LIVERIGHT The Brothers Karamazov: A New Translation by Michael R. Katz

For anyone who hasn’t read this work:It is one of the greatest works of art created by human hands.For anyone who has read this novel but not this particular translation:This is the best translation available.I am a huge fan and appreciator of the Pevear & Volokhonsky translations of Dostoevsky’s works, but man, after completing this Katz translation, I’m prepared to say this is the one to end them all.This translation really loosened the reins that the P&V tightened for me, and I was for the first time exposed to the brilliant humor of Dostoevsky. There were a few moments a snide remark or a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it phrase had me setting the book down so I could laugh without losing my spot.I felt like I experience Dostoevsky’s masterpiece as he intended.Brilliant work and the footnotes were great and convenient.Buy this one if you want the best of the best, in my opinion.

For the price of 40 euros its criminal on the end of the publisher to save 2 bucks and deliver a far worse product. The hardcover and the paper don't really seem of great quality either. Not bad, just not good.It's disappointing since believe it or not, hardcover editions, even sewn ones aren't really expensive to make.In germany Anaconda publishing is selling sewn bound book copies of books for 5-10 euros.A rip off. Simply as that. This edition deserves better.I am thinking about returning it and buying the softcover.

This is a good translation of The Brothers Karamazov from Michael Katz, who has given us perhaps the all-time best translations of several other Dostoevsky novels: Notes from Underground, Crime and Punishment, and Devils (Demons). Unfortunately, I noticed quite a number of errors ranging from missing periods at the end of sentences to incorrect sentence construction (having nothing to do with translation). I hope these mistakes will be emended in a subsequent revision, especially if Norton decides to use this translation for its Critical Edition. (The current Norton Critical Edition is a revision of the Constance Garnett by Susan McReynolds and Ralph Matlaw. Though excellent, it is starting to show its age.)So why am I giving this one star? Because of the poor condition in which my copy arrived. Lately, Amazon has been shipping books either loosely in plastic bags or in cardboard boxes without adequate cushioning inside. Either way, the books arrive with creased or torn covers, or sometimes worse. This needs to end! The defunct Book Depository, an Amazon company, used to ship books in cardboard sleeves that were adjusted to fit their contents snugly, without room for getting jostled around during shipping. Amazon should do the same. We do not deserve paying for new books and then getting damaged product.

I had my first encounter with Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, in the Constance Garnett translation, when I was a freshman in high school. All of us in Mildred Norton’s English class at Lanphier High School, Springfield, Illinois, were asked to select a novel and commit to it. After struggling through several chapters, I begged for permission to dump the book and select another, and she let me off the hook.I took up The Brothers Karamazov for the second time in my early 20s, again in the Garnett translation, and that time around it became one of the great reads of my life, although I still frequently found the writing cumbersome. I wasn’t alone in having trouble with it. Many readers and critics, not without reason, felt that Garnett gave anything she translated a decidedly British, Victorian flavor. (I was ironically reminded of this when in my most recent reading I came to the passage where the boy Kolya says to Alyosha: “I’ve read Candide in a Russian translation … in an old, monstrous translation, almost comical.”)Garnett is on record as saying that Dostoevsky is “so obscure and careless as a writer that one can scarcely help clarifying him.” She failed to grasp how grand his obscurity and carelessness can be. To boot, it appears that she simply omitted passages that stumped her.My third and richer encounter with Dostoevsky’s masterpiece came in my late 40s, when in 1990 the husband-and-wife translating team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky published their eminently readable version. I have since then recommended their translation.Now, in my early 80s, along comes a new translation by Michael R. Katz, who in his introduction, while commending Pevear and Volokhonsky and expressing indebtedness to them, maintains that “their translation is characterized by a too-close adherence to the Russian text that results in a word-for-word and syntax-for-syntax style that sacrifices tone and frequently misconstrues a passage’s overall sense.”For this reader, whose knowledge of Russian is admittedly nil, the choice between the two later translations is pretty much a toss-up. Either is a better choice than Garnett, unless you prefer to have your Dostoevsky sound like Dickens. Whatever your choice of translation may be, you shouldn’t complete your reading lifetime without encountering this endlessly fascinating, perplexing work. Don’t expect a smooth ride in any translation, and do be prepared to be challenged and astonished.In the current unstable national and world political climate, it’s jarring to recall that were it not for a whim of Tsar Nikolai I, the young Dostoevsky would have been executed and we would have none of his remarkable work.Note: All three translations retain Dostoevsky’s irritating reliance on the phrase “and so forth and so on,” which is the sort of shorthand that can seriously damage narrative integrity. The phrase occurs with such frequency that it becomes a tic. Well, readers, perhaps in the end we must allow masters their tics.

I love this translation. It’s as if the author is speaking to you. Very readableñ