That last one is especially offensive to the ear of a native English speaker. Here’s what P & V have: Second Marriage, Second Children Here are a few chapter headings from the Oxford World Classics translation by Ignat Avsey, the one I ended up going with: When I decided to tackle The Brothers Karamazov last month, I chose my translation the obvious way: I pulled up Amazon previews for half a dozen versions and compared the opening pages and tables of contents to see which one grabbed me. Unfortunately, the result is not something you would want to spend 974 pages with. No one has ever offered a truer approximation of Dostoevsky’s prose! P & V are like Gillette razors-you just can’t get any closer! The promotional material practically writes itself. I may not know Russian-but neither does Richard Pevear.) The result, as you might imagine, is a fairly close replication of the original. (He hasn’t mastered the language himself, not even at a conversational level, which is why I feel comfortable criticizing their work so harshly. A husband-and-wife team, Larissa makes a literal translation as close to word-for-word as possible and then Richard tidies up her copy. What I don’t know is how. Admittedly, their method is a publicist’s dream come true. There’s a lot of money at stake, for them and for their publisher. Fourteen thousand copies a year, practically indefinitely, is why. I have no idea how Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation of The Brothers Karamazov came to be regarded as definitive.
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