Interesting interview with the acclaimed translators of particularly Dostoevsky here.
In Dostoevsky's work, as your translations reveal, the language is occasionally strange and the forms are much more dramatic than in Tolstoy's fiction. When I picked up, for instance, your Brothers Karamazov a few years ago, it was a revelation to recognize the dynamic energy of the language.
Their translation revealing of the intentionally awkward and strange use of language most obvious in their Notes from Underground, which other translations will render more readable or 'natural', not grasping the deliberate strange coarseness of the language as an essential component of the work.
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Good interview. i was amused by the thing about the Harvard prof dissing their translation for 'lapsing into the banal', when the original is deliberately so at that point.
'Tis curious after Modernism & what followed, that literary folk still have this instinctive, self-assured aversion to roughness & awkwardness of tone & language, and assume you can't write if your prose is ever less than polished. It's as if they never read King Lear ("Howl, howl, howl, howl, howl!") or Eliot or anything, in fact, other than Henry James & Dr Johnson.
i recall my first story (first i wrote & first i sent to a magazine) being rejected with "the premise is original but the tone is uneven." i was so stupefied by the editor's stupidity i didn't send anything else out for about another 2 years. As it happens most editors etc. think like this.
I don't know if it comes off, but I enjoy doing this purposely clumsy kind of writing too at times, mostly for humour I spose but also more seriously with intentional awkward repetitions...not that it's so much a conscious process, but I spose it invloves the intentional attempt to break the smoothness of the synaptic connection in the reader, deliberately short-circuiting the rationalising mind's flow. Or something.
The actual texture of language is rarely examined. Poetry is almost all about texture, which demands close attention, sensitivity to nuance of sound, of the internal structure of a line; the best prose i think has this attention to texture, and what distinguishes good from bad writing is often just that, some subtlety of texture.
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