The perils and rewards...

...of translation: Translators shouldn’t be slaves to the holy “original”

Less controversial is the view that a good translator brings together skills that are analytical (understanding the original) and creative (writing the new text). The married couple Larissa Volokhonsky and Richard Pevear co-translate Russian classics and embody this alter-ego balance. She, the native speaker, reads the text and drafts it into English using her superior comprehension. He, the stronger English compositor, edits and revises her text, able to sit the original alongside it for reference. But their Dostoevskys and Tolstoys are often held to be clunky or unhelpfully exoticising. They have overdone it, perhaps, imposing too much order on a necessarily mysterious process.