Hating on P&V has become a meme. I thought the translations were competent and enjoyable. There is far, far worse out there. I read one "modernized" version of the Gambler that was so butchered it was like reading a YA novel.
I don't think it's a meme, there's something there. I've read P&V (underground), Katz (demons), Garnett (brothers), and McDuff (house)
I get that underground is supposed to sound more erratic, but there's this sort of clunkiness behind P&V that other translations don't have. I usually compare translations before buying and I notice it there too
Katz and McDuff were good. Garnett not bad. But P&V is just feels god awful to read, prose is just too unnatural sounding
I can't relate to that feeling, but then again I had no issues reading Pynchon or DeLillo. I appreciate the difference in cadence and don't believe prose has to conform to the same beats every time. It's true some books are easier to read (I'm reading a Murakami right now) and that is pleasant in its own way, but once you get into a flow I find it opens up and becomes enjoyable, in a particular way.
I would not want that all the time, but one doesn't read Russian lit all the time either. Becomes part of the experience for me.
Has it? Using P&V-fueled/-inspired superiority to hate on Victorian translations (or anything non-P&V, really—including e.g. Magarshack) seems to have a lot more meme energy than the reverse.
Weird reaction, because redundancy is implied (even while "completely redundant" it is not), and the support is definitely there:
> People say, for example, you can't read The Count of Monte Cristo unless it's Buss's translation published by Penguin, or you can't read Garnett's Dostoyevsky. Well, okay, but when pressed about what the purportedly less faithful versions [...] get wrong, I've only ever heard mimetic regurgitation of nonspecific claims (on par with "don't read K&R; it's awful") or when someone actually articulates something concrete and falsifiable, it doesn't hold up—"That actually was in the 19th century translation that I read, so..."
If that's not "something to support your pov", I'm not sure what you want. It's a comment that (a) antedates yours on the same topic (literally using the phrase "mimetic regurgitation"), and (b) explains exactly the issue of nonspecific claims that I've run into with people who offer criticisms of the earliest translations into English. Aside from all that, even at worst—if you're not satisfied by any of this, for whatever reason—it contains no less support for my position than the support you provided for yours.
