Richard Pevear is an American translator, poet and teacher, best known for the English versions of Russian classics he makes with his wife, Larissa Volokhonsky. He studied at Allegheny College and the University of Virginia, taught at several American universities, and from 1998 at the American University of Paris, where he is now Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature. He has also published two books of poems, Night Talk and Other Poems and Exchanges.
Most of his public work is translation, so the thing to know is how it gets made. Volokhonsky, a native Russian speaker, writes a close first draft. Pevear, whose spoken Russian is not fluent, reshapes it in English, and the two pass the text back and forth through several rounds. Their stated aim is to keep the author's own manner, awkward turns and repetitions included, instead of smoothing it into polite prose. On his own, Pevear has translated Dumas, Yves Bonnefoy and Alberto Savinio, and Sophocles' Aias with Herbert Golder.
Together the pair have taken on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Chekhov, Bulgakov, Pasternak and the prose of Pushkin. They won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize twice, for The Brothers Karamazov and for Anna Karenina, and received the first Efim Etkind Translation Prize for The Idiot. Their Anna Karenina was later picked for Oprah's Book Club, which brought it to a far wider public than most translations reach.
To start, read Anna Karenina, the book listed here. It is long, but the Penguin Classics edition carries the Pevear and Volokhonsky approach at full scale, from the ballroom and the railway station to Levin's mowing. If you want a shorter taste of their work afterwards, try Gogol's Collected Tales, or go on to The Brothers Karamazov.
