That’s surprising to hear. I’ve found P&V’s Dostoevsky translations very readable, and my understanding from reading reviews online was that P&V’s translations are well regarded in general.
Which translation did you read/would you recommend?
Edit: I did some reading online and found some criticism of P&V, such as:
They are not without their detractors - part of it is they take on difficult work, some of which hasn't seen serious translator attention for a while. Personally, I find the results poor but obviously lots of people like them.
Chekhov's short stories are an English translator's nightmare though - there's a reason he's much more famous as a playwright in the English-speaking world.
I don't mean the reason is one aspect of his work is 'better' than the other, just that the difficulty translating his short stories makes them much less accessible to English readers than the plays.
I think the reverse is the case for Russian - Жалобная книга (The Complaints Book) is part of Russian idiom, the famous play Чайка (The Seagull) is not. Chekhov just occupies a different part of the English-speaking cultural taxonomy.
A (maybe more than a little over the top) way to put it is, it's like if in Russia, Newton was primarily known as a great theologian and alchemist.
Strugatski brothers' Monday Begins on Saturday is aslo a difficult translation from Russian. I really love Russian literature, especially modern writers like Vladimir Sorokin, it's so different.
Anything will be hard to translate between languages as distant as English and Russian, to be quite honest. Monday Begins on Saturday just has more contemporary cultural references that Russian readers understand. Chekhov's stories probably have just as many but they are just as lost to the contemporary Russian reader as they would be to an English translation one :)
On the other hand, I remember watching Russian translation of the Naked Gun and finding it extremely funny even though neither I nor the translator understood any references there so, I guess, it's still possible to enjoy art without the context.
There's a lot more runway, in a novel, to establish style and voice - both for the authors and for the translators. Monday Begins on Saturday begins:
"Я приближался к месту моего назначения. Вокруг меня, прижимаясь к самой дороге, зеленел лес, изредка уступая место полянам, поросшим желтой осокою."
Pretty much ez-mode compared to this opener, in the Gooseberries (Крыжовник) someone brought up upthread:
"Еще с раннего утра всё небо обложили дождевые тучи; было тихо, не жарко и скучно, как бывает в серые пасмурные дни, когда над полем давно уже нависли тучи, ждешь дождя, а его нет."
Two different translators' takes:
"The whole sky had been overcast with rain-clouds from early morning; it was a still day, not hot, but heavy, as it is in grey dull weather when the clouds have been hanging over the country for a long while, when one expects rain and it does not come."
and
"From early morning the sky had been overcast with clouds; the day was still, cool, and wearisome, as usual on grey, dull days when the clouds hang low over the fields and it looks like rain, which never comes."
The ‘Gooseberries’ excerpt sounds close to ‘stream-of-consciousness’ with the attempts to describe the inner mood—and indeed I can't think of anyone speaking or writing in English in the manner of that passage, except Nabokov. As a translator, you'd basically have to imagine maybe John Malkovich narrating your book, and then whack at the words until they sound natural coming from him.
The first linked article (commentarymagazine.com) suggests that the Garnett/Matlaw translations of Dostoevsky’s "Notes from Underground" is a better translation than the P&V translation.
As an example, it says the following:
> ...His word for such acts of self-injury is, in English translations before P&V, “spite.” It is fair to say that to miss the concept of spite is to miss the work entire.
> But that is just what P&V do. Instead of “spite,” they give us “wickedness.” Now, the Russian word zloi can indeed mean “wicked.” But no one with the faintest idea of what this novella is about, with any knowledge of criticism from Dostoevsky’s day to ours, or with any grasp of Dostoevskian psychology, would imagine that the book’s point is that people are capable of wickedness.
From my copy of the P&V translation for this book, toward the end of the Foreword, Pevear says the following:
> There is, however, one tradition of mistranslation attached to Notes from Underground that raises something more than a question of “mere tone”. The second sentence of the book, Ya zloy chelovék, has most often been rendered as "I am a spiteful man." Zloy is indeed at the root of the Russian word for "spiteful" (zlobnyi), but it is a much broader and deeper word, meaning "wicked," "bad," "evil." The wicked witch in Russian folktales is zláya véd'ma (zláya being the feminine of zloy). The opposite of zloy is dóbryi, "good," as in "good fairy" (dóbraya feya). This opposition is of great importance for Notes from Underground; indeed it frames the book, from "I am a wicked man" at the start to the outburst close to the end: "They won't let me...I can't be...good!" We can talk about the inevitable loss of nuances in translating from Russian into English (or from any language into any other), but the translation of zloy as "spiteful" instead of "wicked" is not inevitable, not is it a matter of nuance. It speaks for that habit of substituting the psychological for the moral, of interpreting a spiritual condition as a kind of behavior, which has so bedeviled our century, not least in its efforts to understand Dostoevsky.
Translations are, by their very nature, open to interpretation and oftentimes small details and nuance gets lost. And then you get debates about things like the aforementioned comparison. As such, it's more practical to look for a good translation than the best translation.
Chekhov's short stories are an English translator's nightmare though - there's a reason he's much more famous as a playwright in the English-speaking world.