मेघदूत: "नीचैर्गच्छत्युपरि च दशा चक्रनेमिक्रमेण"

समर्थ शिष्या अक्का : "स्वामीच्या कृपाप्रसादे हे सर्व नश्वर आहे असे समजले. पण या नश्वरात तमाशा बहुत आहे."

G C Lichtenberg: “It is as if our languages were confounded: when we want a thought, they bring us a word; when we ask for a word, they give us a dash; and when we expect a dash, there comes a piece of bawdy.”

C. P. Cavafy: "I’d rather look at things than speak about them."

Martin Amis: “Gogol is funny, Tolstoy in his merciless clarity is funny, and Dostoyevsky, funnily enough, is very funny indeed; moreover, the final generation of Russian literature, before it was destroyed by Lenin and Stalin, remained emphatically comic — Bunin, Bely, Bulgakov, Zamyatin. The novel is comic because life is comic (until the inevitable tragedy of the fifth act);...”

सदानंद रेगे: "... पण तुकारामाची गाथा ज्या धुंदीनं आजपर्यंत वाचली जात होती ती धुंदी माझ्याकडे नाहीय. ती मला येऊच शकत नाही याचं कारण स्वभावतःच मी नास्तिक आहे."

".. त्यामुळं आपण त्या दारिद्र्याच्या अनुभवापलीकडे जाऊच शकत नाही. तुम्ही जर अलीकडची सगळी पुस्तके पाहिलीत...तर त्यांच्यामध्ये त्याच्याखेरीज दुसरं काही नाहीच आहे. म्हणजे माणसांच्या नात्यानात्यांतील जी सूक्ष्मता आहे ती क्वचित चितारलेली तुम्हाला दिसेल. कारण हा जो अनुभव आहे... आपले जे अनुभव आहेत ते ढोबळ प्रकारचे आहेत....."

Kenneth Goldsmith: "In 1969 the conceptual artist Douglas Huebler wrote, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”1 I’ve come to embrace Huebler’s ideas, though it might be retooled as “The world is full of texts, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.” It seems an appropriate response to a new condition in writing today: faced with an unprecedented amount of available text, the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists. How I make my way through this thicket of information—how I manage it, how I parse it, how I organize and distribute it—is what distinguishes my writing from yours."

Tom Wolfe: "The first line of the doctors’ Hippocratic oath is ‘First, do no harm.’ And I think for the writers it would be: ‘First, entertain.’"

विलास सारंग: "… इ. स. 1000 नंतर ज्या प्रकारची संस्कृती रुढ झाली , त्यामध्ये साधारणत्व व विश्वात्मकता हे गुण प्राय: लुप्त झाले...आपली संस्कृती अकाली विश्वात्मक साधारणतेला मुकली आहे."

Saturday, November 29, 2025

How Tricky Translating The Brothers Karamazov Is...You Can't Give Clue to A Detective Story While Translating First Sentence!

                                            Vilas Sarang on the translation of The Stranger
 

The first sentence of "The Brothers Karamazov" in Russian is: 

"Был у нас в округе, в свое время, и теперь еще у нас в памяти, помещик, Федор Павлович Карамазов, отец троих сыновей, и отца троих сыновей, и умерший смертью трагическую и загадочную, умерший ровно тринадцать лет назад, о чем я расскажу на своем месте." 

  • Был у нас в округе, в свое время, и теперь еще у нас в памяти: "In our district, in his time, and still remembered by us..."
  • помещик, Федор Павлович Карамазов: "a landowner, Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov..."
  • отец троих сыновей: "father of three sons..."
  • и умерший смертью трагическую и загадочную, умерший ровно тринадцать лет назад, о чем я расскажу на своем месте. "and who died a tragic and mysterious death, who died exactly thirteen years ago, about which I will tell in its place."
    •  

    Daniel Soar write in LRB March 6 2025:

    "...The Brothers Karamazov has been translated into English a ludicrous number of times: since Garnett’s version (and five separate revisions of it), there have been translations by David Magarshack (1958), Andrew MacAndrew (1970), Julius Katzer (1980), Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (1990), David McDuff (1993), Ignat Avsey (1994) and, most recently, Michael Katz. Apparently there are at least eleven translations into German, nine into French, five into Spanish, and who knows what else.

    Translators always tell us where they stand on the matter of fidelity – accurate but sometimes awkward, or fluent but sometimes loose? – though those who claim to stick closely to the original usually make more noise about it: no one wants to say their version is far removed from the book you want to read. I don’t find the debate, in the abstract, very interesting. 

    ‘Literal’ translation is a contradiction in terms. Languages have different syntaxes, with Russian word order quite unlike that of English or French or Spanish, and many words in one language don’t have an exact equivalent in the other – the Russian for ‘dark’, тёмный, has connotations of the murky, the clouded, the unknowable, the obscure, as well as perhaps the suspicious or dodgy – which makes it impossible to render perfectly in English. 

    The word turns up in the first sentence of the novel, as one half of the phrase ‘трагической и тёмной’, referring to the (later to be revealed) circumstances of old man Karamazov’s death. The трагической (‘tragicheskoi’) is easy: it’s a recognisable cognate of ‘tragic’, and there’s no alternative. 

    The other word is much harder. Both Magarshack and MacAndrew render the phrase as ‘tragic and mysterious’; McDuff has ‘tragic and fishy’ – all this seems fine. Pevear/Volokhonsky and now Katz pretend there’s no issue by translating it ‘literally’ as ‘dark and tragic’. Avsey, for some reason, has ‘violent and mysterious’, and Garnett does ‘gloomy and tragic’. ‘Gloomy’? What does she mean? That the story is depressing? Avsey’s choice is damaging for a different reason: apart from everything else it is, The Brothers Karamazov is a detective story, with a large element of suspense: to say that old man Karamazov’s death will be violent is to give rather a lot away.

    So the choices have consequences. And with Dostoevsky, these choices matter more than they do with most other writers..."

     
     
    Illustration by German artist, Kurt Hilscher (1904-1980), for the German translation of 1984, by George Orwell

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