Translation comparison: Notes from Underground

“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),…