Before I went to graduate school for poetry, I went to graduate school for translation. For a while, I even thought of myself as a translator first, writer second. This did not last—I am not a very good translator—but the experience did form me as a reader and writer. Translators have to be accountable for every idiom, every reference, every syntactical hiccup, and still realize something greater than the sum of these parts. In other words, translation sensitized me to how the craft of literature is both technical and magical.

Among the translators I most admire are Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The pair—married since 1982—have collaborated on many classics of Russian literature, like Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. They began their first collaborative translation, of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, after Pevear had been reading David Magarshack’s version of the novel. Volokhonsky, a native Russian speaker, decided to read along, and noticed that many of the original’s more delightful and idiosyncratic moments had not made it into the translation. “I said to Richard, You are reading a different book,” Volokhonsky recalls. “Usually if you read in your native tongue, unless you’re either a scholar or an especially curious and attentive reader, you just read. You follow the plot, the characters, you hope maybe this time this one won’t murder that one! But now I started actually looking at the language.” Magarshack came up short. His translation was “very bland. Something tame, not right.”

This is the central, Sisyphean task of translation—conveying not only the “what” of a text, but the “how.” The jokes, the references, the dialects, the wordplay. At some point, every translator has to cut her losses—but the excellent translator will find creative, even ingenious solutions. (This was where I failed.) Still, I take comfort in the fact that no translator has the final word. If something didn’t work in Constance Garnett’s or David Magarshack’s translations, it might work in Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear’s—or in someone else’s, in the future.

Pevear notes that “translating prose is closer to poetic writing than it is to real prose writing.” As a lapsed translator and current poet, I have felt the same way. When I write poetry or translate prose, I pay greater attention to the music of the sentences than I would otherwise. After a while, you’ve looked at the words for so long that they become sort of dizzying, one of those hidden-picture puzzles. I do love this feeling. “Translators are the only ones who live in this place between languages, both as reader and writer,” Pevear says, paraphrasing the translator Gregory Rabassa. “No one else is quite in that same … whatever it is … hiatus.”

—Patty Nash

The Art of Translation No. 4