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Word for word: Literary
translation gets some overdue props
2003 Time Out New York feature

by Marion Lignana Rosenberg

Italians express with brutal elegance the dilemma of the translator’s art: traduttore, traditore—or “translator, traitor.” Many critics don’t even acknowledge the work of translators, while others, who may or may not know a text’s original language, have the cheek to issue broad dismissals of painstakingly crafted translations. So why would anyone undertake this thankless task?

“Well, I wouldn’t call it thankless,” responds translator Richard Pevear, sounding taken aback. “I guess what you mean is that translation is impossible. But once you’ve said that, then you can begin to do it.” The Boston native and his St. Petersburg–born wife, Larissa Volokhonsky, are perhaps the best-known translator duo in the world. The pair, whose version of Chekhov’s The Complete Short Novels has just been published by Everyman’s Library, have twice won the prestigious PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize, for their clear, stylish renderings of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (Everyman’s) and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (Penguin Classics). Several months ago, Oprah Winfrey chose the latter for her book club, resulting in a projected 50-fold increase of total sales of the 2001 translation.

Speaking by phone from their Paris home, the couple seem unperturbed by their newfound mainstream celebrity. “Well, we’ve been interviewed a lot,” Pevear says. “And I suppose there will be some money, but it all sounds rather suppositious so far.” Translators are used to toiling in obscurity and with derisory compensation for their efforts. Volokhonsky’s delicate, high-pitched voice hardens with indignation when she recalls the “puny amount of money” ($1,000) they were initially offered for their Brothers Karamazov translation: “For two years of work!”

Indeed, no one takes up translation hoping to get rich, and translators rarely win fame outside their close-knit community. Exceptions include Peter Constantine, another distinguished Slavist, whose work also embraces translations of Voltaire and Thomas Mann, and William Weaver, who has created magically graceful renditions of Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco. For Burton Pike, translator of a 2004 edition of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther (Modern Library), he and his colleagues are “language freaks,” spurred on by “the endless fascination of trying to re-create a scene, a character, an emotion felt in one language into another.” Estelle Gilson, whose translations include Massimo Bontempelli’s Separations: Two Novels of Mothers and Children (McPherson), works in what she calls “the insane belief that the world will thrill” when a text previously unknown to U.S. readers appears, “and that, this time, proper rewards will be forthcoming.”

Still, the odds are stacked against translators. While U.S. consumers eagerly snatch up foreign-made clothing, toys and cars, the book market remains stubbornly insular. The Los Angeles Times recently reported that fewer than 3 percent of literary titles published in the U.S. are translations—“a proportion no better than in the Arab world.” The three years since the 9/11 atrocities have seen an uptick in the study of foreign languages and in “grassroots interest in translation,” as shown by the success of such journals and websites as Two Lines and Words Without Borders, the paper reported. Major publishing houses, though, show no signs of mending their isolationist ways.

For centuries, writers undertook translations to refine their craft and enrich their native cultures—think of Chaucer’s versions of Boethius and The Romance of the Rose. Pevear and Volokhonsky began working as a team about 20 years ago, when they were reading Brothers Karamazov simultaneously—he in English, she in Russian. “I usually read naively,” Volokhonsky recalls, “but then I’d look [at the English translation] and discover that the humor was lost, the tone was lost. It was a different text!” In their view, most English-language translations lose the “great lightness and playfulness—as in Mozart” that punctuates the volcanic darkness of Dostoevsky’s prose.

Volokhonsky begins a translation by creating a “completely literal, handwritten” version of a work, with copious annotations detailing “Biblical overtones, distorted quotations or references, repeated words.” Pevear then transforms her text into “nondeformed English,” with subsequent renditions vetted word by word by the fastidious duo. “It’s a filigree—very fine work,” muses Volokhonsky, as her husband picks up the thought. “Translating prose is like a poet’s work,” says Pevear, himself a poet, “because you’re very concerned with hearing the words. It’s like jewelry work.” Laughter born of the harmony of the couple’s personal and professional relationship leavens the conversation when Pevear recalls Robert Frost’s distillation of the seductive challenge of their craft: “Poetry is what gets lost in translation.”

Anton Chekhov’s The Complete Short Novels is out now from Everyman’s Library ($23).

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