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I shudder to think what Auden's or Nietzsche's or my own reaction would have been had we first read "Notes From Underground" in the translation by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky in the new Everyman's Library edition. When I was growing up, the great Russian writers were only available in translation by an Englishwoman named Constance Garnett, about whom I know nothing except that she made Russians sound like Edwardian Englishmen. (I don't know any Russian, but even as a freshman in college I knew something about bad English.)
The 1970s brought Penguin Classics and Dostoevsky translations from another Englishwoman, Jessie Coulson, which were only a mild improvement, often sounding like something translated from Russian to Esperanto to English. Dostoevsky's Underground Man is one of the first characters in literature infected with the modern disease of alienation, but rendered in such stilted English prose, it's amazing that he seemed modern at all to us.
Pevear and Volokhonsky have translated seven of Dostoevsky's novels, including "The Brothers Karamazov" (for which they were awarded the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize). This is the fourth version of "Notes From Underground" I have read, and for the first time I can hear what Pevear calls in his introduction its "striking language, unlike any literary prose ever written; its multiple and conflicting tonalities; the oddity of its reverse structure, which seems random but all at once reveals its deeper coherence."
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