[Hammerhead88]

I'm in!

[JPK]

I actually feel a little bad for Don Quixote. Losing 0-7 is rough.

[Khetienn]

Andorion, on 01 June 2017 - 05:26 PM, said:

Hey, welcome to the group!

Thank you!

[Aptorian]

You lost me almost immediately during the last book but reading the description of this one, I think I going to give it another try.

[JPK]

Seduce Goose, on 01 June 2017 - 07:34 PM, said:

You lost me almost immediately during the last book but reading the description of this one, I think I going to give it another try.

Yeah, it seemed like tCoMC wasn't really for you though, and I can totally understand why. M&M is less than half the length of it, so it pretty much has to be a tighter narrative with far less flowery prose. That's what I'm hoping at least.

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Here's what I think is a (roughly phonetic) transliteration and word-by-word(-by-most-possible-words) translation of the epigraph. It's interesting to compare with the German original and the free English translation:

Tak kto zh ti, nakonets?
R --- chast toy seeli,
chto vechno khochet
ela ee vechno sovershaet blago

So | who | are | you, | finally/at last?
R --- | Part | of that | force(often as in military forces)/strength/vigor/power
Which | eternally/everlastingly | is willing/wanting/desiring
Evil/ill/maliciousness/angriness/bitterness | and | eternally/everlastingly | is committing/accomplishing/perpetrating | good/blessing/boon

German original (from Goethe's Faust):

Nun gut, wer bist du denn?

Mephistopheles:

Ein Teil von jener Kraft,
Die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft.

Nun gut, wer bist du denn?

Mephistopheles:

Ein Teil von jener Kraft,
Die stets das Böse will und stets das Gute schafft.

Now good [idiomatic "okay now"], who be'st you then? [likely pun on bist/Biest, you be / Beast]
A Deal [as in "part"] of that Strength/Force,
That always the Evil [/malice/anger] wills and always the Good [/estate/commodity/property] produces.

When Bulgakov was writing, the German usage of "will" had special resonance: the Nazi film Triumph of the Will, the Nazi appropriation of Nietzsche's Will to Power... though it also evokes the German philosophical tradition (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, The World as Will and Representation).

English:

"'... who are you, then?'
'I am part of that power which eternally wills evil and eternally works good.'"

The German is metrical, end-rhymed, and consists of three lines. The Russian splits it into four verse lines, adding a line-break after "will"---giving added emphasis to that then-all-too-significant word.

The Russian takes out the subtle puns, but adds dense consonance and assonance, rendering it more overtly poetic. The English, in contrast, is as prosaic as possible (and not just because it's a translation---the Russian itself is a translation, though the omission of the German---and even of the translator's name---obscures this). The implication is that Russian is poetry, beautiful, sonorous, worth studying, while English is banal, simplistic, only worthwhile for the sake of efficient production.

The Russian also replaces "denn" / "then" with наконец (nakonets) "finally/at last"---a word with more poetic and philosophical resonance: Who are you finally, at last?

Also:

The novel's first sentence appears to be misleadingly translated: "At the hour of the hot spring sunset two citizens appeared at the Patriarch's Ponds."
I had assumed "the hot spring sunset" referred to a "hot spring" (sunset at a hot spring, maybe even seen through the geysers and the steam), but the Russian instead indicates a "hot, spring sunset"; and the style is completely different:

Once in spring, at the time of an unusually hot sunset, in Moscow, at Patriarch Ponds, appeared two citizens.

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 01 June 2017 - 08:32 PM

[Mentalist]

"Наконец" , in this context is probably best translated as "in the end, after all this/when all is said and done" .

Russian can be insanely contextual.

[Itwæs Nom]

Ment is that all you've got to say about the translation?

I can't speak Russian but as Czech I'd think that

"toy" in "Chast toy seeli" ("část tvojí síly" in Czech) means "your"

"chto" in "chto vechno khochet" (kdo všechno ???) means "who", "vechno" means "all" I'm this case, don't know what the last word is supposed to be

"ela ee vechno sovershaet blago" don't know what "ela" is but "evil" is "zlo" I believe, "vechno"(všechno) probably means "everything", best translation for "blago"(blaho) would probably be "well-being" but I'm not sure in this case

[Mentalist]

I speak it fluently, but I wasn't gonna translate the whole novel for the forum, I wrote specifically about the part I felt Azath significantly missed the point. I'll agree with the rest of his translation. (Also, I didn't read Faust, so I can't really judge the appropriateness of the epigraph)

But okay, here's a total breakdown:

Той= that (as in, part of that) сила (force/power)
Что (what, or rather, "which" ) вечно (eternally, or rather, always) хочет (wants/desires, from the base verb хотеть)

Зла (evil) и (and) вечно (same thing, always) совершает (causes. But it's usually used together with "поступки" which means "deeds" , so "does" would also be appropriate) благо (archaic/biblical word for "good" )

[Puck]

^ This. Due to it's very nature, Russian is both insanely contextual and very flexible, making translating a difficult task, especially if you want to make the text flow naturally, which would include changing the sentences around, at which point purists would start complaining. There's no way to make a translation from Russiand of such as book as M&M satisfying to all. This is, funnily, evidenced in Azath Vitr's post right there, considering in the first part, you complain about a translation being not true to the text und in the second about one that is too true to the text, as 'hot spring sunset' is the literal translation of a VERY common phrase in Russian.

I'd also like to call bullshit on the whole epigraph non-debate up there. You're not taking cultural conventions into account. It make sense for the original German version to be metrical, because it's a freaking theater piece. Bulgakov, in the Russian version, used an approximation that fit what he wanted to allude to, but it's not a direct quote. The word 'khochet' has not a whiff of the connotation the German 'will' has in that context, though I am sure that if Bulgakov had wanted that he would've found a way, even though the word most closely fitting the German in this case would be the Russian 'wolya', which has no corresponding verb. That said, it is a Russian literature convention to use metric language within novels much more than say, in German or English. A metric phrase at the end of a novel is nothing unusual. One of the problems of translating something is to decide how to do it. Do you want to keep more to the literal word or do you want to have the meaning carried over as much as possible? oftentimes, you have to choose which side to lean more towards (and people will still complain). Sure, the translator could have kept the verse style of the epigraph, but would it have made sense in English? I can imagine that the metric quality/rythm would've been lost in the translation, and the convention of having a line end mid-sentence does not exist in English, so it makes more sense to have it as prose rather than verse.

That 'Наконец' or 'finally' there, actually, often carries an exasperated rather than poetic meaning in Russian, btw. More along the lines 'care to finally tell me who you are, so that we can get this over with?', which does go nicely with the satirical tone of the novel.

My point? There's little point in arguing over words when it should be pretty clear that a translation, by definition, cannot carry the same meaning as the text in the original language (especially when read by a native speaker), all it can do is an approximation, and most translators try their best. I find it a pity when I see people disparaging a translator's work without knowing what kind of thought went into using that translation and not the other one. The important part is to get as close as possible while still retaining a readable product.

And there's even less point in jumping at people for only reading (or being able to read) a translation, or even looking for free versions of something when the laws of their country of residence permit it. Who are you to decide which version of the book is acceptable or not?


EDIT: To add what I originally came to the thread for.. A couple years ago, there was a stage adaptation of the book in a theatre near me, which was excellent. They had a band write an entire album to accompany the stage version, which was also excellent, so if anyone's interested in some musical accompaniment or just curious, look up What do you believe in? by Botanica. I cannot link anything due to not knowing which Youtube video would be available everywhere.

This post has been edited by Puck: 01 June 2017 - 09:25 PM

[Mentalist]

Hmm, that's actually true. I don't think Russian has a one-verb translation for "willing smth to happen" . This feels odd to me, because Ukrainian does have a verb like that.

This post has been edited by Mentalist: 01 June 2017 - 10:11 PM

[Puck]

I certainly can't think of one, and I checked the dictionary just to be sure, since my literary use of Russian is somewhat rusty. There's a noun - во́ля/wolya -- but I can't think of a corresponding verb.

Btw, what's the Ukrainian word? I'm primarily russophone so I have much less trouble of thinking of Russian words than Ukrainian ones, so I'm curious. And sorry for the off-topic.

This post has been edited by Puck: 01 June 2017 - 09:46 PM

[Azath Vitr (D'ivers]

Puck, on 01 June 2017 - 09:18 PM, said:

^ This. Due to it's very nature, Russian is both insanely contextual and very flexible, making translating a difficult task, especially if you want to make the text flow naturally, which would include changing the sentences around, at which point purists would start complaining. There's no way to make a translation from Russiand of such as book as M&M satisfying to all. This is, funnily, evidenced in Azath Vitr's post right there, considering in the first part, you complain about a translation being not true to the text und in the second about one that is too true to the text, as 'hot spring sunset' is the literal translation of a VERY common phrase in Russian.

The Russian is:

Однажды весною, в час небывало жаркого заката

Where are you seeing "hot spring sunset"? Spring is весною and "hot sunset" is "жаркого заката", right? While "hot spring sunset" may be a common phrase in Russian, it doesn't appear there, does it? When I first read that I thought it meant "hot spring" as in "a spring produced by the emergence of geothermally heated groundwater that rises from the Earth's crust" and I wanted to spare other readers that confusion. My more significant complaint is that the style and the flow of the prose is changed far beyond what's neccessary, though of course that is a stylistic choice.

The inclusion of poetry, and yes even metrical poetry, is not that unusual in novels. Erikson does it (mostly unmetrical); many other authors include metrical poetry.

If хочет carries no connotation of "will" but rather "desire/wanting", that is interesting too. The line-break does foreground that word. Or do you think the translator just put a line-break there out of metrical laziness?

Finally, I meant that, just as Goethe plays on the idiomatic use of "gut" ("good"), I think the Russian may be playing on the idiomatic meaning of Наконец---the primary meaning is idiomatic and conversational, as it's sometimes used in English (tell me, finally!---as Puck rightly explains); but in the poetic context the colloquialism has a deeper possible secondary meaning (and it is also foregrounded by being the last word in the line).

This post has been edited by Azath Vitr (D'ivers: 02 June 2017 - 12:26 AM

[JPK]

FWIW, this off-topic is actually an amazing discussion that comes directly from discussing issues with translations of the work between different languages. I'm thinking this conversation is very on-topic.

[EmperorMagus]

I have two translations of the text in front of me right now, and they have translated the passage at question like this:

'Say at last--who art thou?'
'That Power I serve
Which wills forever evil
Yet does forever good.'



FAUST :
Who then art thou?

MEPHISTOPHELES :
Part of that power which still
Produceth good, whilst ever scheming ill.

The second example is from the translation I'll be reading off. It was done by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky and published by Penguin, currently under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license, which means I can provide a link for it here if anyone would like it.

[worry]

JPK, on 01 June 2017 - 10:09 PM, said:

FWIW, this off-topic is actually an amazing discussion that comes directly from discussing issues with translations of the work between different languages. I'm thinking this conversation is very on-topic.

If you ask me, these posts are the real classics!

[Andorion]

So I think its pretty clear that we are going to be doing Master and Margarita.

My copy, the Penguin edition has 32 chapters. How about 6 chapters a week?

[Gabriele]

I've read a German translation of Master ande Margarita ages ago. Turns out the book is still lurking on my father's shelves. I've asked him to bring it with him this afternoon.

Though I've voted for Don Quichote, because I gave that one three goes and never finished it. Maybe we can tackle it some day.

[JPK]

Andorion, on 04 June 2017 - 02:03 AM, said:

So I think its pretty clear that we are going to be doing Master and Margarita.

My copy, the Penguin edition has 32 chapters. How about 6 chapters a week?

I think that sounds really reasonable. I know it will vary between editions and translations, but what does that break down to for page counts per week?

Gabriele, on 04 June 2017 - 02:21 PM, said:

I've read a German translation of Master ande Margarita ages ago. Turns out the book is still lurking on my father's shelves. I've asked him to bring it with him this afternoon.

Though I've voted for Don Quichote, because I gave that one three goes and never finished it. Maybe we can tackle it some day.

Yeah, I really want to read that at some point too. It's already reached nomination voting twice, so I suspect it's only a matter of time before it's the selection.