My Brothers K is a Garnett translation. Which translation would you recommend then?
I read *Crime and Punishment * years ago and enjoyed it. I don’t remember the translatior. That’s the only Dostoevsky I’ve read.
As for Garnett, I enjoyed her *War and Peace * translation, but someone in another thread had a cow when I said that.
I’m obviously not Maeglin, but I would recommend the Richard Pevear/Larisa Volokhonsky translation, like I mentioned in my earlier post regarding “The Idiot.” They’re a husband-and-wife team (he’s American and she’s Russian) and write vibrant, sensitive prose. The Amazon entry for this translation displays this snippet from a review:
I believe that.
Thank you. I don’t wanna junior mod but I’m pretty sure it’s ok as long as it’s not a referrer link.
I read the Brothers Karamazov ages ago and Crime and Punishment more recently. I own much of his work, some of it in Russian although I’ve not read any of the Russian books yet. When I lived in Saint Petersburg I visited some of the places where he lived. You can still go to the place where Raskolnikov lived, I believe, but I did not do that. My Russian teacher gave me his copy of Crime and Punishment for my birthday. He said that he, as a Saint Petersburger, did not like Dostoevsky too much because he lived in the same insane city as Dostoevsky had, so he could not appreciate Dostoevsky on an anthropological level the way outsiders could. Plus, he said, Dostoevsky writes in a terrible style.
I have tried to read The Idiot three times in the last 20 years, since my half sister gave me a copy as a gift. Last time I got 2/3 of the way through before giving up. I still have the same copy - one day, I’m going to finish it, dammit!