Yes, yes, I know I do tend to ramble on about the vagaries of different translations of some of my favourite books; but at the risk of being a bore, this came back into to my mind recently thanks, oddly enough, to OH’s film-watching tendencies!
OH is a real movie buff (proper films, as I would call them, not modern blockbusters that look like computer games…) and he was watching a film called “The Gambler” from 1974, starring James Caan. It seems to loosely draw on Dostoevsky’s book of that name (which is one of my favourite of the great Russian’s works), and in fact the author himself features in a university teaching session Caan’s hosting. OH was intrigued by a quotation given, apparently from “Notes from Underground”, which was rendered as:
Reason only satisfies man’s rational requirements. Desire, on the other hand, encompasses everything. Desire is life.
He asked me about it and to be honest, I was a little dubious as it didn’t ring any immediate bells and sounded perhaps a bit too straightforward to me for Dosty. The credits gave the version as being the Signet edition, translation by one Andrew MacAndrew and despite the fact that I own several editions of “Notes..” already (as you can see from above) I felt compelled to send for this one. I also dug about in my current versions and came up with some fascinating variations!
The MacAndrew version
The MacAndrew version:
Reason is only reason, and it only satisfies man’s rational requirements. Desire, on the other hand, is the manifestation of life itself – of all of life – and it encompasses everything from reason down to scratching oneself.
A David Magarshack translated collection
David Magarshack:
But reason is only reason, and it can only satisfy the reasoning ability of man, whereas volition is a manifestation of the whole of life, I mean of the whole of human life, including reason with all its concomitant head-scratchings.
Two lots of Zinovieff and Hughes
Kyrill Zinovieff and Jenny Hughes:
You see gentlemen, rational judgement is a good thing – there can be no argument about that – but rational judgement is just rational judgement and satisfies nothing but man’s rational faculties, while desire is the manifestation of the whole of life, that is of the whole of human life including rational judgement and all the head-scratching.
Hugh Aplin version from Hesperus
Hugh Aplin:
You see: reason, gentlemen, is a good thing, that is indisputable, but reason is only reason and satisfies only man’s reasoning capacity, while desire is a manifestation of the whole of life, that is, the whole of human life, with both reason and all its funny itches too.
******
Well – that gave me plenty of food for thought and after cogitating for a while I concluded the following before my head started hurting too much:
1. The movie obviously took MacAndrew and truncated him to suit the script.
2. Even the split of sentences is not consistent in translation as some extracts I’ve given have to be longer because some of the translators run the previous sentence into this one (or else it’s not split in the original but some translators split it).
3. I’ve read Magarshack’s translations in the past with no problem, but I don’t fancy his rendering here…
4. I quite like Aplin’s funny itches, although what strikes me is that each translator has interpreted the itching and its cause and location rather individually!
So – basically I’m just going to have to live with the fact that pretty much every translated rendering of a book is going to be very different and I’ll just have to choose the one which speaks to me the most and get on with it. And I now have four versions of “Notes from Underground” which is possibly a little excessive…
Kaggsy's Bookish Ramblings 
Sep 07, 2017 @ 07:41:09
Fascinating, and also so confusing and frustrating! I think I like the Aplin best, but who knows if he is most faithful to Dostoevsky? And what is faithful is a matter for interpretation…my brain hurts and its not even 8am yet!
Sep 07, 2017 @ 10:59:58
Sorry to make your head hurt so early in the day!! Yes, for some reason the Aplin speaks to me too, and I usually enjoy his translations. It *is* confusing, though intriguing – I think I need to put notions of faithfulness out of my head and just read the version I like best!!
Sep 07, 2017 @ 07:59:57
If only we had the capacity to read in the original language any book we pleased! I often worry about missing something, particularly with poetry, with a translation. I guess, as you say, you may have to worry less about accuracy, which I think is a challenge in translation anyway, and go with the version you enjoy the most.
Sep 07, 2017 @ 10:59:03
I’d *love* to be polylingual but it ain’t going to happen – I’ll just have to stick to translations, and yes, I’m going to go with the one that appeals to me most. That way, at least I’ll read and enjoy the books I want to!
Sep 07, 2017 @ 08:34:05
It’s an age old-problem, I think. Better to go for readability or accuracy? There’s no easy answer to that question. As you say, it’s probably a case of settling on the version that speaks to you the most, irrespective of other factors. 🙂
Sep 07, 2017 @ 10:31:51
I think that’s going to have to be the key – because I don’t speak Russian I can only rely on how the book comes across to me, which is what I’ve tended to do in the past. And it usually works!
Sep 07, 2017 @ 08:41:42
That is one of my pet subjects too – and concerns. For a long time I refused to read poetry in translation for fear of missing out (less so in prose, but as we can see from the rather different versions, even there). But then I realised I would be missing out on so much of world literature. My favourite Dostoevsky translator is Julius Katzer in the Soviet Union (but I don’t know if he translated everything: he certainly did Crime and Punishment and The Idiot, and he also translated Chekhov and Lenin and the like), but I am not sure if anything was left out or censored to fit Soviet needs at the time. I’ve heard Magarshack is considered rather good, however one might define goodness…
Sep 07, 2017 @ 10:31:06
It’s very difficult – if I think of the literature I would have missed by not reading translations it makes me shudder. I too had heard good things about Magarshack and I’ve read and enjoyed his work, but I think I would hold back from his version of “Notes…” based on these lines. I guess I’ll just keep sticking to the version that speaks to me the most!
Oct 24, 2020 @ 07:59:27
Hey – a Julius Katzer fan here. No his translations did not edit or leave anything out to appease censors. I’ve read and studied them compared to other translations and I can attest to that. Soviet book publishing culture, censorship notwithstanding, was actually much more open in the classics it published than propaganda about the USSR lets on. They published a number of Russian classics for the first time that were previously heavily censored and butchered by Tsarist authorities. Resurrection by Tolstoy especially. The Russian publishing houses that put out Katzer and other such English translations of Russian classics – Progress Publishers, Raduga, etc – were committed to publishing all kinds of literature to disseminate to interested English speaking readers around the world, particularly the Third world countries like India and Pakistan. That’s how my family got exposed to Russian literature. They even published books that somewhat went against the grain, though obviously they never went as far as to publish Platonov or Bulgakov. But they were much more open minded than Western observers give credit for.
Oct 24, 2020 @ 13:07:33
Thank you so much for this – so interesting! I have a small collection of Progress, Raduga etc books so was very interested to hear how groundbreaking they were. Wonderful!
Oct 26, 2020 @ 11:24:25
Oh, thank you for this comment! I was wondering, as a non-Russian-speaker! And I’m so glad to find a fellow Katzer fan. Nobody else seems to know about these editions – I bought a lot of Raduga and Progress publications in English on a trip to Moscow as a child (Pushkin etc. too) and they are beautiful editions, as well as great translations).
Oct 26, 2020 @ 14:05:17
Now you’ve both got me wanting to rush off and check my Progress and Raduga editions to see who translated them…. ;D
Oct 26, 2020 @ 14:14:55
I would not be too hasty in assuming that all Progress and Raduga translations are full and uncensored. Soviet censorship may have been less heavy-handed in the English translations it published than in Russian works for local consumption, but it was definitely vigilant. Yes, they restored tsarist cuts, but that doesn’t mean they didn’t make their own. There is little chance they would have allowed anything they saw as anti-Soviet to slip by.
Nov 02, 2020 @ 08:15:41
I think Languagehat is very ignorant about the nature of Soviet censorship, which I’ve studied in depth as someone specializing in Soviet studies. Just because its plausible doesn’t mean that’s actually the case. In this case, he’s factually incorrect. I’ve read most of the Soviet editions of these classics (Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, Dead Souls, Gogol’s stories Hero of Our Time, The Enchanted Wanderer, The Golovlyovs, and the others. I’ve compared them with other translations published in the West and I can honestly say they are complete and unabridged with nothing left out. The Progress Soviet Authors Library is a bit different as those were meant to showcase Soviet literature, with the authors usually being those who stayed in the USSR and were overall loyal to it. Sholokhov, Gorky, Alexander Fadeyev, etc. You would never see critical works like those of Bulgakov, Grossman, Platonov, Krizhizhanovsky, Zamyatin or Pasternak in there. Occasionally you had some critical writers but typically the titles in those series were examples of Socialist realism, though they thankfully had a volume of Mayakovsky’s verse.
But the 19th century Russian classics were never censored or edited to fit a Soviet worldview (more often than not used to critique the earlier regime). Soviet publishing houses knew the import of Russian literature put that ahead of political differences in these texts. The fact that they even included Ivan Bunin’s works (a major emigré writer) uncensored is impressive. Of course, their openness only went to a point. They never released works like Dostoevsky’s Demons or Goncharov’s Oblomov (whose satire of lazy bureaucrats could just as easily apply to Soviets as well as Czarists). But overall, it was hardly the censored editing that this poster suggests may have been the case. I read each and every one of the titles in their Russian Classics Series and compared them with the current English editions from the West. They are complete and unabridged or as complete as can be depending on the text used (as textual history and analysis have advanced over the past 45-50 years).
They also exposed an entire generation of people in the Global South to Russian literature and culture from the Soviet perspective, for good or ill.
Nov 02, 2020 @ 08:22:31
Finally, in response to languagehat, I think its important to add that most of these translations were prepared in the final two decades of the Soviet Union, where ideology grew less important than attachment to Russian culture and so many of these translators and editors affiliated to Russian publishing houses were able to release standard classics even respected by Soviet censors without interference as the goal was exposure to Russian culture though they also had a separate division for exposiing readers to Marxist literature, Soviet doctrines interpreting Marxist literature and life in the USSR. But these never sold as well as the literary works, though many a budding socialist in countries like India value the Marxist books from these publishing houses for educating them in Marxist ideas.
If censorship ever revealed itself, it was never in the texts themselves (which are again complete and unabridged, though translation quality may vary) but in the choice of texts, though again that is only assumption on my part. Keep in mind these were incomplete publishing endeavors and many titles were announced that they never got around to publishing. The Foreign Language Publishing House gave way to Progress Publishers which in turn got replaced in the 80s by Raduga publishers which lasted past the fall of the USSR into independent Russia itself.
Nov 02, 2020 @ 08:30:49
PS: Soviet censorship was much stronger in the Stalin years than afterwards. From Khruschev onwards, it decreased significantly, though it was still there. But far less strict and pervasive as in earlier decades. In the final two decades of the USSR (when these Progress Publishers/Raduga editions came out), 19th century literary classics were not edited or censored to leave out anything offensive to the regime, especially as it was gradually loosening up and commitment to disseminating Russian culture overtook the need to present Soviet doctrine. And again this is only with regards to 19th century Russian literature. 20th century Russian literature, these houses were much more choosy, though they could make surprising choices like Bunin. But I think the fact that a novel like Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich could be published in the USSR demonstrates the relative openness of late Soviet culture (whatever its limitations, which were real) compared to the high point of repression during the Stalin years of the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s.
Nov 02, 2020 @ 12:13:51
You’re not doing yourself any favors with your over-the-top rhetoric, complete with absurd insults (“I think Languagehat is very ignorant about the nature of Soviet censorship”). I’ve spent decades reading Russian and Soviet literature (I have a bookcase full of Russian literature in Russian and another full of Russian and Soviet history, both double-shelved) and I have books like Maurice Friedberg’s A Decade of Euphoria; Western Literature in Post-Stalin Russia, 1954-1964 (have you read it?); I am very familiar with both tsarist and Communist censorship. You seem to be arguing with an imaginary boogieman who hates everything Soviet. Let’s go through some of your statements:
I’ve read most of the Soviet editions of these classics (Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, Dead Souls, Gogol’s stories Hero of Our Time, The Enchanted Wanderer, The Golovlyovs, and the others. I’ve compared them with other translations published in the West and I can honestly say they are complete and unabridged with nothing left out.
I’m sorry, but this is simply untrue, and the fact that you can say such an unbelievable thing shows your inability to discuss the issue intelligently. I know exactly how hard it is to compare translations and how long it takes; I once spent a ridiculously long time marking up a copy of Rabassa’s (terrible) translation of Cortázar’s Rayuela (Hopscotch) to show the many, many mistakes and omissions; it took me ages, and I didn’t even get halfway through. I sent Robert Chandler a long list of errors and omissions in his version of Platonov’s The Foundation Pit which took me a long time to compile, and it was just based on passages I’d happened to look up when reading the original; to actually compare each word of the Russian text to his translation would have taken months — and that’s just one translation! To compare the Russian originals of “Crime and Punishment, Anna Karenina, The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, Dead Souls, Gogol’s stories Hero of Our Time, The Enchanted Wanderer, The Golovlyovs, and the others” to both Soviet editions and translations published in the West would have taken you your entire life, and no, you didn’t do it. I would bet money you’ve done spot checks and drawn vast conclusions from them, colored by your prejudice (you clearly need to believe Soviet censorship didn’t touch foreign works). You overstate your case to try and force people to believe it, but it doesn’t work.
The fact that they even included Ivan Bunin’s works (a major emigré writer) uncensored is impressive.
Show me a Soviet edition of Окаянные дни.
Soviet censorship was much stronger in the Stalin years than afterwards. From Khruschev onwards, it decreased significantly, though it was still there. […] But I think the fact that a novel like Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich could be published in the USSR demonstrates the relative openness of late Soviet culture (whatever its limitations, which were real) compared to the high point of repression during the Stalin years of the 20s, 30s, 40s and 50s.
Again, this is an absurd oversimplification. There was a brief thaw in the mid-1950s and another, more famous, one in the early 1960s (the time of Ivan Denisovich), but once Khrushchev was ousted censorship was back in force — I can send you bushels of links if you like (just reading about what the Strugatskys went through is heartbreaking). It only started relaxing under Gorbachev in the late 1980s.
Look, it’s silly to argue about this; I’m not the raving xenophobe of your imagination. If you can just admit that there may have been some censorship, even if minor, we’re on the same page — I’m not claiming whole passages were omitted. Just try to avoid making absurd claims like that you’ve read and compared every word of every major novel with every translation. It doesn’t help your case.
Nov 02, 2020 @ 13:34:06
I take your points here, and definitely am not happy about name-calling in the comments of one of my posts, particularly when it’s towards someone like you whose knowledge and expertise on Russian and Soviet lit I respect, and from someone who’s on a protected blog so I can’t judge their opinions any more widely. I too am aware of what people like the Strugatskys put up with, and I’m old enough to remember that it *wasn’t* that easy in the 1970s and Solzhenitsyn actually being expelled from the Soviet Union. Enough is enough.
Nov 02, 2020 @ 13:50:47
One cannot rely on a caricaturized understanding of Soviet censorship of the arts.
We’re finally in agreement!
Sep 07, 2017 @ 10:52:55
Fascinating post Karen. It is obviously a big problem for readers if texts in translation. How can one know beforehand which is the best to choose?
Sep 07, 2017 @ 11:00:58
Exactly – having multiple version of every translated book on my shelves is not an option, as I just wouldn’t have the space – translated literature is a big part of what I read! So it’s a case of dipping into various versions when you can and then just taking a chance!
Sep 07, 2017 @ 11:22:43
If you tell me what chapter it’s in I can tell you which translation is most accurate!
Sep 07, 2017 @ 19:47:00
Thank you! It’s chapter 8, about four paragraphs in! :)))
Sep 07, 2017 @ 12:03:18
Gosh, McAndrew’s and Magarshack’s translations don’t even mean the same thing ! I understand and share your annoyance. I read The Murderess, by Papadiamantis (NYRB) a few months ago. The introduction had been written by the translator himself, which was very interesting, as he himself acknowledged the difficulty of translating certain Greek turns of phrase and words into English. He mentionned the French translation, and I think I’m going to look out for it in order to compare the two.
Sep 07, 2017 @ 19:46:43
I know – the variations in the itches alone are bizarre! I guess beggars can’t be choosers, so to speak, but I like a little consistency in meaning!
Sep 07, 2017 @ 17:00:23
I’m currently doing something that’s quite enlightening. I’m translating one if my own stories into German. I can tell you, although I wrote the original English and German is one of my native languages, it’s still very hard. I mostly skip accuracy now.
Sep 07, 2017 @ 19:45:34
I can’t imagine how complex translation is – I’ve never got over struggling with *live* in class translation during French lessons at my grammar school – one of the most nerve-wracking and difficult things I’ve ever done!
Sep 07, 2017 @ 18:02:21
I try to avoid getting too involved in comparing translations but usually fail and start trying to work out which is best. I end up getting frustrated and just going for one that at least doesn’t have any major issues.
It’s a nicer problem than having no translation of a work one wants to read.
Sep 07, 2017 @ 19:44:45
Me too – I tell myself not to get so intense about it, but I can’t help it. And yes – thank goodness for translators or I’d be screaming about not being able to read the books I love!!
Sep 07, 2017 @ 21:13:26
So I’d say the MacAndrew version is the closest to the original text, which is fiendishly difficult, like the rest of “Notes from Underground”! A word-for-word translation would be something like “reason is only reason and satisfies only the reasoning capacity of a human, while desire/wanting is a manifestation of all life, that is all human life, both with reason and with scratchings.”
Clearly clunky in the English, so you can see why the poor translators struggled with it!
Sep 08, 2017 @ 14:21:28
That’s interesting, isn’t it? I have to say that Notes is not a particularly easy read in the English versions I’ve read so I’m reassured to here you say that it’s hard in the original too! And here we have scratchings!
Sep 08, 2017 @ 20:52:45
Yes I think what is meant re: the scratchings is the physical side of life and its urges (as in the Garnett translation).
Sep 09, 2017 @ 14:12:28
Ah! Thanks for all your input on this! :))
Sep 07, 2017 @ 22:10:40
..and, of interest, here is the Constance Garnett interpretation (in my Dover Thrift copy): “You see, gentlemen, reason is an excellent thing, there’s no disputing that, but reason is nothing but reason and satisfies only the rational side of man’s nature, while will is a manifestation of the whole life , that is, of the whole human life including reason and all the impulses.”
Sep 08, 2017 @ 14:20:22
Thank you! Another one to compare – we have impulses instead of itches this time!
Sep 07, 2017 @ 22:56:34
I admit it took me a long while to get on to this. It hit when reading a Scholastic Press version of the Swiss Family Robinson to my kids. About half the book was missing yet it was supposedly “unabridged.” And the language was….off. I found the original translation and we honestly started over. Today, with translated classics I sample before I buy. GREAT POST!
Sep 08, 2017 @ 14:19:58
Thanks! And yes, sampling is definitely best practice I find – there’s such variation!
Sep 08, 2017 @ 04:17:44
I haven’t read War and Peace because I own three or four different translations and I can’t decide which one to read.
Sep 08, 2017 @ 14:13:49
It *is* difficult – I only had two translations to choose from, and that was hard enough!!
Sep 08, 2017 @ 15:41:49
Isn’t it funny how often we struggle through the mire and then elect to decide that the mire is as it is and we can only change our thinking about being in it! Thankfully, when it comes to books, we can simply reach for another edition!
Sep 08, 2017 @ 15:45:44
It’s a reassuring thought, isn’t it – if one version does work for us another one may!
Sep 09, 2017 @ 17:15:10
I prefer head scratching to funny itches!
Sep 09, 2017 @ 17:32:13
:)) Yes, the odd itches are a bit worrying….
Sep 09, 2017 @ 17:23:29
Proof if ever we needed it that translation is an art and not a science even though the automated translation tools you have from some online providers would have you believe otherwise. I have had many conversations with colleagues from other countries about how best to translate an advertising slogan and message. We ended up doing what some people call ‘trans-creation’ – in other words you think ‘ what is this text trying to say’ and then ‘how would I say it in my language’ rather than doing a straight translation.
Sep 09, 2017 @ 17:30:31
Yes, you may have got to the heart of it there – a literal translation isn’t going to capture the meanings and nuances, is it?
Sep 10, 2017 @ 16:42:13
That’s the issue exactly which is why its such a shame translators don’t get more kudos. They have to really get to the essence of the author’s style and what they are trying to achieve before they can do a good job on a ‘translation’ – its more like an interpretation I suppose
Sep 10, 2017 @ 17:28:36
Exactly – I can’t thank or praise translators enough really!
Links | XIX век
Sep 10, 2017 @ 13:59:27
Sep 10, 2017 @ 14:51:33
I’ll reproduce my comment from XIX век, omitting the Russian citations:
An interesting comparison! But I can’t say I like Aplin’s “funny itches”; it’s a funny phrase in English, but I don’t see that it has much to do with the Russian, which is not about itching but scratching. The thing that a person почесывает [‘scratches’] is most frequently head, neck, or (most notably) затылок [‘back of the head’], and I don’t think of that action as scratching an itch so much as being slightly flummoxed by a situation and unsure of what to say. I also don’t like “desire” for хотенье, since the English word carries a heavy freight of sexual connotation which (as far as I know) is absent in the Russian — хотение is simply the fact of wanting, of exercising one’s will to have. Magarshack’s “volition” is technically accurate but a horrible word to use here; I’d have to think about how to render it myself. Translation is hard!
Sep 10, 2017 @ 15:20:26
Thank you! This is all so perplexing to the Anglophone reader, particularly when the writing is so nuanced. Although I *like* funny itches, because it seems the kind of quirky thing Dostoevsky would say, I can see that it doesn’t necessarily make perfect sense here. Perhaps it was meant to imply flummoxed in a different way to stating it outright. As for desire, I agree – a reader will tend to default to the sexual desire whereas this seems to be more ‘wanting’ in a general sense. But agreed about volition – it sounds awful here! Translation must be impossibly difficult – I can only begin to imagine.
Sep 13, 2017 @ 04:02:23
Oh, I love different translations! And I also love pictures of stacks of books. Perhaps I read the Magarshack in my teens: God only knows! Last winter I read the Garnett, which I did very much like, because her prose isn’t pretty-pretty when she does Dostoevsky. And I really must force myself to reread something else by him, hoping that I finally can make my way through his derpessing half-comedies~
Sep 13, 2017 @ 07:11:07
I know I read Magarshack back in the day – possibly Crime and Punishment – but maybe all translators are not right for all books. About time I read some more Dosty, really!
Sep 16, 2017 @ 17:26:54
Fascinating stuff!
Sep 16, 2017 @ 17:38:26
Indeed – if somewhat perplexing…!
Sep 17, 2017 @ 13:26:23
I have a couple of additional translations of Notes from Underground by Pevear & Volokhonsky (1993) & Natasha Randall (2012) – the latter being the most recently published of all six:
Pevear/Volokhonsky (1993):
You see: reason, gentlemen, is a fine thing, that is unquestionable, but reason is only reason and satisfies only man’s reasoning capacity, while wanting is a manifestation of the whole of life – that is, the whole of human life, including reason and various little itches.
Randall (2012):
Do you see? Reason, gentlemen, is a good thing, that’s indisputable, but reason is only reason and satisfies only the rational abilities of a man, whereas desire is a manifestation of one’s whole life, that is, all of human life, including reason and including all its little itches.
Of these two I prefer the Randall – I particularly like her switch from reason to rational in the latter part of the sentence, whereas P/V use reason twice and I prefer desire to wanting; I also think that and various little itches is flatter (more prosaic) than all its little itches.
Sep 17, 2017 @ 13:41:12
Thank you for sharing these! Yes, I prefer the Randall of the two – P/V are always rather flat and prosaic I find. I haven’t forgiven them for nearly killing The Master and Margarita for me….
Sep 17, 2017 @ 14:32:25
I found the same with their translation of Dr Zhivago – so switched to the earlier Haward and Harari and wished I started with this one; I seem to remember at least one poor review of the P/V Doctor Zhivago. I read P/V for the Bulgakov – did you prefer the Glenny?
Sep 17, 2017 @ 14:48:57
I read the P/V M&M first and although I loved the story that was coming through, I did struggle very much with the actual reading of it. When I re-read it, I chose the Burgin and O’Connor version (my review is here https://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2015/08/31/a-white-cloak-with-blood-red-lining/) and it was a whole different and very wonderful experience. I’ve yet to read Glenny or the other versions, but I can highly recommend the Burgin and O’Connor. As for Zhivago I had no intention of going near the P/V version – I read the Hayward/Harari which I thought was marvellous and reviewed here: https://kaggsysbookishramblings.wordpress.com/2015/05/01/the-book-is-always-better/ Interestingly, Pasternak’s niece doesn’t think much of the P/V version, and also languagehat has had plenty to say about them on his blog here: http://languagehat.com/?s=pevear
Sep 17, 2017 @ 18:26:21
Some really useful pointers here – thank you for taking the time and trouble – am following them up. Best wishes, Peter
Sep 17, 2017 @ 20:24:56
Very welcome – happy reading!
“A Meek Girl” | XIX век
Jun 19, 2021 @ 13:05:39
May 25, 2022 @ 03:08:05
There is also the translation by Professor Michael Katz, which is the version I read. I’ll have to find that sentence and compare it to the other translations from this post.
May 26, 2022 @ 01:09:04
Here is Michael Katz’s translation-
“reason is a fine thing gentlemen, there’s no doubt about it, but it’s only reason, and it satisfies only man’s rational faculty, whereas desire is a manifestation of all life, that is, of all human life, which includes both reason, as well as all of life’s itches and scratches.”
May 26, 2022 @ 20:29:14
Here is another translation by Ronald Wilks-
“You see, gentlemen: reason is a good thing, there’s no denying it, but reason is only reason and satisfies only man’s rational faculty, whereas volition is a manifestation of the whole of life- and by that I mean the whole of life, together with reason and all the headscratching that goes with it.”
Jun 08, 2022 @ 00:10:39
I absolutely love this post and the comments! I can find something I like in all the translations, although in the end, I believe Michael Katz’s translation sounds the best (to my ear at least) and I do like “as well as all of life’s itches and scratches.”
Jun 08, 2022 @ 11:21:10
Thanks! There’s a lot to be said for so many of the versions, and I agree it’s often best to go with what personally sounds best to you.