Translation Comparison: Notes from Underground.

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…