NP Satan in Lit

[Michael F]

What's the preferred English translation of Master and Margarita?  I had a
Russian exchange student who refused to believe the book could be understood
in any language other than Russian...  Is he correct?
Mike

On 11/22/07, Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net> wrote:
>
>   Kai sez:
>
> > Bulgakow's "Master i Margarita" (in the German translation of Thomas
> Reschke)
> > is the best book I've read this year so far.
>
> It's a favorite of mine, too. If somehow it could have been published (and
> widely translated) in 1937 or 1940, instead of creeping into world literary
> consciousness as it did in the 1960s and 1970s -- in variously truncated and
> restored versions, and inevitably with some flavor of a "historical
> curiosity" -- I think we'd have a different notion of the origins of "black
> humor," "magic realism," and allied tendencies (or at least labels) that
> turn up in the grab-bag of Pynchonian satire. Fictional stances that our
> usual discourse traces to post-WWII Western consumer culture are a
> surprisingly good fit for Stalin's Moscow.
>
> For those who haven't read it: imagine a mash-up of Faust, the "Grand
> Inquisitor" section of Karamazov, and Darkness at Noon. Now make it very
> funny, in the sense that the Mittelwerk chase in GR or the LA apocalypse in
> The Day of the Locust are funny... y'know, with the stench of death wafting
> in from the wings.
>
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