reeling and writhing

"What now, Tolstoy?"*

As Yann Martel might have said, if he'd read this terrific profile of the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation team in Humanities (link via BookForum), which notes among other things, that they have 'finished' translating the works of Tolstoy. Surely a good excuse to revisit some of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky's works. I will also have to indulge in the pleasure of a second shot at The Brothers Karamazov:

The first Pevear-Volokhonsky collaboration was conceived as a way of addressing a commonly cited critique of [Constance]Garnett and her successors. Husband and wife, each having worked independently as translators, initially joined forces in order to better emphasize the overlooked irony in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. “Constance Garnett didn’t understand that he was funny. And every time he was funny—which  he very often is, even at the most heartbreaking moment—she removed it,” Richard claims. “The humor transforms the darkness of what he’s describing. And so that all got omitted for a long time. We wanted to restore that; that was our first mission.” 

It was also interesting to learn that Garnett, a classics student when at Cambridge, began studying Russian "while enduring a difficult pregnancy, in the 1890s."

* I haven't read The Life of Pi, though I have read the author's note, where Martel posts away a failed manuscript to a fictitious address in Siberia (with a fictitious return address in Bombay) and then asks himself this question (in full, "What now, Tolstoy? What other bright ideas do you have for your life?")

reading this space

At Stephen Mitchelmore's blog, This Space, there are two new posts of interest.

He quotes Beckett's concerns voiced in an interview 26 years ago about the label 'absurd' applied to his writing:

Cautiously, I explain that I believe an artist's work is inconceivable without a strict ethical sense.
A long silence.
"What you say is true. But moral values are inaccessible. And they cannot be defined. In order to define them, you would have to pass judgement, which is impossible. That's why I could never agree with the notion of the theatre of the absurd. It involves a value judgment. You cannot even speak about truth. That's what's so distressful. Paradoxically, it is through form that the artist may find some kind of a way out. By giving form to formlesssness. It is only in that way, perhaps, that some underlying affirmation may be found."

And secondly, draws our attention to the online publication of a translation of an early story by Thomas Bernhard.

reading in new ways at Three Percent

Surprise is surely one of narrative’s virtues, but do Americans overlook, in its favor, other narrative rewards and satisfactions, other priorities and uses? Pop and pulp especially, by standardizing story forms and making, so to speak, formula racers—sleek, streamlined thrill machines capable of hugging hairpin plot reversals and sudden narrative curves—have made us canny consumers of plot.

Edward Gauvin is guest blogging at Three Percent, a blog run by the translation program and publishers at the University of Rochester to promote the art of translation. I enjoyed his post about the challenges of reading translations, and thought this marriage of formulaic narrative to its image was...well, rather sleek and streamlined too.