The Brothers Karamazov question

For Dostoevsky, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have been praised as the best and truest to Dostoevsky's style. I would stick with them for any Dostoevsky work.

I've read both the Garnett and the Pevear/Volokhonsky translations. There is no doubt in my mind that many times Garnett reads better in English than P&V. I.e., if I were to choose a quote from the book to post on Facebook, it'd almost certainly be from Garnett, because the language just sounds prettier. However, Garnett loses a lot in her translation, namely the *feel* of the different characters voices. It is known that Dostoevsky used to keep journals wherein he would simply practice sounding like one character or another, trying to imbue the speech with various mannerisms. Mind you, these journals never made it into the text, they were a warm-up of sorts, so when he wanted to write Alexei's or Ivan's or Dmitri's speech, he would reflexively know how they were supposed to sound. P&V do a ridiculous job of capturing this. In Garnett, all the characters sound the same. In P&V, none of them do. They all have their own verbal nuances that distinguish them from one another (e.g., the way Dmitri trips over himself and restates himself, as if he's editing himself as he speaks, or the way Smerdyakov always sounds like he's beating around the bush and is never speaking clearly).

Also, P&V are scary in how accurate they are. This is a facet that turns people off, because they're accurate to the point of sounding clunky in English at times (e.g., they use the word "anthropophagy" instead of "cannibalism". Why? Because the word Dostoevsky uses is "antropofagiya", so they prefer to use a word in English, even if it's uncommon, that is closer in etymology). But I love this aspect. I've read a number of their translations, and for each one, anytime something crops up that catches my eye (e.g., if they use an idiom that I don't know exists in Russian, or if they use a 5-dollar word like "anthropophagy", or if the meaning of a sentence or passage is just unclear), I bust out a copy of the Russian version and ask my fiancee (born and raised in Kiev) to translate, and 99 times out of 100, they're spot on. The only times they seem to deviate from the literal text is 1) if there's a pun in the Russian that wound not translate as a pun into English; then they replace the literal translation with a comparable pun in English, or 2) if they want to bring out humor which is present in the Russian but doesn't quite come out in the literal English translation (this is done frequently in their translation of Bulgakov's Master and Margarita).

All told, I think anyone reading BK is doing themselves a massive favor, just in life. And I'd ultimately probably recommend having a main translation that you read and an auxiliary translation or two that you can consult in the event of confusion. That's what I usually do, which is easy since Garnett's translations are out of copyright and are therefore easily found online for free. But if someone wanted a single translation, I'd recommend P&V with no reservations.

Happy reading, dude.

I, too, would recommend the P-V translation for Dostoevsky. The Brother's Karamazov is infinitely more enjoyable in the P-V translation than the Garnett in my opinion.

And might I say that I'm jealous. I wish I could read the book for the first time again. It is a treasure of world literature, take your time and enjoy it.

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, anytime. Just go for it. Not just for Dostoevsky, but for Tolstoy too.

I like my 1929 modern library, Constance Garnett- translated edition.

I don't like Garnett's translation; it feels stiff to me. I can't speak to the accuracy of any one translation over another (not speaking any Russian), but I enjoyed both P+V's (Pevear is an alum of my college, so his translations were all over the book store) and Andrew MacAndrew's efforts. MacAndrew's translation is the one that I own and reread, and it's published by Bantam.