Robert Chandler and Boris Dralyuk - both translators themselves - get asked questions like this all too often. In this talk, they try to provide a few answers - and to give readers a few guidelines that may help them to find their own answers.
Which books get translated from Russian, and how often they are re-translated, can seem a random matter. The literary merit of the original and the quality of previous translations have often been less important than international politics and publishers’ ideas of what will sell. Some great books - like Bulgakov’s THE MASTER AND MARGARITA - get translated over a dozen times in a few decades; others have to wait fifty or sixty years for a translation.
For the general reader, who simply wants to read some Dostoevsky and doesn’t want to have to begin by spending several hours comparing seven different translations, it can all be very confusing. In a few instances, there is clearly a single outstanding translation of a particular work. Nearly everyone would agree that Stanley Mitchell’s translation of Pushkin’s EUGENE ONEGIN and Oliver Ready’s translation of CRIME AND PUNISHMENT are unlikely to be bettered for a long time. Nevertheless, publishers continue to confuse matters by bringing out new versions. And Penguin Classics - still more surprisingly - have chosen to keep their old, inferior translation of CRIME AND PUNISHMENT in print, even though they themselves are the publishers of Oliver Ready’s brilliant new version.
Beginning with the fables of Ivan Krylov (Russia’s answer to La Fontaine) and continuing through Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Babel, Platonov, Pasternak, Grossman and others, Robert and Boris will discuss some of their favourite translations and say why they like them.
Robert Chandler has translated Sappho and a selection of Apollinaire for Everyman’s Poetry. His translations from Russian include many works by Vasily Grossman and Andrey Platonov. He has also compiled three anthologies for Penguin Classics: of Russian short stories, of Russian magic tales and (together with Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski) of Russian Poetry. He is a co-translator of three volumes of memoirs and stories by Teffi and the author of a short biography of Alexander Pushkin. His translation of Vasily Grossman’s Stalingrad was published in June 2019. His translations have won prizes in both the UK and the USA and his own poems have appeared in the TLS and elsewhere. Teaching is increasingly important to him, and he runs a monthly translation workshop at Pushkin House.
Boris Dralyuk is a Lecturer in Russian at the University of St Andrews. He has translated and co-translated several volumes of poetry and prose from Russian and Polish, and is the co-editor, with Robert Chandler and Irina Mashinski, of The Penguin Book of Russian Poetry (2015).