Robert and Elizabeth Chandler’s translation reads wonderfully (caution: I know no Russian), and captures the plot’s wildness, cruelty, and touching romance. In his introduction, however, Chandler labours to show that the novel is so subtly put together that it requires several readings. He describes it as a ‘kaleidoscope — a true Joycean collidoscope’. (A collidoscope is a kind of software or interior design.) Actually, like many good tales it contains coincidences and other familiar devices like letters, messages and reversals. With normal attention we can follow them as easily as the two train suicides in Anna Karenina.
Take the coat exchange. Chandler goes into high gear on this: he claims,
The entire story turns on this coat, on Pugachov’s return of the second coat and on the ensuing allegation that Pyotr is a turncoat. This is not Pushkin’s pun; I like to think of it, however, not as my own invention but as a small gift from the English language that a translator would be churlish to spurn.
I immediately thought of the Russian author and critic Viktor Shklovsky who observed in his Energy of Delusion (The Spectator, 29 September):
Most mistakes in literary criticism, I think, occur when people approach so close to the poetic horse — Pegasus — and mount it so swiftly that they miss the saddle and end up on the other side of the horse. Then they get up, look around, the horse is still standing there, but the person is not in the saddle.
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