To the Editors:
In his review of our translation of The Brothers Karamazov (March 1991), Vasily Rudich takes the “unfashionable position” that “style in a work of literature is subordinate to the message.” All the more so, it may be assumed, in a work of non-literature—fortunately for Professor Rudich, whose message concerning the “failures and flaws” of our translation is then free to soar above the bromides, weary reviewerisms, and dying metaphors in which he expresses it.
“To their credit,” he writes, for example, “[the translators] have escaped the temptation to mod ernize Dostoevsky’s language and to embroider it with current slang.” (To our credit? But we didn’t “escape” the temptation; we simply never felt it.) However, grateful though he is for this hypotheti cal escape, the “native speaker of Russian” never theless feels that our choice of words and phrases could have been bolder “without compromising the fabric of English.” That “uncompromised fabric” is good, but Professor Rudich can do bet ter: “The many merits of the new translation not withstanding, the novel’s innumerable literary gems are bound to remain unfathomable and un suspected by the reader who is innocent of Rus sian.” This same unsuspecting reader, if he gets as far as “The Grand Inquisitor,” is going to find him self beset by “a familiar host of problems.” But there’s no help for it, since the frustrated state in which our translation leaves both the reader in nocent of Russian and the reviewer guilty of it,
