There are seven in-print translations of Crime and Punishment (and another six that are out-of-print). Which one is best depends on who you ask, or what you're looking for. The Garnett translation is itself considered a classic, and is in the public domain. The trendy one is Pevear and Volokhonsky. But there are other well-regarded versions to consider. This page lists them all and has extracts and links to articles to aid comparison.
https://welovetranslations.com/2020/04/25/whats-the-best-tra...
That's an interesting article -- thanks for posting.
One thing that struck me: two of the translation samples included the (correct/reasonable?) names for the street and bridge (Stolyarnyi Lane, Kokushkin Bridge). The others replaced the words with S-----i Lane, and K------n Bridge (or S. Lane etc).
I think I understand the problem. Cyrillic alphabet doesn't map to Latin alphabet, and there was no established English-language translation for the names in question. The two that attempted it even had slightly different spellings, akin to the problem we see with many Arabic names in English today.
This makes a big difference in readability, to me. The setting is supposed to be foreign and a bit unfamiliar to excultural readers, but K-------n looks like an error, a misprint, or an "(unintelligible)" in a transcription. That becomes part of the story, and it isn't intended as such by the author.
For this and other reasons, my vote goes to Sidney Monas, 1968. I'll add that note to my long and ever-growing TOREAD list. :)
I think it is just the opposite, and I'm not sure how much Dostoevsky thought about excultural readers. The setting is supposed to be familiar, or at least feel familiar, to many of the readers, to the point where certain names are redacted to give the feeling that the author is "protecting the innocent", or avoiding accusations of libel, because you are actually reading a true story and not something made out of whole cloth.
The first line of the original is (asterisks mine, indicating where Dostoyevski intentionally did not write the name of a street or bridge):
"В начале июля, в чрезвычайно жаркое время, под вечер, один молодой человек вышел из своей каморки, которую нанимал от жильцов в **С — **м переулке, на улицу и медленно, как бы в нерешимости, отправился к **К —** ну мосту."
In English:
"On an exceptionally hot evening early in July a young man came out of the garret in which he lodged in S. Place and walked slowly, as though in hesitation, towards K. bridge."
I assumed that the redactions were not in the original, and that the translators were avoiding complexity by presenting the English-speaking audience with a digstible form.
I guess I underestimated the translators, or the reading public. Thanks for the correction.
PS: I did not mean that Dostoevsky intended excultural readers to feel unfamiliar, but that excultural readers should expect (and maybe prefer) a certain amount of unfamiliarity in foreign works. I thought the translators were insulating their readers from it, which felt inauthentic.
I'm even more bothered by the idea of the translators "filling in the blanks" that were intentionally placed by the author. Curious that both translators who did so, used roughly the same names for each -- perhaps they are the real names that we know the author was referencing? Still, that's a bit presumptuous, I think.
