Friday, September 9, 2022

“The turning point of summer”

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.]

comments: 7

Wu said...

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...

Michael Leddy said...

One 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.

Fresca said...

Great passage. My sister said the real love story in Anna Karenina is agricultural--specifically, she says, "the introduction of the potato to Russia".

Michael Leddy said...

I don’t think there’s been a potato so far. But yes, the nature and agriculture passages are terrific.

Fresca said...

I tried to find something about potatoes in AK, and instead I found this, about War and Peace:
"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."

Michael Leddy said...

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.”

Wu said...

Salty Potato is my new favourite catchphrase