Zhivago Translation from WNYC's Fishko Files by listenerservices@wnyc.org (WNYC, New York Public Radio)

Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky are a husband-and-wife translating team who have been working together since their 1990 edition of Dostoyevsky's The Brother's Karamazov. They’ve gone on to translate works by Gogol, Chekhov and Tolstoy. Pevear and Volokhonsky's new English translation of Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago is only the second English version of the book ever published. The first English edition was produced under much political distress, in a hurried three months in 1958. Since their first translation together, Pevear and Volokhonsky’s process has remained the same: Volokhonsky, a native Russian speaker, produces a word-by-word, phrase-by-phrase translation of the work into English. Pevear, a native English speaker, then works with Volokhonsky's translation, paying careful attention to the peculiarities of English nuance and style.

View the full feature story, here. Download the podcast here. See also: Doctor Zhivago, Doctor Zhivago (Movie Selections): Piano/Chords