Nepenthe

We would be together and have our books and at night be warm in bed together with the windows open and the stars bright. —Ernest Hemingway. A Lighthouse of Quotes

The Impossible Cool

"In  Crime and Punishment , there is a sentence that goes like this: ‘It was a very simple matter and there was nothing complicated about it.’” Richard Pevear lets the words hang in the air, along with a note of faint bafflement. From his Paris apartment, one half of the world’s only celebrity translation team is recollecting some of the knotty, cross-lingual jumbles that he has spent his working life trying to untangle. “I came running to Larissa”—Larissa Volokhonsky, Pevear’s wife of thirty years and collaborator on twenty-one works of Russian-to-English translation—“and said, ‘Can that be? Is that what he said?’ And she checked and said yes. ‘It was a very simple matter and there was nothing complicated about  it.’” Reassured, if still skeptical, he jotted it down and moved on to Dostoyevsky’s next syntax-warping creation. The inconspicuous passage would resurface before long, though. The translation was published and, Richard recalls, “one very eminent revi...