- Jul 2023
-
www.commentary.org www.commentary.org
-
Morson, Gary Saul. “The Pevearsion of Russian Literature.” Commentary Magazine, July 1, 2010. https://www.commentary.org/articles/gary-morson/the-pevearsion-of-russian-literature/.
You have to love the reference to perversion of Pevear's name in the title! Wonder how they'd translate this into Russian...
-
-
www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
-
Remnick, David. “The Translation Wars.” The New Yorker, October 30, 2005. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/11/07/the-translation-wars.
-
At the end of our last conversation in Paris, Pevear went to his shelves and pulled down a volume in French, and read a prayer by Larbaud addressed to St. Jerome, who translated the Bible into Latin. Following the line with his finger, Pevear squinted and, slowly, translated: “Excellent Doctor, Light of the Holy Church, Blessed Jerome. I am about to undertake a task full of difficulties, and from this moment on I beg of you to help me with your prayers so I can translate this work into French with the same spirit with which it was composed.”
-
Pevear, especially, has read some of the theory about translation: Walter Benjamin, José Ortega y Gasset, Roman Jakobson, and, of course, Nabokov.
Some authors who have written about translations.
-
Finally, in 2000, the book was published in the U.K. Penguin sold a few hundred copies in England. At Viking-Penguin in New York, Caroline White, a senior editor, ordered a print run of thirty-two thousand, with the hope that some strong reviews would mean that the new edition would displace Garnett, the Maudes, and other translations on the academic market.
Initial print fun of the P/V translation of Anna Karenina was 32,000 copies which the publisher hoped would push other translations to the margins. Then Oprah picked it up for her book club... and the publisher ordered another printing of 800,000 copies.
-
He takes banal people and puts them into banal situations, but he has hope for them.
Pevear talking about Chekhov.
-
But Tolstoy himself said the point is to get the thing said and then, if he wasn’t sure he had said it, he would say it again and again.”
quote from Richard Pevear
Tags
- writing advice
- clarity
- Saint Jerome
- writing
- Anton Chekhov
- Larissa Volokhonsky
- José Ortega y Gasset
- quotes
- Oprah Winfrey
- read
- book clubs
- character development
- Russian
- Roman Jakobson
- Richard Pevear
- Leo Tolstoy
- translations
- Penguin
- publishing
- Vladimir Nabokov
- Walter Benjamin
- hope
- theory of translation
- banality
- Valéry Larbaud
- Fyodor Dostoevsky
- print runs
Annotators
URL
-
-
welovetranslations.com welovetranslations.com