What's the message?

When I was nine, my thirteen year old brother pulled this out a bookstore and said: hey gerry, they wrote a book about you!
I somehow feel too embarrassed to read it.

>>9172378
It's a nice read, it's about the misadventures of this one guy that came back to Russia after being in a Swiss sanitarium for 4 years

There's a part where one of the characters is on a train, someone plucks the guy's cigar and throws it out the train window, so he does the same to the persons poodle

>>9172390
no there isn't
the general tells that story but is exposed by nastasya who knew he had simply read about it in a magazine

This is my favourite book.

Somehow im too drunk right now

It made me feel something when everything else i felt was lost

Everyone else, do yourself

>>9172469
Much like you have exposed >>9172390
hmm, life imitates art.

>>9172390
Why am I not surprised that someone who read the Constance Garnett translation has no idea what they're talking about?

>>9172485
Is it bad that I have that edition?

I haven't started it yet.

>>9172529
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/11/07/the-translation-wars
Constance Garnett fucked the translations really badly. If she saw a word she didn't know she skipped it.

>>9172529
It reads dreadfully. It's much too clean. I would reject a Constance Garnett translation if it was given to me as a gift.

>>9172551
What do you mean by, "clean"

File: P&V.jpg (633KB, 3264x2448px) Image search: [Google]

633KB, 3264x2448px

>>9172556
The sentences all feel encapsulated. What should be frantic, flowing prose moves along at a crawl. Instead of using the exact words, Garnett uses ones that are often reductive or blatantly misleading.

I found the Garnett translation for TBK online, hopefully this can illustrate the differences.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/28054/28054-pdf.pdf

Garnett:
>Alexey Fyodorovitch Karamazov was the third son of Fyodor Pavlovitch Karamazov, a land owner well known in our district in his own day, and still remembered among us owing to his gloomy and tragic death, which happened thirteen years ago, and which I shall describe in its proper place. For the present I will only say that this “landowner”—for so we used to call him, although he hardly spent a day of his life on his own estate—was a strange type, yet one pretty frequently to be met with, a type abject and vicious and at the same time senseless. But he was one of those senseless persons who are very well capable of looking after their worldly affairs, and, apparently, after nothing else. Fyodor Pavlovitch, for instance, began with next to nothing; his estate was of the smallest; he ran to dine at other men's tables, and fastened on them as a toady, yet at his death it appeared that he had a hundred thousand roubles in hard cash. At the same time, he was all his life one of the most senseless, fantastical fellows in the whole district. I repeat, it was not stupidity—the majority of these fantastical fellows are shrewd and intelligent enough—but just senselessness, and a peculiar national form of it.
Here's hoping the image is oriented correctly.

>>9172541
>fucked the translations really badly. If she saw a word she didn't know she skipped it.
How does this happen? "Does anyone in the world know Russian and English very well?"... "ok.. we will choose you, but you must work on this alone, and do not ask for any help if you dont know a word, also if you are not capable of doing this properly, just continue anyway, its not like there exists anyone else in the world who knows both Russian and English, certainly noone who as such, also is familiar with Dostoevksy"

>>9172551
Then what'a a good translation?

>>9172556
She smooths out the prose a bit too much. It should be a bit more jarring and irregular. Her translations are still worth reading though if it's all you have.

P & V KEKS BTFO!!!!!
https://youtu.be/H2ykytca6Y8?t=3836

>>9172362
>What's the intended message that I'm supposed to get out of this book?

That society is idiots and who they might call can idiot for pointing out their idiocy might not entirely be such

>>9172638
She was simply the first. She worked on the novels a little bit after they were published. So that's simply it. She was first. I'm just citing the article. You'd probably get a better understanding of all this if you read the first quarter of the article.

>>9172654
1:03:56

>>9172668
Wow, I was surprised to hear him say that Garnett was the best Russian translator. Nice to see some mad respect for her.

>>9172704
yep.

>>9172714
He does go on to say that she didn't get Dostoevsky's humour and word-play though, so his humour was left out of her translations.

>>9172362
>What's the message?

Russia is really big and really cold.
Peasants gtfo, and do not meddle in patrician affairs.
Humans can be incredibly shitty people and maybe it wouldn't be so bad if a pogrom came by and snuffed us all. Simultaneously, we're one of the most beautiful creations.

>>9172475
You're alright m8.

>>9172726
well, still. i like to hear "most precise" and "best"

I really love The Idiot. The chief message is difficult to decipher, and even more difficult to understand. The two main thoughts about it is that either Myshkin was unfortunately (or maybe fortunately?) too pure and as a result of being around corrupted people (even characters like Aglaya—all characters less pure than Myshkin) caused him great suffering. You could draw from this that society is impure and that people are naturally impure; an idealistic Don Quixote could never appear without being tainted.
The other interpretation is that Myshkin's purity caused most of, if not all of, the tragedy in the novel. It's his fault that Nastasya was murdered by Rogozhin because of his pursuit of her; It's his fault that Aglaya ends up It's his fault that Aglaya ends up heartbroken, and probably some other things.
There are other messages in there like Russia being separate and unique from Europe, and that European influences are bad for Russia (see Notes From the Underground for more, as well as some of Karamazov).
It's such a tragic work. You grow to love Myshkin, only to see him cause, if only accidentally or inadvertently, his return to Switzerland as a ruined man. An angel comes to these people, everyone simultaneously loves and hates him, and he ends up a wreck, causing more misery than good in spite of his pure nature. It's probably the saddest work of Dostoevsky's, even more so than The Brothers Karamazov, even taking into account the ending with the boys.

>>9172776
spoilers motherfuckerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

>>9172847
This thread is for talking about the meaning in the book.

>>9172362
People can become what you claim them to be.

>the power of suggestion

>>9172378
fuckng pwnt

>>9172362
>Somthing about innocence?
Something like that.

>Also what's /lit/'s opinion on the idiot?
I didn't enjoy it. Some say it's Dostoevsky's worst. I can't comment on that because the only other book I've read by him is Notes From Underground, which was way better.

>>intended message
>>Dostoevesky

>>9172654
>>9172704
>a monolingual anglo part of P&V is somehow an authority on translation precision
Garnett tards are pathetic.

i' literally dostrubed by how mentally challanged people who look for messages in books are. it's not a preschool book for kids you dumb fuck.

>>9172639
Pevear and Volokhonsky.

>>9172639
>>9173972
I second P&V. It was a great read (great notes too).