Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Russian: Лариса Гиршевна Волохонская) are a couple that are best known for their collaborative translations. Most of their translations are of works in Russian, but also French, Italian, and Greek. Their translations have been nominated three times and twice won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize (for Tolstoy's Anna Karenina and Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov). Their translation of Dostoevsky's The Idiot also won the first Efim Etkind Translation Prize.

Richard Pevear

Richard Pevear was born in Waltham, Massachusetts on 21 April 1943. Pevear earned a B.A. degree from Allegheny College in 1964, and a M.A. degree from the University of Virginia in 1965. He has taught at the University of New Hampshire, The Cooper Union, Mount Holyoke College, Columbia University, and the University of Iowa. In 1998, he joined the faculty of the American University of Paris (AUP), where he taught courses in Russian literature and translation. In 2007, he was named Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature at AUP, and in 2009 he became Distinguished Professor Emeritus.

Larissa Volokhonsky

Larissa Volokhonsky was born in Leningrad, now St Petersburg. Volokhonsky emigrated to Israel in 1973, where she lived for two years.

Collaboration

Volokhonsky met Pevear in the United States in 1976 and they married six years later. The couple now live in Paris and have two trilingual children. Volokhonsky translated into Russian “Introduction to Patristic Theology” by John Meyendorff, and "For the Life of the World" by Alexander Schmemann.

Pevear and Volokhonsky began working together when Pevear was reading Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and Volokhonsky noticed what she regarded to be the inadequacy of the translation by David Magarshack. As a result the couple collaborated on their own version, producing three sample chapters which they sent to publishers. They were turned down by Random House and Oxford University Press but received encouragement from a number of Slavic scholars and were in the end accepted by North Point Press, a small publishing house in San Francisco who paid them a $6,000 advance. It went on to win a PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize. Their translation of Anna Karenina won another PEN/BOMC Translation Prize. Oprah Winfrey chose this translation of Anna Karenina as a selection for her "Oprah's Book Club" on her television program, which led to a major increase in sales of this translation and greatly increased recognition for Pevear and Volokhonsky. Their translation of Dostoevsky's The Idiot won the first Efim Etkind Translation Prize awarded by the European University of St. Petersburg.

The husband-and-wife team work in a two-step process: Volokhonsky prepares her English version of the original text, trying to follow Russian syntax and stylistic peculiarities as closely as possible, and Pevear turns this version into polished and stylistically appropriate English. Pevear has variously described their working process as follows:

"Larissa goes over it, raising questions. And then we go over it again. I produce another version, which she reads against the original. We go over it one more time, and then we read it twice more in proof."

"We work separately at first. Larissa produces a complete draft, following the original as closely as possible, with many marginal comments and observations. From that, plus the original Russian, I make my own complete draft. Then we work closely together to arrive at a third draft, on which we make our 'final' revisions."

Volokhonsky and Pevear were interviewed about the art of translation for Ideas, the long running Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) radio documentary. It was a 3-part program called "In Other Words" and involved discussions with many leading translators. The program was podcast in April 2007. Their translation of Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace was published on 16 October 2007 by Alfred A. Knopf. It was the subject of a month-long discussion in the "Reading Room" site of the N.Y Times Book Review. Their 2010 translation of Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago met with adverse criticism from Pasternak's niece, Ann Pasternak Slater, in a The Guardian book review., but earned praise for "powerful fidelity" from Angela Livingstone in the Times Literary Supplement <Meaning Every Word, TLS June 24 2011>.

Bibliography

Fyodor Dostoevsky

• The Brothers Karamazov (1990)
• Crime and Punishment (1992)
• Notes from Underground (1993)
• Demons (1994)
• The Eternal Husband and Other Stories (1997)
• The Idiot (2002)
• The Adolescent (2003)
• The Double (2005)
• The Gambler (2005)

Mikhail Bulgakov

• The Master and Margarita (1997)

Nikolai Gogol

• The Collected Tales (1998)
• Dead Souls (1996)

Nikolai Leskov

• Stories (in-progress)

Boris Pasternak

• Doctor Zhivago (2010)

Leo Tolstoy

• What Is Art? (1996)
• Anna Karenina (2000)
• War and Peace (2007)
• The Death of Ivan Ilyich and Other Stories (2009)

Anton Chekhov

• Stories of Anton Chekhov (2000) - 30 short stories in total. ISBN 0553381008
• The Complete Short Novels (2000)

External links

• http://www.aup.fr/faculty/dept/clen/pevear.htm
• American University of Paris page on Pevear
• Resume from University of Bologna website