And if you’re looking forward to what’s still ahead, we rounded up some of the buzziest releases of the summer. Like an admiral commanding a flotilla that his underfunded opponent cannot hope to match, Nabokov lords his superior command of Russian language and prosody over his opponent. Volokhonsky’s sense of fidelity has obvious roots: she is confounded by any translation that has little sense of the original’s qualities as they play on a Russian ear and sensibility. Heartily recommended to any reader who wishes to come as close to Dostoevsky’s Russian as it is possible.

He was dressed in a brown jacket, evidently fashioned by a good tailor, but now a little worse for the wear, at least three years old and completely out of fashion.I have no idea how Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation of The Brothers Karamazov came to be regarded as definitive. Katz — as an achievement comparable in scale and power to Homer’s “ Iliad,” Aeschylus’s “ Oresteia” and Dante’s “ Divine Comedy. Through the gripping events of their story, Dostoevsky portrays the whole of Russian life, its social and spiritual striving, in what was both the golden age and a tragic turning point in Russian culture. There’s a note about that, plus a full introduction by Richard Pevear (I didn’t read it all, he’s not my fav introducer), and a character list. 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 English version has to imply how the verse would have ended , leaving the translator no choice but to decide what he thinks the missing text is, using context clues and his own intuition (mostly the latter). Their hope was to be true to Dostoyevsky, right down to his famous penchant for repetition, seeming sloppiness, and melodrama. Mrs Khokhlakova, a wealthy lady, always dressed with taste, was still quite young and very comely in appearance, somewhat pale-skinned, with very lively, almost completely black eyes. She turned down an offer from Tolstoy’s close friends Louise and Aylmer Maude to collaborate on a translation of “War and Peace” and did it on her own.Be pre-pared for any-thing,” the doctor pronounced, emphasizing each syllable, and, lowering his eyes, he himself prepared to step across the threshold to the carriage.