In "The Death of Ivan Ilyich & Other Stories," the husband-and-wife translation team of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have translated 11 of Leo Tolstoy's shorter works. These include such classics as "The Kreutzer Sonata" and the adventure tale "The Prisoner of the Caucasus," which Tolstoy wrote for "peasant children on his estate" but which is remarkably detailed and expressive.
The duo, who live in Paris, have translated books by such writers as Fyodor Dostoevsky, Nikolai Gogol and Anton Chekhov. Their best-known work, a translation of Tolstoy's " Anna Karenina, " was an Oprah's Book Club pick in 2004. More recently, their translation of Tolstoy's "War and Peace" was published in hardcover in 2007.
Mr. Pevear, 66 years old, was born in Waltham, Mass., and initially translated works from French and Italian. His wife was born in Leningrad, Russia, and emigrated to Israel in 1973, where she lived for two years. The couple met in the United States in 1976 and married six years later. They've been translating books together since 1986.
Ms. Volokhonsky provides the first translation of each work, with running commentary on the author's style; her husband works from that draft to render his own version. They then confer and work on that text together. The couple is now finishing a translation of Boris Pasternak's "Doctor Zhivago," a novel that won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1958. The translators were interviewed by phone and email.
The Wall Street Journal: What determines which books you translate?
Mr. Pevear and Ms. Volokhonsky: We have always chosen them ourselves. We thought first of all that Dostoyevsky had not been well translated into English. There was a misunderstanding of his style and tone, especially his playfulness. Most English readers think of him as dark and brooding. His jokes, his narrative, are always playful, or almost always. We thought it would add a dimension to the understanding of Dostoyevsky that non-Russians don't have. The only book that was commissioned is the new one, "Doctor Zhivago," which was commissioned by Pantheon.
WSJ: You've translated 16 books together. Which was the most difficult, and why?
Mr. Pevear: "Doctor Zhivago." The issue is the prose. It's not that rich or ornate, but it's extremely difficult to translate. His language is very studied. Even when it looks simple, it's not. The sentences aren't long or complex, but it's the quality of the words. It's never what you expect. He doesn't fall into a flow of language that you can pick up and ride along on. Every sentence has to be worked out.
WSJ: How do you resolve your differences over the work, and do disagreements ever spill over into your personal life?
Ms. Volokhonsky: Richard is a native speaker of English. I'm a native speaker of Russian. My task is to explain to Richard what is happening in the Russian text. Then it is up to him to do what he can. The final word is always his. I can say this is not quite what the Russian says. Either he finds something that satisfies me or he says no, this is how we're going to do it. We discuss endlessly and sometimes it becomes a nuisance because we return to it again and again even after the manuscript goes off. But we really don't quarrel. It would be much more interesting if we did.
WSJ: Is it difficult to avoid using modern expressions while translating 19th-century texts?
Mr. Pevear: There's a border I try not to cross, but I suppose sometimes I do. I use the Oxford English Dictionary, which gives you the history of words and when those words entered the language. We try to avoid jargon and all the spoken phrases that we have today. Things like, "She knew what her options were," we don't use that. Of course, neither would any good writer, even today. I'm conscious of the time period. When we translated Mikhail Bulgakov ("The Master and Margarita"), I felt relieved that we could use slightly more modern words. It was a little freer.
WSJ: There seem to be fewer footnotes in "The Death of Ivan Ilyich & Other Stories" than in your other translations.
Mr. Pevear: Maybe I told myself to cut back, but there isn't as much historic context. Tolstoy was trying to radically simplify his style, to make it plain, to make it more universal, as he got older.
WSJ: Every culture thinks its literature will stand the test of time. What is it about the Russian novelists that makes us come back to their work again and again?
Mr. Pevear and Ms. Volokhonsky: I think there's the phrase "the accursed questions" attributed to Dostoyevsky: What is the meaning of life, the existence of God, the mystery of death, the big metaphysical spiritual questions? Those questions were central to Russian literature in the 19th and 20th centuries in a way that they had all but ceased to be in Western European literature. The Russians were engaged in portraying a fully human destiny rather than one dictated by class, social position, personal ambition and so on -- which is a vision similar to what we find first of all in Homer, as well as Dante and Shakespeare. We thirst for that vision and are grateful to find it in the great Russians. The aliveness of Tolstoy's heroes may come ultimately from the same wholeness of vision, which is not generalized and abstract, but deep in detail.