Tuirgin

Anton Chekhov was a master of the short story. However, he gets poor treatment by the Interwar Period translations of Constance Garnett. I first came to dislike Garnett’s Russian translations while discovering the writings of Fyodor Dostoevsky. The great Russian writers all have very distinctive writing styles and Constance Garnett succeeded in making them sound like Victorian era British novelists. She is known for her very fast, “smoothed over” style of translation in which difficulties in the original are simply dropped from the work. This is simply not the way to get the flavor of the great Russian writers. I can only surmise that the decision to go with the Garnett translation of these stories rested upon the economics of public domain versus newer, licensed translations.

My preference would be for one of the modern translations, and in particular the Pevear/Volokhonsky translations are wonderful. They are quite literal and maintain a strong sense of the “Russianness” of the works. They don’t Westernize, they don’t turn Russians into Latins, they don’t turn a perhaps unfamiliar “liturgy” into a familiar “mass”. Instead, they provide ample endnotes to ellucidate the aspects of Russian culture and history which are likely to be opaque to the Western reader.

With a poor translation as the foundation for this audio book, I still held out hope for a powerful reading. Unfortunately, the problems were only compounded by poor production choices made by reader/producer Max Bollinger. (continue reading…)

I’ve been reading short fiction lately, and for the reasons I mentioned in a previous post I am focusing almost exclusively on Science Fiction and Fantasy. This week I got the idea of seeking out this year’s award winners, and was pleasantly surprised to see how much was available for reading on the web. Free stories are a treat for the unemployed. (continue reading…)