The Squabble

Rating:
Summary: Superior Translation
Review: I'm kinda picky about my Gogol. The recent translations by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol (Vintage Classics)) are lumpy and wooden to my ear.

These translation more than hit the mark; they capture Gogol's good-natured and sunny prose style. These translations are all the more effective when Gogol zings you at the end of a story; as the introduction notes, Nabokov observes that the comic is separated from the cosmic by a mere syllabant.

The only down side is that these aren't even Gogol's best (or most famous) three stories. I hope this translator continues working on Gogol.

The introduction -- which discusses Gogol's 1980s career in Hollywood writing sci-fi scripts for Roger Corman (!) -- is a must-read!