Reviewing The Idiot - II

My editor at Penguin has just drawn my attention to T.J. Binyon's review of the translation that appeared in the Times newspaper back on May 24. Her assistant should have sent me a copy, but somehow that didn't happen, so I've only read it now. It's very useful when the reviewer actually knows Russian and can comment on the translation in an informed way - all too often the reviewers merely end up summmarizing or commenting on Dostoyevsky's work, without really taking the translation into account. So I was interested in what Binyon had to say. He says some nice things, but he also has some criticisms:

Accuracy is very much a feature of this translation. McDuff has meticulously endeavoured to make his version as faithful to Dostoevsky as possible, reproducing, for example, the verbal repetitions so characteristic of the author, the peculiar "Frenchness" that contaminates his style in this novel and the highly individual speech peculiarities of the various characters. All this is excellent, but at times the sensitivity to English,rather than Russian, linguistic nuance falters, allowing anachronisms to creep in. Aglaya scornfully calls Myshkin "pathetic", while he tells her he is afraid he will "flunk" a meeting. In the end, however, this is probably as close as one can get to reading the original, even if - perhaps inevitably, and through no fault of the translator - one is left with a feeling somewhat akin to that one has after watching a television adaptation of a 19th-century novel: the conviction that, although the heroine's Victorian dress has been lovingly recreated, beneath it she is undoubtedly wearing modern underwear.

All I would say in response to this that we are now living in the twenty-first century, the English language has moved on, and readers, especially younger readers, expect to be able to enter the world of an author like Dostoyevsky without too much head-scratching. This is not to imply that it's acceptable to flood the English version of a nineteenth century classic with "modern" expressions - just that occasionally it may be okay to insert a more modern usage where a word like "wretched" may even have subtly changed the nuances of its meaning over the centuries. But Binyon has a point: it's probably impossible to truly recreate nineteenth century Russian novels in English - the cultural differences between the Russian and the English-speaking worlds are too great, and the passage of time has made the bridge even more difficult to cross. None the less, there are striking similarities between the Russia of Dostoyevsky's time and the Russia of today, and it's perhaps here that the real points of contact can be made.