Translations in this Project
Translations in this Project
The Eight Translations I'm Comparing
I’m comparing eight translations in this 2024 read-through of Crime and Punishment, as well as the Russian original.
Read more about how to choose a translation here:
Which Translation Do I Choose?
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All the shopping links below are affiliate links and provide me with a small commission when coverted to a sale. This supports the channel and helps me to keep it going. Thanks for using one of my links. 🙏🏻Constance Garnett, 1914
I have this edition on Kindle. It’s one of the earliest translations available. Garnett was prolific in translating Russian literature and is to be lauded for making it available to English readers. She is not without her detractors, though. This quotation from Joseph Brodsky, a Russian exile, sums up the general feeling I’ve seen from some readers:
“The reason English-speaking readers can barely tell the difference between Tolstoy and Dostoevsky is that they aren’t reading the prose of either one. They’re reading Constance Garnett.”
This is a common complaint I’ve read about Garnett’s translations in general. The only anecdotal evidence I can offer at this time is that I read Garnett’s translation of Anna Karenin in 1994 as a first-year Russian literature student and did not enjoy it at all. I started reading it again in 2019 and DNFed it. And now I get annoyed just looking at the title, which should, of course, be Anna Karenina! I will be reading a different translation very soon.
The Garnett translation of Crime and Punishment is no longer in copyright, so it can be acquired at low cost or no cost. I paid £0.99 for my Kindle copy.
Macmillan Collector’s Library (Amazon)
Wordsworth Classics (Amazon)
Barnes & Noble Classics (Amazon)
Word Cloud Classics (Amazon)
Simon & Schuster Enriched Classics (Amazon)
Bantam Classics (Amazon)
Dover Thrift (Amazon)
Amazon Classics (Amazon)
Jessie Coulson, 1953
Oxford World Classics (Amazon Marketplace)
David McDuff, 1991
The McDuff translation is available as a Penguin Black Spine and also as a Penguin Clothbound Classics edition. The image shown above is an older Black Spine edition than the current version.
Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, 1992
Everyman’s Library (1 June 1993) (Amazon)
Vintage Classics (1 March 1993) (Amazon / Bookshop.org)
Vintage Classics (20 May 1993) (Amazon)
Oliver Ready, 2014
Penguin Classics Deluxe (Amazon / Bookshop.org)
Penguin Classics (Amazon)
Nicolas Pasternak Slater, 2017
Michael R. Katz, 2018
Roger Cockrell, 2022
Alma Classics Paperback (Amazon)
Original Language Edition
This is my old beat-up copy that I bought at a street market in Odessa, Ukraine in April 1996 while I was studying there for an academic year. The original price would have been 1 rouble, 10 copecks, so Raskolnikov himself could have bought it with what he got from the old pawnbroker for his father’s watch and had 5 copecks left for a glass of vodka and a pie of some sort!
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