Posted by Joffre on 17/4/2009, 13:41:05, in reply to "Re: Petersburg"
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When I was shopping for Petersburg, I read something online which made me feel the Cournos translation was inadequate. I am not sure what or where it was. It may have been no more than a customer review, but it made some objective claim like incompleteness. This is what the translator's introduction to my Maguire/Malmstad edition says:
For English readers, a major obstacle to the appreciation of Petersburg has been that 1959 version, which bears only incidental resemblance to the original. Apart from gross misreadings, it makes numerous cuts, which eliminate, among other things, virtually the entire persona of the narrator, whose presence is essential to any real understanding of what Bely is up to. The translator, John Cournos, deserves our respect as a pioneer, but his work conveys little of the intricacy and subtlety of the original.
I said that Petersburg had been translated "to no great acclaim" by a couple of professors, by whom I meant, of course, Maguire and Malmstad. I really had no good reason to say that. I don't know of any criticism of their translation. I've never otherwise heard of them, but that's really true of most translators. One customer review on Amazon complains that M/M is "horribly clunky on the sentence level," but acknowledges that the Russian could be the same, and indeed M&M note that, "The peculiarities of Bely's style... pose formidable problems for the translator. Shifted grammatical categories, assaults on conventional syntax, quirky (some would say "impossible") combinations of words...." Still, based on their reputation, if Pevear and Volokhonsky translated Petersburg, I would buy it to read and compare.
There is no telling about Nabokov's judgements. They were so quirky that one could understandably dismiss them. Don Quixote was no good? There was nothing or not much in Jane Austen? Dostoievski was a melodramatic mystic? But The Invisible Man and Dr. Jeckyl and Mr. Hyde are first rate works?
I suppose we are people who would know of books that were obscure to most. Looking over Burt's hundred novels, I probably do think Petersburg is one of the two most obscure, the other being The Dream of Red Chambers. I think the book I'm now reading, The Relic, is more obscure than either. I suppose Bely gets lost among all the great Russians of the 19th century.
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