The sentence flops onto its bottom like a toddler.
Ann Pasternak Slater, niece of Boris Pasternak, pens a delectably vicious smackdown of Volokhonsky-Pevear's translation of Dr. Zhivago.
I read Dr. Zhivago in college but already had considered the movie a favorite for years. In the film, you never "hear" Zhivago's poetry and I liked it that way. I was disappointed that they were included in the book and didn't really enjoy them. Later, I learned that the poems are really famous (They were, after all, Pasternak's, and he was a great poet.)! Since then, I've read some other translations of the Zhivago poems and love them (translation matters!). I'm interested to know how V-P dealt with the poetry, since they are better known as prose translators.
This is what Pasternak Slater has to say about the poems in their translation: "There are many bad translations of Pasternak's poems. Volokhonsky and Pevear's are no worse than the rest. They're what Nabokov called his translation of Pushkin's Onegin – 'a pony'. A humble pack-horse. A prose crib, dutifully set out in pointless short lines mimicking the original." Ouch.
Adriana, did you hear the WNYC piece by The Fishko Files about the translation of the book? She interviewed Volokhonsky and Pevear http://www.wnyc.org/shows/fishko/2010/dec/10/
Posted by: Angrywayne | December 10, 2010 at 11:58 AM