translations, bulgakov and glenny

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i've just finished the master and margarita, and i thought it was a very good book, i enjoyed it quite a lot. but since finishing it i've discovered that the glenny translation (the one that i have read) is often disparaged, and that their are superior translations. but this doesn't seem to be unanimous (wow i have no idea how to spell that!), and the glenny version seems to have its defenders. other versions may be better, but i haven't read others, and have nothing to compare it to

1. who here has read master and margarita? and has anyone really read different translations of it?
2. how problematic is the nature of translations to foreign literature?

― gareth, Tuesday, 8 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

1. yes its grate. alice is doing a whole semester of bulgakov so she may know much about this soon. the version i read didnt seem too bad but i havent read it in russian. i tried reading pelevin in russian, i have loads of stuff that hasnt been translated but it is so frigging hard. 2. potentially, very problematic. although doesnt need to be. i think the main problem is larger contextual problems, where one word in russian say might describe a whole mood/event/characteristic that would take several paragraphs to explaining in english. this doesnt make for very flowing langauge.

― ambrose, Tuesday, 8 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

I haven't read different translations of 'The Master and Margarita', but I've read other Bulgakov novels translated by different people. I often prefer older translations to more modern ones, and MM seems to have been translated first, so all I can say is that I liked the older translation of MM better than the more modern translations of 'The Heart of a Dog', for example (though MM is a better story, so who can tell!) ... I haven't thought about it before, but perhaps that's because reading older English is slightly more like reading a foreign language? (I don't mean slang, but deeper things such as sentence construction, tempo etc.)

I have read some of Dostoevsky's novels in several different translations. The Constance Garnett translations, which were often the first to appear, are really disparaged, but I think that's a load of bull, because she's clumsy with slang but so what? You can hear that yourself, and she writes quite - rapidly? - I mean it doesn't feel studied, which so many translations painfully do. I don't know anything about Constance Garnett but I can't help but feel that some of the virulence directed against is tainted with the typically modernist fear of 'decadent women scribblers.'

― maryann, Tuesday, 8 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

I think I've got the Garnett translation and I just don't like it cuz it's boring. Not sure if that's due to the translation being oldsounding or Dostoevsky being oldsounding. I don't like oldsounding.

― Josh, Wednesday, 9 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

The one difference I can remember from 'The Master and Margarita' is the answer to the question, 'Who says true love does not exist?' to which the answer is either: 'Cut out his lying tongue!' or: 'Cut out the vile liar's tongue!' I prefer the former, but I don't know who did it.

― Peter Miller, Thursday, 10 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)

Some of those 1920s-40s Penguin Classics translations of Modernist French novels are DIRE. Ditto the Aylmer Maude translations of Tolstoy. The one of 'Thèrese Désqueyroux' being a particularly noxious example. A good translator is Michael Hulse - who translated (sad use of past tense) W. G. Sebald. He also did 'The Sorrows of Young Werther' which was good. Translation dates very badly in my opinion.

― Will, Thursday, 10 January 2002 01:00 (twenty-four years ago)