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A review by casparb
The Foundation Pit by Andrei Platonov
Here's a big name in Russian lit & a well-known if seemingly unfinished novel. It's anti-soviet. I think it is very good in certain ways with that comic interplay of - what the blurb calls Carollian - and what I call Gogolism. Also very very grim this is early years five year plans and the Колхоз is not so happy.
Sadly the vintage translation is not quite holding water for me which seems odd since the three(!!) translators have their pedigree. It reads as though it were a literal translation intended to be shaped into an English idiom but somebody was too rushed in idiomising it so we have patches of oddness. This is boring talk but I shall demonstrate. The Russian verb 'to rest' is <Отдыхать> - which is literally something like 'breathing out' (think, 'taking a breather'). Vintage has 'many of the men stopped digging and sat down for a sigh' which sounds suspiciously to me like somebody literally translated Отдыхать. A few pages later we also have a husband say to his wife in bed 'let me organize myself close to you!'. That's kind of brilliant I wish it wasn't a mistake
Sadly the vintage translation is not quite holding water for me which seems odd since the three(!!) translators have their pedigree. It reads as though it were a literal translation intended to be shaped into an English idiom but somebody was too rushed in idiomising it so we have patches of oddness. This is boring talk but I shall demonstrate. The Russian verb 'to rest' is <Отдыхать> - which is literally something like 'breathing out' (think, 'taking a breather'). Vintage has 'many of the men stopped digging and sat down for a sigh' which sounds suspiciously to me like somebody literally translated Отдыхать. A few pages later we also have a husband say to his wife in bed 'let me organize myself close to you!'. That's kind of brilliant I wish it wasn't a mistake