So my advice? Go with the free Constance Garnett translation. But I could be wrong, because it is also possible that, if I had been reading the Constance Garnett translation, I might also have occasion to find myself coming to the Richard Pevear translation for comparison and feel enlightened.
Based on a few isolated examples, I suspect Constance Garnett has a better sense of language. The differences are small, one uses "desperately", "the need to live was so strong" while the other uses "in despair", "the desire for life was so intense", so you cannot say one is wrong, but you just suddenly feel that you learned more what was going on with one translation than with the other. Occasionly I would feel a bit confused regards to what Tolstoy was trying to say, so I had to go to the Constance Garnett translation freely available on internet, and would find that Contance Garnett used a different word, a mot juste, in my opinion, that suddenly enlighted me. I read the Richard Pevear & Larissa Volokhonsky translation.
0 kommentar(er)
