Lost in Translation: Barnes & Noble Edition

I finally plodded through the last couple chapters of "Dead Souls" by Gogol, wondering why every few pages an editor would note that portions of the manuscript were missing.  Turns out the entire Book II of Dead Souls was so bad that Gogol tried to burn all of it.  I don't blame him.  Later in his life, with the success of Book I hanging over him, Gogol became somewhat of a religious fanatic and wanted to write a second part that would show Tchichikov's moral redemption.  However, as Nabokov notes in "Lectures on Russian Literature": "Tchichikov's swindles are but the phantoms and parodies of crime, so that no 'real' retribution is possible without a distortion of the whole idea" (p.53).  Thus Book II ends up being an exercise in bland preaching, rather than a lively continuation of Book I.

Side note:  What the heck is with these Russian writers and bizarre end-of-life manias?  Dostoevsky had gambling, Tolstoy wanted to become a wandering ascetic, and now Gogol.

In paging back through the book (which I had started more than two months ago, yikes), a bunch of "haha" and "lol" notes popped out from the margins to remind me that yes, Book I was entertaining.  Gogol has a knack for disrupting the author-reader wall and commenting directly on his characters as real people:

It is no great matter to the reader whether Tchichikov is angry with him or not, but an author ought never under any circumstances to fall out with his hero--they have still to go a long way hand in hand together...

Nabokov points out the plethora of secondary, tertiary, and even one-sentence characters that pop out from metaphors and tangents: "I find pleasure in rounding up those peripheral characters that enliven the texture of its background."  People with ridiculous names like Sysoy Pafnutevich and Makdonald Karlovitch.  "Not only people, but things too indulge in these nomenclatorial orgies."  This emphasis on characters, description, and linguistic agility reminds me of Cormac McCarthy's "Suttree"; no explicitly profound ideas, but a masterpiece of the language. Which brings me to the translation issue ...

YUCK!  Frown of disapproval for the Barnes & Noble edition as translated by Constance Garnett.  To illustrate, here's a final passage from Book I, with Nabokov's translation of the same:

B&N: "The ringing of the bells melts into music; the air, torn to shreds, whirs and rushes like the wind, everything there is on earth is flying by, and the other states and nations, with looks askance, make way for her and draw aside."

Nabokov: "The middle bell trills out in a dream its liquid soliloquy; the roaring air is torn to pieces and becomes Wind; all things on earth fly by and other nations and states gaze askance as they step aside and give her the right of way."

Bottom line is, look into what's the best translation before embarking on another Russian book.  Or any foreign-language book.

On Digging Deeper, Or Not

In regard to allusions and whether or not it's worthwhile to "understand" them:

NY Times: Grand Allusion

“If a poem catches a student’s interest at all, he or she should damned well be able to look up an unfamiliar word in the dictionary. . . . You can see what a nasty teacher I must be — but I do think students get lazier and lazier & expect to have everything done for them.” Bishop saw in her students’ resistance evidence of a bias against knowledge in favor of feeling: “They mostly seem to think that poetry — to read or to write — is a snap — one just has to feel..."