People, I’m still plugging away at my translation of Notes from Underground. Earlier I wrote about the word choices regarding zloi and zlost’, which lead off the book and present translators with a global interpretive question: is the U-Man spiteful? Or is he bad, evil, wicked? How about angry? These have all been tried, and… Continue reading Nastiness, Gentlemen, and People
Tag: spite
On First Words
Richard Pevear has a foreword to his collaborative (with Larissa Volokhonsky) translation of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground in which he offers some rationale for using the word “wicked” to translate the Russian злой (zloi) in the first line: the book is not about psychology, as is sometimes thought, he claims; it’s about morality, and to… Continue reading On First Words
Russell Scott Valentino 