OUP and some others have excellent translations from the Russian - which is an extremely difficult language to translate.
A lot of the humor doesn’t even translate well to English (especially in the case of Gogol, who used deliberately funny names for his characters to add to the humor, for example in ‘The Government Inspector’) Anna Karenina is horribly difficult and complex to translate because even native russian speakers appear to have different reactions to the same scene, depending on their age, background etc. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/28/books/review/new-translations-of-tolstoys-anna-karenina.html?_r=0 > On 14-Dec-2015, at 12:12 PM, Ashwin Nanjappa <[email protected]> wrote: > > On Mon, Dec 14, 2015 at 2:01 PM, Aadisht Khanna <[email protected]> wrote: >> Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy - I took two years to finish this, but enjoyed >> it far more in 2015 than 2014. Tolstoy has this under-the-surface mild >> sarcasm that suddenly leaps out, bites, and then goes back to rest. > > Do you recall which translation you read? I see 6+ different > translations of Anna Karenina on Amazon with wildly varying reviews > from readers. > > Besides the translations, another problem is that publishers put out > edited/abridged versions of classics with cover material that doesn't > mention this. I had a great time this year chomping through ~1500 > pages of the original anonymous English translation of Count of Monte > Cristo. But before I settled on that I had been misled by a > "shortened" ~800 page edition, which definitely did not read well. > Investigating this issue, I found other ~200 and ~400 page versions > too! > > ~ash >
