all even Hemingway once said that reading “the Russians was like having a great treasure given to you.”
Pevear and Volokhonsky are translating wonder team—they have translated several of both Tolstoy’s Dostoevsky’s works, Bulgakov’s The Master and the Margarita, Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and various texts by Chekhov and Gogol. I can personally attest to their great work, having read their version of Anna Karenina twice. Their translation is both accessible and elegant, and they provide the reader with detailed footnotes to put you up to speed on 19th century Russian culture, obscure literary references, and the occasional French translation (those aristocrats and the way they throw around French phrases).
I would argue that Pevear and Volokhonsky are (thanks in part to the selection of Anna Karenina by Oprah for her book club in 2004) some of the best-known translators in the literary world today. In The New Yorker’s 2005 article “The Translation Wars,” David Remnick describes the couple’s translation process, in this case specifically pertaining to their first translation, Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov:
“Their division of labor was—and remains—nearly absolute: First, Larissa wrote out a kind of hyperaccurate trot of the original, complete with interstitial notes about Dostoyevsky’s diction, syntax, and references. Then, Richard, who has never mastered conversational Russian, wrote a smoother, more Englished text, constantly consulting Larissa about the original and the possibilities that it did and did not allow. They went back and forth like this several times, including a final session in which Richard read his English version aloud while Larissa followed along in the Russian. “
The danger with translated works is that there’s a fine line between taking creative license as a translator and making the original story flow in a new language and perhaps taking it too far, so that the temptation is to “smooth out” as Pevear says in Remnick’s article the “mixed metaphors, stumbles, and mistakes” of human speech. Such is reportedly the case with Constance Garnett’s original translations of the Russians—critics, Nabokov am
ong them, stated that Garnett’s work simplified the complexities of the original texts.
And though I cannot read Russian, (maybe another New Year’s resolution?) so cannot comment as to the true accuracy of Pevear and Volohonsky’s translation, I can tell you that their work is a masterpiece.
by Kaycie
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