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Max asked this question about The Master and Margarita:
What's the recommended translation for this book? Many seem to have negative comments about Pevear & Volokhonsky. I have access to Glenny, P&V and Burgin & O'Connor.
Lucy Day Werts .
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There are six translations of The Master and Margarita in total: Ginsburg, Glenny, Burgin/O'Connor, Pevear/Volokhonsky, Karpelson, and Aplin.

People …more.
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There are six translations of The Master and Margarita in total: Ginsburg, Glenny, Burgin/O'Connor, Pevear/Volokhonsky, Karpelson, and Aplin.

People tend to recommend whichever translation they happen to have read, which means that most recommendations are just people talking about the most recent or most well-known edition.

P&V are superstar translators, so there are a lot of people talking about them. They're well-respected, but anything that's extremely popular also produces a strong backlash, and there are definitely readers and critics who are strongly against their work.

Glenny is arguably the best if you want something that reads smoothly in English; it appears to be the worst if you care about accuracy.

Burgin/O'Connor seems like a good choice. Unlike Ginsburg and Glenny, they had the benefit of a couple decades of research on Bulgakov.

P&V, like Burgin and O'Connor, were aiming for a literal, faithful Russian translation. Both versions have lots of explanatory notes.

For information on all the translations, including book covers, ISBNs, pagecounts, links to relevant articles, and extracts for comparison, visit We Love Translations: World Literature in English.

» What's the best translation of The Master and Margarita?

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The Master and Margarita
by Mikhail Bulgakov
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