Dostoevsky Lost in Translation

I have no idea how Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s translation of The Brothers Karamazov came to be regarded as definitive. Let me rephrase that. I know why. Fourteen thousand copies a year, practically indefinitely, is why. There’s a lot of money at stake, for them and for their publisher. What I don’t know is how. Admittedly, their method is a publicist’s dream come true. A husband-and-wife team, Larissa makes a literal translation as close to word-for-word as possible and then Richard tidies up her copy. (He hasn’t mastered the language himself, not even at a conversational level, which is why I feel comfortable criticizing their work so harshly. I may not know Russian—but neither does Richard Pevear.) The result, as you might imagine, is a fairly close replication of the original. The promotional material practically writes itself. No one has ever offered a truer approximation of Dostoevsky’s prose! P & V are like Gillette razors—you just can’t get any closer!