I own two copies of Crime and Punishment. One is Constance Garnett’s, published by Heinemann in 1914, in a paperback so worn the spine gave up long ago. The other is Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s, published by Knopf in 1992. Same novel, same axe, same saint, same city of yellow wallpaper and fever. And yet the two books sit on my shelf like strangers who happen to share a name. It took me years to understand why.
For most of my twenties I thought about translations the way I thought about window glass. Something between me and the room beyond it, and all I asked was that the glass be clear. Then a friend who reads Greek, and is insufferable about it in the kindest possible way, laid three versions of the same eight words of Homer in front of me and asked which man I wanted to travel with. The question annoyed me. I have been grateful for it ever since.
One adjective, three men
The Odyssey opens by asking the Muse for a story about Odysseus, and the poem’s first description of him hangs on a single Greek word, polytropos, built from poly (many) and tropos (turn). Robert Fitzgerald, in 1961, gives us a hero “skilled in all ways of contending.” Robert Fagles, in 1996, gives us “the man of twists and turns.” Emily Wilson, in her 2017 translation for W. W. Norton and the first complete English Odyssey by a woman, gives us “a complicated man.”
My friend wanted to know which of the three I trusted. The honest answer is that I had trusted all of them, one at a time, without noticing there had been a decision at all. Three translators stood at the same fork and walked in different directions, and I followed each of them without ever seeing the fork.
Wilson has said she was after the crystalline clarity she hears in the Greek, along with the speed of a poem built for the voice, so she held herself to iambic pentameter and cut the archaisms. Her translation made news in 2017 for a second reason. Where older English versions call the dead suitors’ serving women “maids” or “handmaidens,” Wilson writes “slave,” because that is what the Greek says. The NPR review that year asked the plain question: why call them handmaidens when they were slaves? And in a podcast recorded in spring 2026, Wilson said that if she went back to the poem now she would keep her opening line but replace the places where she had leaned on the single word “slave” with more precise vocabulary. The translator rereads her own work the way the rest of us reread novels, and finds things to fix.
What Garnett smoothed away
Constance Garnett translated 71 volumes of Russian literature across a working life that ran from the 1890s to the 1930s, and English readers have been arguing about her ever since. Her Crime and Punishment landed in 1914, and it made Dostoevsky a fixture of the English-speaking imagination. She worked fast, sometimes covering fifty pages a day with a dictionary and, later in life, failing eyesight, and she admitted smoothing over rough places in the Russian for the sake of readability. Nabokov, who had firm opinions about everything, complained that the smoothing flattened the deliberate awkwardness of Dostoevsky’s voices.
He had a point, and so did she. Here is the fact I keep coming back to: from 1914 until Pevear and Volokhonsky’s version appeared in 1992, the Dostoevsky most English readers met was substantially Garnett’s. Seventy-eight years is long enough for a translation to become the book itself, to be quoted, taught, imitated, and remembered as though the author had written it that way. When I finally read the 1992 translation, Raskolnikov’s speech kept its repetitions and its jolts, and the man in the garret stopped sounding like a Victorian gentleman in distress. The plot was identical. The temperature was different by ten degrees, and the ten degrees were what the novel was made of.
The bug Kafka declined to name
The Metamorphosis, published in 1915, opens with a sentence every writer in the world would like to have written. Gregor Samsa wakes, and he has been changed overnight into what the German calls ein ungeheueres Ungeziefer, a monstrous vermin. That word, Ungeziefer, is the family term for something unclean, something unfit for temple sacrifice, and Kafka never once says beetle, roach, or fly.
Willa and Edwin Muir, whose English version appeared in 1933, chose a different first sentence: “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” A gigantic insect. Two decisions in four words, both of them the Muirs’ and neither of them Kafka’s. The German leaves the creature shapeless and therefore everywhere; the Muirs give it six legs and a species. Ian Johnston’s later translation keeps the vagueness and reads “changed into a monstrous vermin,” and you can hear how much closer the dread stays to the page. Even the dreams shift: uneasy in one version, anxious in another, troubled in a third, all of them landing on the same German adjective. The story survives every version. What changes is where the shiver starts.
Learning to see the second writer
The writer this collective is named for knew all this from the inside. J. M. Coetzee translated Marcella Emants’s A Posthumous Confession, a spare Dutch novel, and Wilma Stockenström’s The Expedition to the Baobab Tree, which Jonathan Ball published in 1983. Coetzee is a novelist of exact, unornamented prose, and watching him translate is like watching a man who builds plain furniture carry someone else’s carved chairs down a staircase without chipping them. A reviewer in the Irish Times wrote of the Stockenström that it reads as though Coetzee could as easily have written it himself, which is at once the compliment a translator wants and the worry a reader should keep.
That worry earns its keep as a second set of eyes on the page. My own habit now is small and slightly fussy: before I buy a translated novel, I read the first page of two editions side by side in the bookshop, and I check the title page for the translator’s name and the year. The year matters as much as the name, because language ages and a 1914 English is a different instrument from a 1992 one. When a translated book astonishes me, I have learned to be grateful to two people. When one goes flat on me, I have learned to ask whether I am holding a dull book or a dull pane of glass.
A novel in translation is a collaboration across a distance, and the collaborator is never in the room when you are reading. That is the part I find strange and slightly moving. Someone in another century stood at every sentence of this book and chose the word I would get, one word at a time, thousands of times, in silence, with nobody watching. Some nights I hold Garnett’s Crime and Punishment in one hand and Pevear and Volokhonsky’s in the other and read the same scene twice. The gap between the two versions is where the reading actually happens. That gap is the measure of how much room one story can hold, and of how many books one novel can quietly become.