Before his death, Jin supposedly joked, “Being beheaded is the most painful thing, but for some reason it’s going to happen to me. Fancy that!”

napoleonchingon:

nostalgebraist:

First, Gary Saul Morson told me that Pevear and Volokhonsky were bad, and I thought, hmm, that’s really interesting, but maybe he’s just a contrarian.  There are always contrarians, on any subject, right?

Then I read their translation of Anna Karenina, and it was kinda tedious, but maybe I just didn’t like Tolstoy?

Then Janet Malcolm told me, no, P&V actually screwed up Anna Karenina, and provided some great examples – here’s one short enough to not break the flow of this post:

Garnett: All his efforts to draw her into open discussion she confronted with a barrier that he could not penetrate, made up of a sort of amused perplexity.

P&V: To all his attempts at drawing her into an explanation she opposed the impenetrable wall of some cheerful perplexity.

And now, this morning, I’m idly comparing two translations of Dostoevsky’s Demons / The Possessed, wondering if the reason I could never get into it before was the P&V translation, and on the very first page I run into this:

Garnett: This may all have been the effect of habit, or rather, more exactly of a generous propensity he had from his earliest years for indulging in an agreeable day-dream in which he figured as a picturesque public character. 

P&V: It could all have been a matter of habit, or, better, of a ceaseless and noble disposition, from childhood on, towards a pleasant dream of his beautiful civic stance.

I’m getting the sense that Morson was just right, and P&V are just bad.  This stuff is barely even English!  And P&V defend this by saying that Russian is not English.  Which, yes, of course it isn’t, and neither is any other language – but that’s where your job starts, not where it ends.  You’re a literary translator, you’re not writing cribs.

Yes. P & V are just bad. I’m a long-standing P & V hater. I even once wrote a thing about how you shouldn’t read their translation of Master and Margarita

But the thing that is extremely ridiculous about all of this, for me as a Russian speaker, is that P & V are, as far as I can tell, NOT always more literal than other translations. This has been what I’ve found whenever I compared P & V to originals, and it’s also what I assume in the examples you give above, since they would make barely legible Russian sentences.

It’s just not the case that they’re not moving sufficiently far away from cribs to make a readable English translation. It’s that they *are* moving away from cribs, but not in the direction that would make for a readable translation.

Like Pevear is on record as saying he wants to spruce up English in these translations, and I think this is what he’s doing: getting cribs and purposefully making awkward, stilted sentences because that’s his taste.

And like in a sense me saying this is cheating, it lets us sidestep the entire question about domesticating vs. foreignizing translations, which is a hard question. But it just seems to me to be the case that P & V are bad completely apart from that.

(via sungodsevenoclock)

First, Gary Saul Morson told me that Pevear and Volokhonsky were bad, and I thought, hmm, that’s really interesting, but maybe he’s just a contrarian.  There are always contrarians, on any subject, right?

Then I read their translation of Anna Karenina, and it was kinda tedious, but maybe I just didn’t like Tolstoy?

Then Janet Malcolm told me, no, P&V actually screwed up Anna Karenina, and provided some great examples – here’s one short enough to not break the flow of this post:

Garnett: All his efforts to draw her into open discussion she confronted with a barrier that he could not penetrate, made up of a sort of amused perplexity.

P&V: To all his attempts at drawing her into an explanation she opposed the impenetrable wall of some cheerful perplexity.

And now, this morning, I’m idly comparing two translations of Dostoevsky’s Demons / The Possessed, wondering if the reason I could never get into it before was the P&V translation, and on the very first page I run into this:

Garnett: This may all have been the effect of habit, or rather, more exactly of a generous propensity he had from his earliest years for indulging in an agreeable day-dream in which he figured as a picturesque public character. 

P&V: It could all have been a matter of habit, or, better, of a ceaseless and noble disposition, from childhood on, towards a pleasant dream of his beautiful civic stance.

I’m getting the sense that Morson was just right, and P&V are just bad.  This stuff is barely even English!  And P&V defend this by saying that Russian is not English.  Which, yes, of course it isn’t, and neither is any other language – but that’s where your job starts, not where it ends.  You’re a literary translator, you’re not writing cribs.

music-genre-robot:

Armenian Terror Jazz

The sentence is bad because pied-piping has not occurred.

Is This the Hardest Course in the Humanities? →

“What’s in a name?” asked Shakespeare’s Juliet. The answer: a lot of rich data in need of structure and new properties.

Back when we were arguing over logical induction, I posted this in an Agent Foundations comment, but I don’t think I ever posted it over here.  I really like it, and I think it helps clarify how weak mere convergence can be:

Finally, about abstract asymptotic results leading to efficient practical algorithms – yes, this happens, but it’s important to think about what information beyond mere convergence is necessary for it to happen.

Consider root-finding for a differentiable function F from R→R. Here’s one method that converges (given some conditions): Newton’s method. Here’s another: enumerate the rational numbers in an arbitrary order and evaluate F at one rational number per timestep, and write down the number iff F there is closer to zero than with the last number you wrote down. (You can approximate the root arbitrarily well with rationals, the function is continuous, blah blah.)

Even though these are both convergent, there’s obviously a big difference; the former is actually converging to the result in the intuitive sense of that phrase, while the latter is just trolling you by satisfying your technical criteria but not the intuitions behind them. (Cf. the enumeration-based trader constructions.)