I'm very weary of P&V but is this good? Read some Gogol stories and I want more.
>>7568846
>weary
fuck, I meant wary.
>>7568846
The translation or the stories?
The stories are superb. Among the greatest short stories ever. Especially distinguished is The Overcoat, The Portrait, The Squabble and The Nose.
As for the translation, I have one by P&V too, it's just the Everyman Library edition. I think they're quite fine for Gogol.
>>7568879
Yeah I meant translation, Gogol's cool.
>>7568900
They work for Gogol, or so I think. I've tried P&V with, I think, both Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and was less than impressed, but for Gogol, they're okay.
>>7568846
Well, I'm Russian and half the Russian bloggers from the USA (mostly mail order brides, kekeke) complain about P&V. They got some of the favourite parts of the Russians quite wrong. They don't always know their history or catch every reference. I didn't read them but I liked a BBC radio play based on Gogol because it was so daring and innovative. They changed the name and place to things that mean roughly the same to the Anglos. There is also Chekhov's Cherry Grove reimagined in post-CW American South, and the cherry grove moved to a mining town in Wales. This is what I call a good translation. The rest of it is rather dull. I also liked how Shakespeare translated the novella about Romeo and Juliet into Elizabethan English.
yo, literati, you post some interesting problems, then I could compare translations with Gogol's original text.
Here is a task for the rest of you: provide a good translation of Taras Bulba. It features archaized South East Ukrainian dialect mixed with Russian and is interspersed with classical allusion (in other words: if it is porn or ultraviolence you can be sure he's quoting Homer, Ovid, Hesiod or one of the historians). So far that novelette is hardly spoken of in the West.