Fwd: New Year Reading

[malignd at aol.com]

Meant to send this to the list.


-----Original Message-----
From: malignd at aol.com
To: hraudask at sun3.oulu.fi
Sent: Mon, Dec 28, 2009 6:36 pm
Subject: Re: New Year Reading


The translation is very good, but I found it very frustrating to read.  
For whatever reason, all the French is untranslated in the body of the 
novel and one must repeatedly (if you doesn't read French) drop down 
and read the translation in footnotes.  I found it annoying and 
tedious.  A simpler solution, if they wanted to keep the original 
French available, would be to set all that was written by Tolstoy in 
French in English italics (so the reader would know) or some other 
typeface and put the original French in footnote. 
 
Constance Garnett, to contrast, put everything into English. 
 
-----Original Message----- 
From: Heikki Raudaskoski <hraudask at sun3.oulu.fi> 
To: Henry Musikar <scuffling at gmail.com> 
Cc: 'Pynchon Liste' <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Mon, Dec 28, 2009 4:46 pm 
Subject: Re: New Year Reading 
 
My partial answer is: War and Peace. Not only because it is, likeGR, at 
once huge and intimate. Also because the latest translationby Richard 
Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky has been, afaik, widelyacclaimed, see 
e.g.http://www.nybooks.com/articles/20810(Have only read a Finnish 
translation myself, though.)HeikkiOn Sun, 27 Dec 2009, Henry Musikar 
wrote:> Hmm... what to read next.  Chandler (Big Sleep)?  Dickens 
(where does one> start?)  Roth's most recent (whatever that was)?  
Something or another that> I haven't read by Rushdie?  Finally tackle a 
good (recent) translation of> War and Peace (which translation)? Mark 
Twain?  Candide?  Don Quixote?  Or> go back and try to get more out of 
V than I did the other two times that> I've read it?>> Henry Musikar> 
Sr. IT Consultant> http://astore.amazon.com/tdcoccamsaxe-20/>>