NP Satan in Lit

[David Morris]

On Nov 24, 2007 9:54 AM, Michael F <mff8785 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_Margarita

There are quite a few published English translations of The Master and
Margarita, including but not limited to the following:

Mirra Ginsburg, New York: Grove Press, 1967.
Michael Glenny, New York: Harper & Row, 1967; London: Harvill, 1967;
with introduction by Simon Franklin, New York: Knopf, 1992; London:
Everyman's Library, 1992.
Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O'Connor, annotations and afterword
by Ellendea Proffer, Ann Arbor: Ardis, 1993, 1995.
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, London: Penguin, 1997.
Michael Karpelson, Lulu Press, 2006.
Ginsburg's translation was from a censored Soviet text and is
therefore incomplete.

The early translation by Glenny runs more smoothly than that of the
modern translations; some Russian-speaking readers consider it to be
the only one creating the desired effect, though it may be somewhat at
liberty with the text.[4] The modern translators pay for their
attempted closeness by losing idiomatic flow.

However, according to Kevin Moss, who has at least two published
papers on the book in literary journals, the early translations by
Ginsburg and Glenny are quite hurried and lack much critical depth.[5]
As an example, he claims that the more idiomatic translations miss
Bulgakov's "crucial" reference to the devil in Berlioz's thought:

"I ought to drop everything and run down to [6]." (Glenny)
"It's time to throw everything to the Devil and go to Kislovodsk."
(Burgin, Tiernan O'Connor)
"It's time to send it all to the devil and go to Kislovodsk." (Pevear,
Volokhonsky)

Several literary critics have hailed the Burgin/Tiernan O'Connor
translation as the most accurate and complete English translation,
particularly when read in tandem with the matching annotations by
Bulgakov's biographer, Ellendea Proffer.[7] Note that these judgements
predate the translation by Pevear and Volokhonsky.

Limited information is available, at the time of this writing,
regarding the 2006 Karpelson translation.