Their edition of The Brothers Karamazov [0] (translated by Susan McReynolds) stands in my memory as being a pleasure to read and ponder...definitely a book that stays with you over time.
0: https://wwnorton.co.uk/books/9780393926330-the-brothers-kara...
Personally I'd highly recommend reading Michael R. Katz's translation of The Brothers Karamazov instead.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/is-couple-singular-o...
> When writing of a couple getting married, it is more common to use the plural form ("the couple are to be wed"). When writing of an established couple, it is more common to use a singular verb ("the couple has six puppies, each more destructive than the next").
So according to MW we're a bit more right than NYT.
"The original was unfaithful to the translation."
BORGES AFFIRMED, in earnest, that an original can be unfaithful to a translation. He vehemently objected to claims that certain translations he admired are “true to the original” and derided the presuppositions of purists for whom all translations are necessarily deceitful in one way or another. Borges would often pro- test, with various degrees of irony, against the assumption – ingrained in the Italian adage traduttore traditore – that a translator is a traitor to an original. He referred to it alternatively as a superstition or pun. For Borges the Italian expression, unfairly prejudiced in favor of the original, is an erroneous generalization that conflates differ- ence with treachery. The idea that literary translations are inherently inferior to their originals is, for Borges, based on the false assumption that some works of literature must be assumed definitive. But for Borges, no such thing as a definitive work exists, and therefore, a translator’s inevitable transformation of the original is not necessarily to the detriment of the work. Difference, for Borges, is not a sufficient criterion for the superiority of the original.
Previously: <>>36760010 >
https://old.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy/comments/3d1h59/did_n...
Edit: America has a lot of bottoms, apparently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_geographical_bottoms
Nowhere as grand as Aunt Mary's Bottom but South Dakota does have a Big Bottom.
( The Swedes used 66 years, but according to the Norwegian translator, it is no harder than Shakespeare's sonettes. Begun 2016, ETA 2030. )
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/20/movies/dostoyevsky-transl...
Regarding P&V:
> "The Pevear-Volokhonsky versions of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Chekhov, and Bulgakov have earned rapturous reviews by James Wood in the New Yorker and Orlando Figes in the New York Review of Books, along with a PEN translation award. It looks as if people will be reading P&V, as they have come to be called, for decades to come.
> This is a tragedy, because their translations take glorious works and reduce them to awkward and unsightly muddles. Professional writers have asked me to check the Russian texts because they could not believe any great author would have written what P&V produce."
https://www.commentary.org/articles/gary-morson/the-pevearsi...
Lots of interesting stuff of translating jokes and references into a foreign language