Erik McDonald at XIX век has been posting translation comparisons at a rate of about one a year, and even though there’s been little response to my previous posts about them (Fathers and Sons in 2024, The White Guard in 2025), I’m going to keep doing it, because they’re so valuable and so much fun (for me, obviously, and I hope for anyone who likes thinking about translations). This time he tackles one of my favorite works of Russian fiction:
“Of all the works of nineteenth-century Russian literature I have translated, without doubt Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground [Записки из подполья, 1864] remains the most challenging,” writes Michael R. Katz, rather to my surprise (xi). Shouldn’t a short work dominated by one voice, the voice of a disaffected educated man in a confessional mood, be easier than many things?
Apparently not. The voice of this “half-crazed, embittered cynic” (Hogarth ix) is full of “obvious stylistic infelicities or outright ineptitudes” to be turned into “stilted English” (Matlaw xxiii). There are allusions now obscure (MacAndrew 237–38). The narrator’s language gets “careless and confused” when he is excited, above and beyond his usual “peculiar, untidy, and colorful idiom” (Shishkoff xxxiii–xxxiv). A direct contrast between zloi ‘wicked’ (but also ‘spiteful’) at the beginning and dobryi ‘good’ at the end is often lost as translators try to convey the multiple meanings of zloi (Ginsburg xxviii–xxix), evidence of a “habit of substituting the psychological for the moral” (Pevear and Volokhonsky xxiii). Even the title is hard, since podpol’e is not an abstract “the underground” or even a cellar but “the space beneath the floorboards,” a place where vermin might live but not people (Ginsburg xxix, Aplin xiii, Zinovieff and Hughes xiii). The language is coarse: “if the Underground Man were writing today, many of his ‘viles’ and ‘fouls’ would be replaced by words far nastier than any I know” (Jakim xxv), and if he comes “as close as makes no difference to using the word ‘shit’” only once, “there are several occasions when the translator finds himself reaching for it” (Zinovieff and Hughes xiii). And there are the usual linguistic issues: what is the best way to translate the diminutives of the words for not just ‘horse,’ but ‘vice’ and ‘passion’? Is soznanie ‘awareness’ or ‘consciousness’? Is mokryi sneg ‘sleet’ or ‘wet snow’ (Zinovieff and Hughes xiv–xv)?
I know of 17 published English translations (it hits the sweet spot of short, good, and popular, just like Fathers and Children), and I’ll give a very quick impression of each before looking at a few parts in detail. […]
Nearly all of these translations are very good; of the free ones I recommend Garnett, and of the ones under copyright I especially like Shishkoff and Jakim, with honorable mentions to Ginsburg, Katz, Zinovieff and Hughes, and Lodge.
His summaries are punchy and (so far as I am familiar with the work of the translators) accurate; for example, he says David Magarshack “Has a reputation for being careful with the meaning of the text though occasionally disappointing as a stylist, and every so often he lives up to it, but in general this is not just adequate but good.” I’m particularly glad he appreciates Garnett as she deserves. He goes on to discuss the introduction, the manifesto/monologue of part 1, the farewell dinner, the sex scenes with Liza, diminutives, and the Nekrasov poem quoted in the text; I’ll reproduce a couple of good bits. First off, I find the final question in this paragraph (from the dinner section) intriguing:
Ferfichkin’s line has him say da-s instead of da, a sarcastic use of the ostensibly respectful “slovo-er-s” construction. Later translators tend to translate this using “sir” (Shishkoff, Ginsburg, Katz, Pevear and Volokhonsky, Aplin, Jakim, Zinovieff and Hughes, Randall), while earlier ones don’t translate it directly (Hogarth, Garnett, Magarshack, Matlaw, MacAndrew, Coulson, Kentish, but also Wilks and Lodge). Maybe this is a change in how English readers take “sir”?
And here’s one on diminutives:
Russian has a batch of obviously related words with the root dev– that must have historically been diminutives of deva ‘the Virgin (Mary), Virgo’: (krasnaia) devitsa ‘(fair) maiden,’ devochka ‘little girl,’ devushka ‘young woman’ or ‘virgin,’ devchonka ‘girl (jocular),’ and others, including devka, which according to Ushakov can mean either ‘young woman’ or ‘debauched woman, prostitute.’ It comes up in a tricky context for translators: [He quotes the “девка, а не девушка” passage] This works in Russian—the Underground Man gets a verbal clue that he needs to explain to us—because devka can mean “prostitute” or be a synonym of devushka, and Liza’s line would be different if (censor notwithstanding) she had said prostitutka with no plausible deniability. Jakim comes about as close as you can to accomplishing the same thing in English:
“Doesn’t it matter to you how you die?”
“But why should I die?” she answered, as though defending herself.
“Why, someday you’ll die, and you’ll die exactly like that woman this morning. She was… a girl like you. She died of consumption.”
“A working girl would have died in the hospital…” (She knows all about it already, I thought: she said “working girl,” not just “girl.”) (83)
Most translators pick a word closer to “prostitute,” like “slut” (Magarshack 341, Zinovieff and Hughes 82), “tart” (Coulson 88, Aplin 101), “whore” (Ginsburg 106, Kentish 87, Wilks 81, Lodge 90). Some, especially in older texts, go closer to “young woman,” with “woman” (Hogarth 102), “wench” (Garnett 121, Matlaw 79, Katz 63), “dame” (MacAndrew 167), “gal” (Shishkoff 86). Pevear and Volokhonsky send me to the dictionary with “jill” (90). OED: “Formerly also a flirtatious or sexually promiscuous woman (obsolete).”
I am grimly amused by P&V’s very characteristic (and silly) “jill.” At any rate, I’ve just scratched the surface of this great post, which must have taken Erik a huge amount of time and effort, and I will keep it at hand to offer the next person who asks me for translation recommendations.
Update. See Erik’s follow-up post Pronouns in Dostoevsky:
Heaven knows my Notes from Underground (Записки из подполья, 1864) translation comparison was long enough without me getting back on this hobbyhorse, but I was keeping an eye on how the translators handled formal and informal pronouns. If you’ve read Notes in English and also speak Russian, what pronouns do you imagine were used between the Underground Man and 1) Simonov, his former classmate and friend and current creditor, 2) his former classmate and longtime enemy Zverkov, and 3) Liza?
Extremely interesting, as you’d expect.
Thanks! Being a person who asked you for translation recommendations, I see he links to a paper which reviews translations of Oblomov. As here, almost of them are deemed very good, with no obvious choice except perhaps by matter of personal taste. I guess this is like asking a classical music enthusiast which is Thee Best recording of a Beethoven symphony or a Mozart piano concerto.
Yessir!
(any amount of sarcasm conveyable by context)
See the Update for Erik’s follow-up post.
Since I myself am an old grouch, I think I know what Dostoevsky means by злой (zloi): a more formal term for “grouchy” is “ill-tempered”. I think the Underground Man is saying that he is an ill-tempered man. Not spiteful or wicked (etc.) — those are too specific. I think he means in a more general sense: ill tempered.
o, fascinating! i look forward to reading the full post.
but now i’m eager for someone to go for Notes from the Crawlspace!
and i’m wondering what other languages have a specific word for podpol’e – yiddish has “podloge/padloge/podlike” (stressed on the first syllable) and “dil”for floor, but nothing much derived from either.
My phonetics professor, Roger Lass z”l, gave us as, a sample sentence for transcription, an utterance of his mother’s: Es shteyt povetshenye afn podloge.
Hang on, is that THE Roger Lass, and are you saying he has passed away?
This Roger Lass seems to be still around — Wikipedians are very alert to such things.
Re povetshenye, is that povetine “cobweb/spiderweb” (cf. Russian pautina, idem: re au => ov, this was discussed recently in another thread)?
Au contraire, wikipedia is full of potentially-derelict articles that are not constantly being reviewed by obsessives to make sure they have not become inaccurate or incomplete in the last decade. If the 90th anniversary of someone’s birth is approaching, how strong an inference can be drawn from the lack of date of death in a wikipedia article about them is going to vary considerably depending on how actively the article in question is monitored/updated.
If you take the notation at the bottom of this article about the 2014 award of an honorary professorship to Prof. Lass to mean it was still accurate as of November 2024, then that’s reasonable evidence he was alive as of then. https://www.ed.ac.uk/news/staff/appointments-awards/2014/roger-lass-250914
R. Lass not currently listed in U. Capetown Humanities Faculty (other emeritus profs are listed):
https://humanities.uct.ac.za/research/research-overview
That would hardly “stand”.
@dm
Does a Spinnennetz “liegen” in German? I am not being sarcastic, I really do not know.
I think a Danish edderkoppespind “sidder“. Make of that what you will.
I would either say a spider web hängt “hangs” or simply ist “is”. If it’s flat on the ground (because it fell down) it would liegen “lie”.
All I can suggest is
“Es shteyt a boym af’n veg” is a pattern that could give (incorrectly or not)
*”Es shteyt (a) povetine afn podloge”.
To add to the above:
В углах стояла паутина. Из-за недостатка света казалось, что весь верх комнаты закопчён, а может, так оно и было.
In the corner [lit. corners] was [STOYALA, lit. stood] a cobweb. In the dim/insufficient light, it seemed that the whole upper part of the room was soot-blackened, and maybe it was.
https://litrossia.ru/item/7736-yury-dobroskokin-electric-man/
This appears to me to be elevated (and maybe slightly dated now), but not experimental language, so I would say that this may indicate Slavic influencing or sharing a grammatical feature with the Yiddish.
Heh. Yuri Dobrosokin seems to have been published only in that one 1979 issue of Rasskaz; maybe a personal friend of the editor?
…No, wait, it turns out his actual name is Dobroskokin and he published several books of stories — they just consistently misprinted his name in that issue!
Huh. OK, I retract everything. 😐
Thank you for informing me that Roger Lass is still with us! I lost track of him after the Chomskybots at IU ran him off to ZA.
Yes, povetshenye means “cobwebs.” As for their standing anywhere, I believe I remember him rendering podloge as “baseboards” vel sim. An adaptation of the meaning to American domestic architecture?
Even the title is hard, since podpol’e is not an abstract “the underground” or even a cellar but “the space beneath the floorboards,” a place where vermin might live but not people (Ginsburg xxix, Aplin xiii, Zinovieff and Hughes xiii).
“Notes from the Crawlspace”
Is “crawlspace” used in BrE, too?
A Song From Under The Floorboards
Good call! (The Graun is on the case: “When it came out, one of my friends played the track to her Russian literature tutor, and he recognised the song immediately for what it was, and was apparently mightily impressed. Though the single was not a hit it remains one of Magazine’s best-known tracks.”) The keybs are nice, but the only Magazine song one really needs is “Shot by Both Sides.”