Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, translated by Constance Garnett, revised by Leonard J. Kent and Nina Berberova (New York: Modern Library, 2000).
The Four Seasons Reading Club (Elaine, me) is taking on another long book.
[Someday I will have to write a post about the difficulty of searching Amazon for this edition, or for any particular legitmate edition of a work in the public domain.]
Friday, September 9, 2022
“The turning point of summer”
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Is this not a use for Google Translate AI. I know trusting a computer to translate a work of art might be fraught with danger, but at least it will be completely objective...
ReplyDeleteOne way to test would be to try a passage and see what comes out. But I think that with prose of any complexity Google Translate is severely limited.
ReplyDeleteGreat passage. My sister said the real love story in Anna Karenina is agricultural--specifically, she says, "the introduction of the potato to Russia".
ReplyDeleteI don’t think there’s been a potato so far. But yes, the nature and agriculture passages are terrific.
ReplyDeleteI tried to find something about potatoes in AK, and instead I found this, about War and Peace:
ReplyDelete"Happiness Is a Salty Potato – and other life lessons from Russian literature"
www.theguardian.com/books/2017/oct/13/ten-life-lessons-russian-literature-viv-groskop
"This is the five-page kernel of War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, which Henry James called “the large, loose, baggy monster” (read from page 1,074 of the Penguin Classics edition):
The character of Platon Karatayev, the everyman muzhik (peasant), pops up fleetingly to proffer a potato sprinkled with salt to Pierre Bezukhov and deliver the most important message of Tolstoy’s entire oeuvre:
love your parents, have children of your own, bear your fate with acceptance and patience.
And relish every mouthful of that salty potato."
Elaine wondered if the potato was a spoiler, lol. We’re 550 pages in, and no potatoes. I just squinted at the quotation in case we do read War and Peace. But the very end reminded me of Warren Zevon: “Enjoy every sandwich.”
ReplyDeleteSalty Potato is my new favourite catchphrase
ReplyDelete