Glad I'm not the only one who finds a lot of Zamyatin in the other dystopian writers of the 20th c. Orwell in particular is a sacred cow -- the notion that he might have gotten most of what is important about 1984 from Z. is beyond the pale for many. I try not to make such assertions in mixed company anymore. ;-)

BTW, I didn't get around to commenting on your P/V War and Peace post before comments closed, but I did want to mention that I found Pevear quite kind in my interactions with him over email and was happy to see a translation of War and Peace that at least kept the French in with translations in the footnotes. Perhaps he is overreaching in his defense of this latest effort, but I like the guy. :-)

James Wood weighs in on the pro-P&V side in the latest New Yorker.

I found Pevear quite kind in my interactions with him over email and was happy to see a translation of War and Peace that at least kept the French in with translations in the footnotes.

Oh, I'm sure he's a nice guy (and I too am glad to have the French kept), and I haven't even seen the translation, so I can't form an opinion on it; I just dislike the hype of "this brilliant team supersedes all those crappy old translations!" It's just another translation, folks.

Years ago I had a monolingual Anglophone friend enthusiastically assure me that the P&V translation of Gogol (which he hadn't read) far surpassed all earlier translations. Presumably the NYRB had given it a rave review. Those two (or their agent) must be very well-connected.

Oh, I'm sure he's a nice guy (and I too am glad to have the French kept), and I haven't even seen the translation, so I can't form an opinion on it; I just dislike the hype of "this brilliant team supersedes all those crappy old translations!" It's just another translation, folks.

Definitely understood.

Actually, I think someone posted a rather...confident self-appraisal by Murakami or someone as well. It reminded me of Nabokov in his foreward to his translation of "A Hero of Our Time", which runs something like, "This is the first translation of 'A Hero of Our Time' into English. There have been many paraphrases, but this is the first translation."

*sigh*

I suppose you understand that opening the dictionary at, say, p would yield dramatically different results. Words starting with the phoneme a simply don't correspond to normal Russian morphonetics, that's why one gets so many borrowings at the beginning of a dictionary.

Yes, of course, and Zamyatin knew that perfectly well; he was just making a point.

"Если от книг становится тесно и некуда поставить кровать, то лучше заменить кровать раскладушкой."

This reminded me of a story I've heard about one Estonian biologist. It dates back to the Soviet era. This man lived in a single-room apartment that was practically filled with books. He had so many books that he was forced to keep them on the floor. This was also where he kept his winter potatoes: he had books and potatoes stacked in layers on his floor. The layer of books and potatoes on his floor was half a meter high, making it rather difficult to enter the room. Finding the books he was looking for proved difficult as well, so he always worked in the university library.

Only half a meter? My wife's former boyfriend's aunt's apartment (no, my wife saw this herself, this is not FOAFity) had stacks from 1.5 to 2 meters tall occupying the entire floor surface except for narrow walkways connecting the bed, the stove, the toilet, etc.