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	Knopf Dead Souls By Nikolai Gogol Trans. by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky Knopf 443 Pages. $20

A Question of Style

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translate Gogol.

By Timothy C. Westphalen
Published: December 31, 2004

Nikolai Gogol's "Dead Souls" is one of the great Russian novels -- which is to say, it is one of the great novels of the world. Yet when so sensitive a reader as the Irish short-story writer Frank O'Connor finished it for the first time in 1920, he came to the following conclusion: "I thought it a great bore." Eventually, O'Connor reversed his verdict, but not before learning Russian.

Not every reader is as tenacious as O'Connor. Consequently, most people rely on translations at least some of the time. Yet despite the best efforts of translators such as Englishwoman Constance Garnett, American Bernard Guerney and Scotsman David McDuff, Gogol has eluded capture in English to this day, with the hunt for his 1842 novel, "Dead Souls," invariably resulting in the lifeless carcass of the text, rather than the living, panting animal, itself. The laughter that rings out like a bell in Russian is inevitably reduced in translation to garbled mumbling. And Gogol's chameleon of a hero, the protean Chichikov, who evades definition for 10 chapters in the original, becomes a very ordinary, dull, middle-aged huckster, whose tangled scheme to artificially inflate the value of his estate by convincing provincial landowners to sell him the deeds to their dead serfs seems little more than an exercise in obfuscation.

Hope for a reliable translation of the novel arose with word that the renowned husband-and-wife team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky were to tackle Gogol's masterpiece. Like McDuff, who works out of Britain mainly for Penguin, Pevear and Volokhonsky, who are based in Paris and whose work usually appears in the United States through Random House, have been charging through the Russian classics anew.

As a rule, Pevear and Volokhonsky have fared better than McDuff. Their translations of Fyodor Dostoevsky's novels have won numerous awards, including the PEN translation prize, and their version of Leo Tolstoy's "Anna Karenina" hit first place on the New York Times bestseller list last June after talk show host Oprah Winfrey assigned it to her book club. Indeed, current theory holds that a translation is best rendered in tandem by a native speaker of the original language such as Volokhonsky, who handles the intricacies and nuances of the Russian, and a native speaker of the target language such as Pevear, who shapes the text in English.

Despite the awards and theories, however, discriminating critics have taken the pair to task, particularly in matters of style and overall artistry. Some of these shortcomings became apparent in the earlier Dostoevsky translations, where the author's original polyphonic narration, which can switch from rhapsodic to vulgar to lyrical in the space of several paragraphs, was leveled out to an even flow. If these concerns are already palpable in the Dostoevsky translations, they are magnified in renderings of writers for whom style is even more important. Simply put, Pevear and Volokhonsky's Dostoevsky is better than their Tolstoy.

"Dead Souls," then, represents a challenge for Pevear and Volokhonsky. A stylistic tour de force, Gogol's novel encompasses an astonishing range of voices and offers bravura passages in every register within that range. From its delicate, intimate lyricism to its robust, bawdy ribaldry, "Dead Souls" requires a light touch and a bold stroke all at once.

Not surprisingly, Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation is a mixed bag. Were we to accept the definition of translation at which Vladimir Nabokov arrived while Englishing Alexander Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin" -- that translation should essentially be a crib for the original -- then this team of translators would deserve high praise, indeed. Of all the English translations, theirs is most faithful to the original.

But readers generally seek something more difficult to achieve: a faithful rendering of the work as an artistic whole. Judged by this criterion, the shortcomings of Pevear and Volokhonsky's version of "Dead Souls" become apparent on the first page, where the translators fail to catch the right tone of Gogol's playful introduction. What actually happens on this page is that Chichikov rolls into a provincial town for his first stab at buying up the rights to serf-owners' dead. But Gogol packs the paragraphs with so many non sequiturs -- first a seemingly pointless conversation between two peasants about the wheel of Chichikov's britzka, then an extraneous description of a passerby -- that the point becomes less what is happening than how it is being told.

In Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation, Gogol's effervescent and wayward opening emerges accurate, but stilted: "'See that?' said the one to the other, 'there's a wheel for you! What do you say, would that wheel make it as far as Moscow, if it so happened, or wouldn't it?' 'It would,' replied the other. 'But not as far as Kazan I don't suppose?' 'Not as far as Kazan,' replied the other."

The deliberate irrelevance of Gogol's digression is lost to pedantry, a problem that also afflicts the episode that follows:

"Then, as the britzka drove up to the inn, it met with a young man in white twill trousers, quite narrow and short, and a tailcoat with presumptions to fashion, under which could be seen a shirtfront fastened with a Tula-made pin shaped like a bronze pistol. The young man turned around, looked at the carriage, held his hand to his peaked cap, which was almost blown off by the wind, and went on his way."

Igor Tabakov / MT After Nikolai Andreyev's 1909 statue of Gogol was deemed anti-Bolshevik by the Soviet authorities, it was moved to this quiet courtyard on Nikitsky Bulvar.

At times, the absence of Gogol's trademark playfulness mars whole passages. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the interpolated "The Tale of Captain Kopeikin," one of the glories of Russian literature. In it, Gogol takes off on a five-page lark that has nothing and everything to do with the novel's meaning. As Chichikov wreaks havoc across the countryside, the postmaster offers the story of the legendary invalid Kopeikin as an explanation of Chichikov's true identity, though inconsistencies in the story almost immediately make it clear that Chichikov cannot be Kopeikin. As a result, the episode is superfluous to the plot, yet central to Gogol's digressive technique. Here, the marvelous image of an undereducated character offering up his wisdom on something he barely understands deteriorates into a mechanical repetition of stock phrases, such as "my good sir," "if you can imagine," and "if you can picture it," which are meant to substitute for a colloquial voice.

The translation also suffers from lax syntax. Pevear and Volokhonsky seem to interpret Gogol's convoluted language as a license to unleash auxiliary verbs in English. The problem is that Gogol's prose is disciplined and, in its way, economical, neither of which qualities applies to Pevear and Volokhonsky's prose. This troublesome tendency toward excess verbiage particularly afflicts the novel's lyrical passages, robbing them of their poetry.

As a result, despite their faithfulness to the letter of Gogol's text, Pevear and Volokhonsky's translation fails to live up to expectations. Bernard Guerney's 1942 re-creation of "Dead Souls," which Nabokov praised, maintains its preeminence among English versions of the novel for the time being, though we still await a translation that brings "Dead Souls" to life.

Timothy C. Westphalen is associate professor of European Languages, Literatures and Cultures at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and the author of "Lyric Incarnate: The Dramas of Aleksandr Blok." His most recent book is "Aleksandr Blok's Trilogy of Lyric Dramas."

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