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Posted by Lale on 21/12/2001, 16:43:53
I had read someplace that in Russian all female names end with an "a", or a vowel anyway. For instance, Ivanov for the men and Ivanovna for the women, Romanov - Romanovna, Karenin - Karenina. So it has to be Anna Karenina and never Anna Karenin. But the copy I have (Penguin Classics, translated by Rosemary Edmonds) is titled Anna Karenin. Now, I don't want to read this particular translation. If the title is incorrect ...
Anyone know something about Russion to shed light on this?
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Posted by Michael Sympson on 21/12/2001, 20:54:30, in reply to "Anna Karenina - Russian names"
You are perfectly right Lale. But the title would be correct if the translation went: "Mrs. Anna Karenin." Next time, you go to the bookshops, have a look in the Modern Library edition of Anna Karenina. The editor's preface explains in detail all the intricacies of Russian names and their uses.
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Posted by Andres Natal on 27/12/2001, 8:52:10, in reply to "Anna Karenina - Russian names"
Nabokov is famous for pointing out Western mistakes when translating Russian. "Crime and Punishment," by Dostoevsky should be more accurately, "A Crime and Its Punishment," "Fathers and Sons" by Turgenev SHOULD be, more correctly, "Fathers and Children," "Notes From the Underground" would be more correctly (though less poetically) titled "Notes from the Cellar" [as the Russian word for "cellar" is simply "underground," a distinction which ought to be made in English translation, since, in English, there are two different words with wholly different connotations.] Anyway . . . Nabokov says in his collection of essays, "Strong Opinions," that the title to Tolstoy's great novel should actually be "Anna Karenin". (Don't ask me why, in this one instance, the surname of a women is not "feminized," as is the usual custom in Slavic countries. But Nabokov assures us it is so. . . .) So the copy you have is undoubtedly more correct than older translations which make cultural gaffes, despite trying to be correct.
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Posted by Lale on 29/12/2001, 13:54:29, in reply to "Re: Russian names (according to Vladimir Nabokov)"
Andres, I would very much like to have the source of this. Where did you read Nabokov's comments on the Russian translations? Is there a book? This Anna Karenin (sans "a" at the end) business has been criticized by an author we know and respect (he speaks Russian and I always believed his point until I read your posting). I would love to show him a proof, not to see him wrong but to stop him making an incorrect claim any longer.
Thanks for the posting, very interesting. It is hard to understand why in this one instance the rule doesn't apply. But then again, if French can have more exceptions than rules, then other languages should be allowed to have a few exceptions also.
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Posted by Michael Sympson on 1/1/2002, 17:02:37, in reply to "Re: Russian names (according to Vladimir Nabokov)"
Read Nabokov: "Lectures on Russian Literature." But I think Mr. Natal, quoting from memory may have mixed it up. If I am not mistaken, (I quote from memeory as well,) Nabokov fulminated against a translation that had "Mrs. Anna Karenina" in the title which is obviously neither Russian nor English. If you don't translate, only transcribe (from Cyrillic), then it is "Anna Karenina," if you translate it becomes "Mrs. Anna Karenin." Translating "Anna Karenin" without the suffix, leaves the title out. That's what I vaguely recollect.
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Posted by Andres Natal on 3/1/2002, 20:57:06, in reply to "Re: Russian names (according to Vladimir Nabokov)"
No, sorry, Michael: I am not mistaken. I was just as shocked as you and Lale were when Nabokov said that it should be "Karenin," not "Karenina," because I already knew that surnames in Russian were generally feminized for women. (Why the exception to the rule, I wondered?)
It is, I am almost positive, in "Strong Opinions".
And remember: Just because a writer speaks Russian, that does not preclude mistakes. I direct your attention to the Nabokov-Edmund Wilson letters. Wilson was pompous and often only half-educated. His own Russian was (by Nabokov's standards) atrocious and incomplete. But if one did not know that, one would think that the eminent Mr. Wilson was an authority.
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Re: Conclusive Evidence (from "Strong Opinions")
Posted by Andres Natal on 3/1/2002, 21:37:56, in reply to "Re: Russian names (according to Vladimir Nabokov)"
An excerpt from Nabokov's book, "Strong Opinions":
What is your attitude to the modern world?
I doubt if we can postulate the objective existence of a "modern world" on which an artist should have any definite and important opinion. It has been tried, of course, and even carried to extravagant lengths. A hundred years ago, in Russia, the most eloquent and influential reviewers were left-wing, radical utilitarian political critics, who demanded that Russian novelists and poets portray and sift the modern scene. In those distance times, in that remote country, a typical critic would insist that a literary artist be a "reporter on the topics of the day," a social commentator, a class-war correspondent. That was half-a-century before the Bolshevist police not only revived the dismal so-called progressive (really regressive) trend characteristic of the eighteen-sixties and seventies, but, as we all know, enforced it. In the old days, to be sure, great lyrical poets or the incomparable prose artist who composed "Anna Karenin" (which should be transliterated without the closing "a" --she was not a ballerina) could cheerfully ignore the left-wing progressive philistines who requested Tyutchev or Tolstoy to mirror politico-social soap-box gesticulations instead of dwelling on an aristocratic love affair or the beauties of nature. The dreary principles, once voiced in the reign of Alexander II, and their subsequent sinister transmutation into the decrees of gloomy police states (Kosygin's dour face expresses that gloom far better than Stalin's dashing moustache) come to my mind whenever I hear today retro-progressive book reviewers in America and England plead for a little more social comment, a little less artistic whimsy. The accepted notion of a "modern world" continuously flowing around us belongs to the same type of abstraction as, say, the "quaternary period" of paleontology. What I feel to be the real modern world is the world the artist creates, his own mirage, which becomes a new mir ("world" in Russian) by the very act of his shedding, as it were, the age he lives in. My mirage is produced in my private desert, an arid but ardent place, with the sign No Caravans Allowed on the trunk of a lone palm. No doubt, good minds exist whose caravans of general ideas lead somewhere -- to curious bazaars, to photogenetic temples, but an independent novelist cannot derive much true benefit from tagging along.
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