From New York City, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.

I'm John McWater and this episode is going to be a very special episode in that sense that we used to say about 70s sitcoms.

This episode is going to cross-fertilize with something that I wrote recently in a very different venue.

And specifically, that was about war and peace of all things.

During the pandemic, I decided that I would finally tackle that 1200 page book because of course we often didn't have much else to do.

And I actually did it bit by bit by bit.

And I found that I didn't enjoy it as much as I would like to have.

And I've enjoyed a Russian novel or two or three in my day, but this time I was not having the proper experience.

And after a while I started to realize it's not what's going on. It's the translation.

I was reading as many people do these days, the translation by Richard Povir and Larissa Volchansky.

I'm going to call it P and V from now on.

And I found that they have a philosophy of translation that I would have to say is not mine.

Trying to stay as close to the original text as possible.

But the problem with that is that when you do it, what comes out is not English or at least often not graceful English.

And even if you want to say that it's not graceful but it has a different flavor, I would have to question whether sometimes it's exactly even artistic.

In any case, this is not going to be a spoken version of that piece that I wrote.

What I found interesting is that a lot of my points about what didn't go for me in the P and V translation are actually useful linguistics lessons.

And so I want to share with you just a few of the things that rubbed me the wrong way about the translation, although they might not rub all people the wrong way.

And what this can serve as is, in part, a translation show. And awful lot of you have asked me to do a show on translation. And that's one thing that I have never actually attended to partly because linguistics and translation intersect only slightly.

And I'm not trained in translation or translation theory.

And, plus, this will be an episode about translation issues after a fashion. And I hope that this will at least help scratch that itch that some of you have, please do take it as my offering on that score.

The Paveer and Volhansky, Warren Peace and what it can teach us, just about how language works.

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