Issue 213, Summer 2015
Credited with starting a “quiet revolution,” Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear have joined the small club of major translators whose interpretation of a masterpiece displaces the one read by generations before. Volokhonsky, who is Russian, and Pevear, who is American, have been married thirty-three years. In that time, they have translated much of Russian literature as we know it. Their thirty or so translations include The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, Demons, The Idiot, Notes from Underground, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Hadji Murat, The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories, The Master and Margarita, Doctor Zhivago, Gogol’s Collected Tales, Dead Souls, The Enchanted Wanderer and Other Stories by Nikolai Leskov, and Chekhov’s Selected Stories.
Until their translation of The Brothers Karamazov was published in 1990, the English-speaking world got its Dostoevsky (their preferred spelling—with one y) from the great British translator Constance Garnett. Though her translations of Turgenev and Chekhov are generally considered virtuosic, her versions of Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Tolstoy have drawn criticism for Victorian elision. Her Gogol translations are “dry and flat, and always unbearably demure,” complained Nabokov. “The reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that they aren’t reading the prose of either one,” grumbled Joseph Brodsky. The critic Korney Chukovsky summed it up best and most brutally when he wrote, “Who does not feel the convulsions, the nervous trembling of Dostoevsky’s style? . . . But with Constance Garnett it becomes a safe bland script: not a volcano, but a smooth lawn mowed in the English manner—which is to say a complete distortion of the original.” For her part, Garnett once wrote, “Dostoievsky is so obscure and so careless a writer that one can scarcely help clarifying him.”
Pevear and Volokhonsky’s translations have been lauded for restoring the idiosyncrasies of the originals—the page-long sentences and repetitions of Tolstoy, the cacophonous competing voices of Dostoevsky. Though almost unanimously praised by reviewers and Slavic scholars, they have a few critics who accuse them, in fierce blog posts, of being too literal or prone to unidiomatic turns of phrase. Pevear, who is sometimes drawn into the online jousting, never apologizes for erring on the side of the unfamiliar sounding over muting the original.
In 2004, the translators were propelled to commercial success when Oprah Winfrey chose their translation of Anna Karenina for her book club, making the 137-year-old book an instant best seller. (The Moscow Times called it “the greatest promotion of Russian literature since Omar Sharif cantered across the steppe in a fur hat as Doctor Zhivago.”)
Pevear and Volokhonsky have won the pen Translation Prize twice, for The Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenina. Pevear, who has also translated French and Italian works, is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at the American University of Paris. In addition to translating Russian contemporary poets, Volokhonsky, who attended Yale Divinity School, has translated theological texts into Russian. They have two trilingual children.
The interview took place in January over two long afternoons in their ground-floor apartment in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, where they have lived since 1998. Volokhonsky is warm and reserved. She has strong opinions, sometimes delivered bluntly. She doesn’t like facile answers. She accepts praise with sincere embarrassment and pleasure. She speaks with a thick Russian accent, which adds to her considerable charm. Pevear looks like a New England ship captain, bearded and with an excellent head of hair. He has a slow, easygoing manner which belies his precise tastes. He enjoys puns and repartee. In the beginning, the couple took turns speaking, listening respectfully in mortuary silence as the other spoke. But soon, they were interrupting each other, finishing the other’s sentence, prodding the other to speak, teasing or correcting each other, though they were always in general agreement. At the end of the interview, which, like a nine-hundred-page Russian novel, seemed to contain all subjects simultaneously, we opened a half bottle of champagne. Pevear had bought it to celebrate New Year’s Eve, but the two had fallen asleep before midnight.
—Susannah Hunnewell
INTERVIEWER
How did you meet?
PEVEAR
We actually met because of Russian literature. I had written an essay on the Soviet dissident and writer Andrei Sinyavsky. It was published in The Hudson Review in 1972. I remarked ironically that the poet Yevtushenko was giving readings in Madison Square Garden—among his translators were John Updike and Richard Wilbur—while Sinyavsky was in a Soviet labor camp. I received a letter from Irene Kirk, a professor at the University of Connecticut. She told me he wasn’t in prison, he had been released but also stripped of his citizenship and deported. She had helped him and his family leave for France.
VOLOKHONSKY
When I arrived in the United States, I stayed for a while with this professor, and she started matchmaking. Succeeded after a while. Not immediately.
INTERVIEWER
Who was resistant?
PEVEAR
Circumstances. Irene told me there was someone I should meet, and she invited me down to Connecticut. I was very surprised. I lived in Maine and worked in a boatyard as a woodworker—boats were still made of wood back then. I took a little time off and drove down. It happened that Larissa had to renew her visa, which meant she had left for England just as I arrived.
INTERVIEWER
You missed each other.
PEVEAR
It took a few more years. By then we were in Manhattan, both of us.
INTERVIEWER
You lived on West 107th Street.
PEVEAR
Yes. And by some miracle I found Larissa an apartment on the same street.
VOLOKHONSKY
It was convenient.
PEVEAR
Larissa always says that if it hadn’t been for 107th Street, we’d never have been married. When I moved to New York, I took up cabinetmaking. That’s how I earned a living.
VOLOKHONSKY
Yes. We were neighbors with a wonderful, crotchety woman, an old translator from Russian, Mirra Ginsburg. She was a very good translator. We liked her. When we started to try to translate The Brothers Karamazov, we showed her samples. By then, Richard had translated some Russian children’s poetry. Richard’s very good at jingles.
PEVEAR
Who’s that knocking at my door?
His badge is stamped with number four.
His shoulder bag is big and fat.
His coat is blue, so is his hat.
VOLOKHONSKY
She read our samples and said, You can’t do it. Just stick to your cabinetry and these children’s poems. You’re so good at these children’s poems. And she said one phrase that sent me through the roof. She repeated it several times—she said, I adore the smell of wood shavings.
INTERVIEWER
Your first critic.
VOLOKHONSKY
Yes. We had yet another critic, at the very beginning, an old Russian émigré lady. When we first told her we were translating The Brothers Karamazov, she said, Oh, Dostoevsky, I hope you correct his awful style. I said, No, that is precisely what we’re going to keep.