What’s the best translation of Crime and Punishment?

Who was Frederick Whishaw?

He was a British writer, historian, and musician. He was born in Russia, grew up in England, moved back to Russia at age 16 to work, and returned to England at age 26. He wrote poetry, novels, stories for children, and books on Russian history. Some of his works, including his translation of Uncle’s Dream AND The Permanent Husband by Dostoevsky, are available at Project Gutenberg. He also translated Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, Humiliated and Insulted aka Injury and Insult, and The Friend of the Family AND The Gambler. If you’re searching for Whishaw’s translations, it’s useful to know that the author’s name was spelled Fedor Dostoieffsky or Fedor Dostoïeffsky.

Extract from the Whishaw translation of Crime and Punishment

Who was Constance Garnett?

Constance Garnett translated a TON of stuff from Russian, including Dostoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, and The Possessed (Demons), and Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Anna Karenina. She is credited with making many Russian works accessible in English. Her contribution to world literature is nothing to sneeze at. Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Brodsky, nevertheless, accused her writing of being flat and of remaining the same regardless of whom she was translating.

Readers’ opinions vary about whether Garnett’s translation of Crime and Punishment is good. Commentators can’t even agree whether the text sounds Victorian and stilted or surprisingly smooth and modern. Some people say Garnett’s version was thankfully superseded long ago, and others say it never can or will be.

I’m inclined to side with those who uphold Garnett’s translation. Those who praise it sound not just nostalgic but also sensible, and those who criticize it are often motivated to praise newer translations simply because they are newer (or because they sound newer), and perhaps feel it’s safe to attack the work of someone who’s not around to defend it.

Since the translation is old, the copyright has expired, and anyone can republish the text. That means there are a lot of versions with this translation, and they’re cheap.

There are also audiobooks of Crime and Punishment that use the Garnett translation.

If you open a copy of Crime and Punishment and there’s an unsigned “Translator’s Preface” or “Translator’s Note” that starts by saying, “A few words about Dostoevsky himself may help the English reader to understand his work,” then you’ve got a copy of the Garnett translation. You can also cross-check against the wording of the beginning of Chapter 1 (see excerpt below).

About the Garnett translation of Crime and Punishment

• The New Yorker: “The Translation Wars” by David Remnick
  “Garnett’s flaws were not the figment of a native speaker’s snobbery. She worked with such speed, with such an eye toward the finish line, that when she came across a word or a phrase that she couldn’t make sense of she would skip it and move on.”
• The Jolly Traveller Blog: “Two Crime and Punishment Translations Compared ]Garnett and Magarshack]” by John Malathronas
  “She may come handy to those who want a linguistic feel of the times, but I found her simply infuriating.”
• Commentary Magazine: “How to Read Crime and Punishment” by Gary Morson
  “[N]either [the McDuff translation nor the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation] measures up to the classic rendition of the novel by Constance Garnett.”
• Wordsworth Editions: “Gained in Translation” by Tom Griffith
  “[A] well-established translation does have the merits of being tried and tested, and of having already appealed to a wide range of discerning readers…. When you read Constance Garnett’s Dostoevsky, or Louise and Aylmer Maude’s Tolstoy, you are joining a continuum of readers going back a century and a half.”
• Commentary Magazine: “The Pevearsion of Russian Literature” by Gary Morson
  “Students once encountered the great Russian writers as rendered by the magnificent Constance Garnett, a Victorian who taught herself the language and then proceeded to introduce almost the entire corpus of Russian literature to the English language over the space of 40 years, from the 1890s to the 1930s. Her greatest virtues were her profound and sympathetic understanding of the works themselves and a literary artist’s feel for the English language.”
• TLS: “Who-knows-he-dunnit?” by Donald Rayfield
  “Constance Garnett’s century-old version still flows beautifully: she alone meets the requirement of some translators that no word be used that was introduced into English after 1866 (the date of the original).”

Extract from the Garnett translation of Crime and Punishment

Who was David Magarshack?

He was a British writer. In addition to writing fiction and translating works by Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Goncharov, Gogol, and Chekhov, he wrote biographies of several Russian authors, including Dostoyevsky. He was born in Riga, Russia (a city in present-day Latvia), and moved to England in his 20s, eventually becoming a naturalized citizen.

In addition to Crime and Punishment, Magarshack translated The Devils aka Demons, The Idiot, The Brothers Karamazov and a volume entitled “Dostoevsky’s Occasional Writings”.

About the Magarshack translation of Crime and Punishment

Bloggers Karamazov: “David Magarshack, the Penguin Archive, and Translating Dostoevsky: A Chat with Cathy McAteer”
This interview with Cathy McAteer, a postdoctoral researcher in translation studies, is worth reading in its entirety. Regarding his motivation, she says: “Magarshack approached his translation work with a keen sense that the ‘real’ Russia had never been accurately conveyed to British readers in preceding translations.” Regarding his techniques, she says: “[H]e tries his hand at vernacularized dialogue; incorporates Anglicized naming practices…; domesticates culture-specific references; avoids all footnotes [and] frequently tries to smooth out syntax.”

TLS: “Who-knows-he-dunnit?” by Donald Rayfield
“Dostoevsky does not suffer much from David Magarshack’s version, standard [from] the 1950s [to 2018], its blandness notwithstanding.”

Washington Post: “The Desperate Hours” by Michael Dirda
“Currently [in 1992, at the time of the release of the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation] the most used editions of C and P have been those in the Norton Critical Edition (Jessie Coulson’s translation) and the Penguin Modern Classics (David Magarshack’s). There have also been versions by Michael Scammell (best known for his biography of Solzhenitsyn), Sidney Monas and recently, David McDuff, this last a Viking hardcover that will, apparently, replace Magarshack as the standard Penguin paperback.”

The Jolly Traveller Blog: “Two Crime and Punishment Translations Compared” by John Malathronas
Between Garnett and Magarshack, John Malathronas much prefers Magarshack. To show why, he supplies three parallel passages: the opening sentence, the first sentence of Chapter 3, and a sentence from the horse dream in Chapter 5.

Extract from the Magarshack translation of Crime and Punishment

Who was Princess Alexandra “Sasha” Kropotkin?

She was a writer descended from the Russian Czar Rurik, born in exile in London, only child of the famous anarchist Peter Kropotkin, who renounced the title of Prince. She returned with her family to Russia in her 30s for a few years before settling in New York, where she built a career by writing about traditional women’s topics (cooking, etiquette, etc.).

About the Kropotkin translation of Crime and Punishment

The Kropotkin translation was published by International Collectors Library, but some ICL books say they are the Garnett translation, and thus are in the public domain, whereas the 1953 Kropotkin text is not. The Kropotkin edition says on the title page that it is a “revised translation arranged for modern reading”. To the best of my understanding, the Kropotkin translation is just Garnett’s translation with some parts changed and some parts left out.

Certainly that seems to be the case for her translation of The Brothers Karamazov. Worldcat lists it as “Fyodor Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Edited by W. Somerset Maugham in a translation revised by Princess Alexandra Kropotkin. Wood cuts by Louis Hechenbleikner. [Based on the translation of C.C. Garnett. Abridged.].”

Extract from the Kropotkin translation of Crime and Punishment

Who was Jessie Senior Coulson?

She was a British lexicographer who worked on the Oxford English Dictionary and complied a Russian-English dictionary and a translator of Russian works by Dostoevsky, Turgenev, Gorky, and Chekhov.

About the Coulson translation of Crime and Punishment

The Coulson translation of Crime and Punishment was first published by Oxford University Press in 1953 with the subtitle “A Novel in Six Parts and an Epilogue”. It included an introduction by the translator and a list of characters, and had a map of St. Petersburg printed on the endpapers.

Norton published a critical edition in 1964, a revised critical edition in 1975, and a third edition in 1989. They all say they are “edited by George Gibian”. To the best of my knowledge, this means he chose the essays to be included and added notes, but did not alter the wording of Coulson’s translation. The third edition includes a preface by Gibian, a list of characters, a map of St. Petersburg, content from Dostoevsky’s notebooks and letters, a passage from an early draft, 30 essays, a chronology of his life, and a selected bibliography.

The preface in the 3rd edition states:
“The translation of the novel by Jessie Coulson represents accurately, in contemporary English, Dostoevsky’s nineteenth-century Russian original. It distorts neither through modernization nor through Victorianisms, and it is readable in its own right, instead of sounding like a translation.”

The Coulson translation was also reprinted in the World’s Classics series starting in 1980 and the Oxford World’s Classics series in 1998, reissued in 2008. An introduction and notes by Richard Peace were added in 1995. To the best of my knowledge, Peace did not alter the text of the translation.

The Norton and Oxford editions are all out of print. There are no in-print editions of the Coulson translation.

Extract from the Coulson translation of Crime and Punishment

Who is Michael Scammell?

He is a British writer and Slavic scholar known for his prizewinning 1984 biography of Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. He is also the author of a prizewinning biography of British writer Arthur Koestler published in 2009 and he translated Tolstoy’s Childhood, Boyhood and Youth and some works by Vladimir Nabokov. He has written for a number of newspapers, magazines, and journals.

» Visit his website at michaelscammell.com.

About the Scammell translation of Crime and Punishment

Published by Washington Square Press, Scammell’s was the first American translation of Crime and Punishment. It is based on “the authoritative Russian text” of its time.

Extract from the Scammell translation of Crime and Punishment

Who was Sidney Monas?

Sidney Monas sounds like an amazing guy. An American Jew, he was captured and thought to have died in World War II but survived, returned, and took up academic life in Princeton, and went on to earn a PhD from Harvard. Not bad for a dead guy! He died for real in 2019 at the age of 94.

People don’t seem to talk much about his translation of Crime and Punishment, even though it’s still in print. His version is mentioned in some of the articles about newer versions, but nobody seems to champion it.

Extract from the Signet / Monas translation of Crime and Punishment

Who is Julius Katzer?

I can’t find anything about him online. I keep running into my own Crime and Punishment information pages when I Google. He also translated The Brothers Karamazov.

About the Katzer translation of Crime and Punishment

It was published by Raduga Publishers, a Soviet-era publishing house, in Moscow in 1985 and 1989.

Extract from the Katzer translation of Crime and Punishment

A short extract, but better than nothing!

Who is David McDuff?

David McDuff is a British translator of Russian and Scandinavian poetry and prose, an editor and a literary critic. Penguin published his translations of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot.

Penguin is a publishing powerhouse, so you’ll be in good company whether you choose the McDuff version or the Oliver Ready one. Older Penguin editions were translated by David Magarshack.

About the Penguin/McDuff translation of Crime and Punishment

• New York Times: “Raskolnikov Says the Darndest Things” by Richard Lourie
  “Mr. McDuff’s Dostoyevsky survives its too frequent lapses and its too frequent notes.”
• Commentary Magazine: “How to Read Crime and Punishment” by Gary Morson
  “When one embarks on translating a classic that has been rendered many times before, one should have a well-formed reason to serve as a guide in making choices. David McDuff seems to have no reason except to produce yet another translation.”

Extract from the Penguin McDuff translation of Crime and Punishment

Who are Pevear and Volokhonsky?

Pevear and Volokhonsky are an American/Russian husband-and-wife team with a huge list of Russian translations, including The Master and Margarita, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, The Idiot, and Demons to their credit. They became widely known in the US when Oprah chose their version of Anna Karenina for her book club.

There is a LOT of chatter about Pevear and Volokhonsky. Their translations are popular but produced a strong backlash. Their style is characterized as being either “admirably accurate” or “too literal”. I’m not positively inclined towards their version; I have the sense that their stuff has been over-hyped.

You can get an audiobook of Crime and Punishment that is made from the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation.

About the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of Crime and Punishment

• New York Times: “Raskolnikov Says the Darndest Things” by Richard Lourie
  “The version presented by Mr. Pevear and Ms. Volokhonsky does not cover the full distance to English. The way to preserve some of Dostoyevsky’s roughness is not by publishing a rough draft.”
• The New Yorker: “The Translation Wars”
  “Pevear and Volokhonsky may be the premier Russian-to-English translators of the era. They are certainly the most versatile and industrious…. [They] agree with the majority of their critics that they are best at Dostoyevsky.”
• The Washington Post: “The Desperate Hours” by Michael Dirda
  “I first read Crime and Punishment (in Constance Garnett’s translation) some 30 years ago when my mother had to tear the book from my grasp to send me to bed. I’ve reread the novel three more times since, and in this translation by Pevear/Volokhonsky it is better than ever.”
• Commentary Magazine: “The Pevearsion of Russian Literature” by Gary Morson
  “It looks as if people will be reading P&V, as they have come to be called, for decades to come. This is a tragedy, because their translations take glorious works and reduce them to awkward and unsightly muddles.”
• Commentary Magazine: “How to Read Crime and Punishment” by Gary Morson
  “Pevear and Volokhonsky have a very definite idea of what they are doing. They want to capture all those colloquialisms, slang expressions, and low tonalities that Garnett smoothed out. Generally speaking, they succeed quite well.”
• TLS: “Who-knows-he-dunnit?” by Donald Rayfield
  “Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky seem to follow the Byzantine principle of producing a translation from which the original, if it were ever lost, might be reconstituted word by word.”

Extract from The Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of Crime and Punishment

Who is Oliver Ready?

Oliver Ready is a British translator. His version of Crime and Punishment, his first translation of a classic work, seems well respected; some people seem to consider it the best thing since sliced bread. Personally, I don’t like either of the current covers, and I think I prefer the older, smoother sound of Garnett to this newer but supposedly more authentically “jagged” language Ready uses.

If you like audiobooks, there’s an audiobook of the Oliver Ready translation of Crime and Punishment.

About the Oliver Ready translation of Crime and Punishment

• The Spectator: “This new translation of Crime and Punishment is a masterpiece” by A.N. Wilson
  “[The] knife-edge between sentimentality and farce has been so skilfully and delicately captured here. A truly great translation.”
• Los Angeles Review of Books: “All Is Permitted, All Over Again” by Boris Dralyuk
  “[I]t is Ready’s grander success that ought to be applauded, his ability to reproduce the whole heady brew of Dostoyevsky’s novel in a consistent but nimble modern English.”
• The Wichita Eagle: “Translation of Dostoyevsky’s ‘Crime and Punishment’ brings vitality, verve to classic novel”
  “Now comes Oliver Ready’s vivid, new version of the book, promising to adhere more faithfully to the jagged, repetitive rantings inside Raskolnikov’s head and to keep the novel’s language at an even, modern keel, not too dated but not too hip.”
• Russia Beyond: “Dostoevsky’s cacophonic catastrophes” by Oliver Ready
  “Ready… chose not to use 19th century English or contemporary language. Instead, his vocabulary belongs somewhere in the middle of the 20th century, and he tries to avoid words that appeared after the 1960s. This makes the new translation’s language ‘modern, but not contemporary.’”
• Podularity: “Conversations with Oliver Ready on Crime and Punishment” by George Miller
  “[W]hat persuaded him to take the project on? how did he limber up for it? and why — unusually — did he write his version out longhand rather than work on a computer?”
• The Nation: Floating in the Air by Jennifer Wilson
  “Published in 2014 by Penguin, Ready’s Crime and Punishment was praised for its preservation of Dostoyevsky’s humor, a welcome relief in a novel whose mixture of emotional intensity, philosophical speculation, and gruesome realism can at times be dizzying.”

Extract from The Oliver Ready translation of Crime and Punishment

Who is Nicolas Pasternak Slater?

Nicholas Pasternak Slater is the nephew of Russian novelist Boris Pasternak, author of Doctor Zhivago, and has translated Doctor Zhivago into English for The Folio Society. He was raised bilingual and has a degree in Russian literature from Oxford. He began translation work after retiring from a career as a medical doctor.

About the Slater translation of Crime and Punishment

• TLS: “Who-knows-he-dunnit?” by Donald Rayfield
  “[If] a choice is needed then Pasternak Slater probably takes precedence over Katz: the Oxford University Press edition is beautifully produced and competitively priced, and Sarah J. Young has given it a better introduction and notes.”
• Bloggers Karamazov: “Translating Crime and Punishment”
  “In this series of posts, Bloggers Karamazov sits down with the translators to talk about the experience of translating Dostoevsky’s most famous novel.”

Extract from the Oxford Slater translation of Crime and Punishment

Who is Michael R. Katz?

Michael Katz is an Emeritus Professor of Russian and East European Studies and the translator of over a dozen Russian novels, including Devils (Demons). His translation is the newest of the whole batch. I’m impressed by the wealth of features in the Norton Critical Edition; the branding of the Liveright edition points to accessibility.

About the Katz translation of Crime and Punishment

• Bloggers Karamazov: “Translating Crime and Punishment”
  “In this series of posts, Bloggers Karamazov sits down with the translators to talk about the experience of translating Dostoevsky’s most famous novel.”
• The Nation: “Floating in the Air” by Jennifer Wilson
  “Katz has added something with his own translation: Hoping to accentuate what he calls the novel’s “richness of registers or tones,” he pays specific attention to how Dostoyevsky’s characters alternate between religious solemnity and drunken vulgarity. The new work also has an American simplicity and informality that sets it apart from Ready’s more elegant British rendering.”

Extract from The Katz translation of Crime and Punishment

Who is Roger Cockrell?

Roger Cockrell is a writer, translator, and British scholar specializing in Russian literature. He translated Dostoevsky’s Devils, The House of the Dead, and Uncle’s Dream for Alma Classics. He has also translated works by Bulgakov, Gogol, Tolstoy and Chekhov.

About the Cockrell translation of Crime and Punishment

Available as of July 4, 2022.

Extract from Cockrell translation of Crime and Punishment

Get the Garnett translation of Crime and Punishment Free

If you don’t want to spend a lot of time on the decision process, probably any translation would be fine.

Crime and Punishment [is] a story with a power that bursts through any English version. — Washington Post

Personally I am convinced of the virtue of the Garnett translation, not simply because it is abundant and cheap or even free, or because that’s the one I read (which it was). Generations of readers have accessed Russian classics by means of Garnett’s translations; they are, themselves, classics.

Download free from Standard Ebooks

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