There’s a new litter of coyote pups hanging out in the Graceland cemetery in Chicago. They are learning how to coyote.
Sound on!
I have no real expertise here, but I found this really convincing after trying to read the P&V translation of War and Peace, and having such an easier time after switching to the old-school Maude translation.
Pevear and Volokhonsky, who are married, work in an unusual fashion. She, a native Russian speaker, renders each book into entirely literal English. He, who knows insufficient Russian, then works on the rendering with the intention of keeping the language as close to the original as possible. What results from this attempt at unprecedented fidelity is a word-for-word and syntax-for-syntax version that sacrifices tone and misconstrues overall sense.
Students once encountered the great Russian writers as rendered by the magnificent Constance Garnett, a Victorian who taught herself the language and then proceeded to introduce almost the entire corpus of Russian literature to the English language over the space of 40 years, from the 1890s to the 1930s. Her greatest virtues were her profound and sympathetic understanding of the works themselves and a literary artist’s feel for the English language.
Over time, in the case of a few major works, better versions were produced. Ann Dunnigan’s translations of War and Peace, Chekhov’s plays and stories, and Ivan Goncharov’s tragicomic masterpiece Oblomov provide a more accurate rendering of the language and, perhaps, an even greater degree of literary grace than Garnett’s. Bernard Guilbert Guerney accomplished the impossible with a translation of Nikolai Gogol’s enormously difficult and complex Dead Souls, conveying the weirdness, linguistic inventiveness, and perfectly timed humor that had eluded everyone else, even Garnett. To be sure, Garnett and Guerney have their flaws, including some errors in meaning, but editing byjudicious scholars has often corrected those mistakes. Ralph Matlaw thoughtfully revised the Garnett version of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, and Elizabeth Allen did the same with many works in The Essential Turgenev. Susanne Fusso’s recasting of Guerney is the only Dead Souls worth reading.
“Lord, lay me down as a stone and raise me up as a loaf!”
—Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
I picked a wet week to dry out.
“Anything that’s human is mentionable, and anything that is mentionable can be more manageable. When we can talk about our feelings, they become less overwhelming, less upsetting, and less scary. The people we trust with that important talk can help us know that we are not alone.” — Fred Rogers
TARRAH KRAJNAK, Master Rituals I: Ansel Adams | 2018 to Present
In 1983, the year before he died, Ansel Adams published Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs, an influential account of the circumstances and technical considerations — the stories — behind 40 of his most celebrated images. Almost forty years later, I insert my own photographic archive over Adams’ while using my body, hair, and hands to redact his words and alter, estrange and obscure his original photographs. The resulting images bear the physical traces of my body upon them; video recordings document the actions that produced the images. Together my new photographs, re-photographs, and videos reveal hidden poems and new historical narratives. Description: This interdisciplinary work consists of video, recorded performances, poetry, original photographs, re-photographs, and an altered book. It has been partially exhibited in many forms over the last few years.
via Marc
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