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