PARIS.- The first time Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translated a Russian novel together, it felt as if another man had joined their marriage: Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
It was a mariage à trois, Volokhonsky said over coffee at her and Pevears rambling apartment in the 15th arrondissem*nt of Paris. Dostoyevsky was always in our mind. We just lived with him.
They were, Pevear recalled, pouring themselves into The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevskys immense final novel. Well, Volokhonsky said, at least we like each other.
Their translation of The Brothers Karamazov, published in 1990, was so well received that a full-page review in The New York Times Book Review declared, The truth is out at last. Their edition of the novel, it continued, finally gets the musical whole of Dostoyevskys original.
Since then, Pevear and Volokhonsky, he now 81 and she 78, have become reigning translators of Russian literature, publishing an average of one volume per year, including classics by Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov, as well as lesser-known books and works by contemporary writers including Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich. In their reach, the couple are the Constance Garnett of our time, making vast swaths of Russias written word available to the West, for which they have received both adulation and full-throated condemnation.
Their latest project is a translation of Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrins Foolsburg: The History of a Town, published earlier this month by Vintage. To Anglophone readers, to whom the book is largely unknown, it will be a corrective to the only previous translation available, from 1980, as well as an argument for the books Swiftian wit and its relevance to Russia and the United States today. There is even a character in it named Trump.
In Russia, The History of a Town is read in schools and regarded as a masterpiece of 19th-century satire that skewered the countrys leaders and commoners alike through a clinically straightforward chronicle of a place called Foolsburg. Stupidity, thievery, deceit, skulduggery whatever you want to name, its there, Pevear said.
But the previous English translation, by Paul Foote, who died in 2011, is insistently literal, missing the wordplay that makes the book so funny; names, for example, are left in Russian, meaningless to people who dont speak the language. That is the biggest change in the often wry, even laugh-out-loud version by Pevear and Volokhonsky. Footes Baklan has become Blockheadov; Borodavkin, Wartbeardin; Pryshch, Pustule; and so on. Even the name of the town, in Footes edition, went untranslated as Glupov, instead of as Foolsburg.
There is a Putinesque leader of the town who dreams of restoring Russias former glory by returning ancient Byzantium under the sway of the Russian state. Late in the book, Saltykov introduces a character named Trump (an exact translation of Kozyr), a simple ragpicker who takes advantage of crisis to make money and switches from one party to another for political gain. He is so careful about covering his tracks that when he is finally brought under real scrutiny, he is found not guilty and deemed truly the worthiest citizen, who greatly contributed to the suppression of the revolution.
Volokhonsky called the book timeless, adding that, its very much bound with Russian history, but its also about the human condition.
She and Pevear translated The History of a Town using virtually the same method as for The Brothers Karamazov. They have been together for 42 years, and have collaborated for nearly as long, brought together, they said, seemingly by fate.
Pevear, an American writer who maintained working-class jobs in places like a New England boatyard, had published an article that caught the attention of a Russian professor named Irina Kirk. She wanted to introduce him to a friend of hers who had emigrated from the Soviet Union: Larissa Volokhonsky, who, while a graduate student in Leningrad (modern-day Saint Petersburg) in 1973, had impulsively moved to the United States by way of Italy.
Volokhonsky, a linguist by training, had enrolled at Yale Divinity School. Pevear, who was living in New York at the time, went up to Connecticut to meet her, not knowing that she was actually in his city renewing her visa. It was like Nabokov, Volokhonsky said with a laugh.
They eventually met in Connecticut, and when Volokhonsky moved to New York, it was to an apartment across the street from Pevears building. It wasnt long before they were living together. Then, when she saw that he was reading David Magarshacks translation of The Brothers Karamazov, she decided to join him, reading the original in Russian. Sometimes, out of curiosity, she would ask how a seemingly idiosyncratic phrase was translated, only to find out that it wasnt.
Suddenly, a light went on, Volokhonsky said. We decided that we would translate it.
She created a word-for-word, phrase-for-phrase translation into English that Pevear, who doesnt speak fluent Russian, then smoothed over. She took that back to the original text and questioned some of his changes; they discussed the entire manuscript, she said, and, setting a precedent that continues today, disagreed without ever fighting. (Like any couple, they bicker instead about everyday things around the home. When, during the visit to their apartment, he asked her whether he was in her way, she responded, Yes, you are always in my way.)
Before sending their translation to the publisher, Pevear read it aloud while Volokhonsky followed along with the original book. The goal, they agreed, was simple: to do in English what Dostoyevsky did in Russian, as opposed to, Pevear said, imposing English rules on Russian.
It wasnt easy to get The Brothers Karamazov published. They had initially been offered a $1,000 advance, which they were able to negotiate to $6,000. But it was a $36,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities that made the translation possible. With two young children, they moved to Paris, quit outside work and finished the job.
The translation was well received, but a follow-up wasnt necessarily a given. They signed a contract for three additional Dostoyevsky books, which sold well, then moved on to Nikolai Gogol, which didnt. They worked in their Paris apartment, in separate rooms but within shouting distance, so they could communicate. Eventually, they made their way to Tolstoy, with, for example, a version of Anna Karenina that restored the writers rhetorical repetition of words, like enchanting to describe the title character.
Along the way, they established certain red lines. They didnt translate Russian dramas until they started to collaborate with Chekhov-esque playwright Richard Nelson. They still dont translate poetry. Too much gets lost, Volokhonsky said. When Pushkin translated Dante and Shakespeare, it was Pushkins poetry, inspired by them. We were asked to translate Pushkin, but its impossible. There are amazing Onegin translations, but they are not Pushkin.
A bit of good luck arrived in 2004, when their Anna Karenina was selected for Oprahs Book Club, an anointment that flipped the fortunes of a commercially modest translation. From the outside, Volokhonsky said, it looked as if she and Pevear had been raised out of abject poverty to enormous riches. In reality, they finally had a pension fund and an accountant.
Still, they became targets of criticism that they were rampaging through Russian literature as if it were a trove of treasures more literal than figurative. Janet Malcolm, in a scathing essay in The New York Review of Books, accused them of establishing an industry of taking everything they can get their hands on written in Russian. The scholarly critic Gary Saul Morson also wrote a takedown, called The Pevearsion of Russian Literature, in which he wrote that their works are Potemkin translations apparently definitive but actually flat and fake on closer inspection.
Pevear and Volokhonsky had their defenders, and there were holes in attacks against them. Neither Malcolm nor another harsh critic, Helen Andrews, spoke Russian, for example; they just preferred Garnetts Edwardian translations and seemed to dislike modern translations in general.
In a response to Malcolms essay, author and translator Alice Sedgwick Wohl wrote that she preferred Pevear and Volokhonskys translations because I always sense the presence of the original behind the window. I also love Garnetts translations, for all the reasons that Janet Malcolm adduces, although I always feel I am reading an English novel set in Russia.
Ultimately, how Pevear and Volokhonskys translations are viewed depends on a readers philosophy of the craft. Garnetts are eloquently of their time but have been seen by some as infelicitous oversteps that transformed Russian more than translated it. Pevear and Volokhonsky aim for something like objectivity and fidelity; if the diction sounds awkward, its a reflection of the authors stylistic quirks, not their own.
We dont try to be different, Volokhonsky said. It just comes out different. Its nice to be praised, and its bad to be criticized, and Garnett was a great woman. We just translate differently. People can prefer her translations or ours, and thats fine. People have different tastes.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
