Without translators, we are left adrift on our various linguistic ice floes, only faintly hearing rumors of masterpieces elsewhere at sea. Cervantes complained that reading a translation was “like looking at the Flanders tapestries from behind: you can see the basic shapes but they are so filled with threads that you cannot fathom their original lustre.” And yet they persevere: here comes Edith Grossman, four centuries later, quixotically encountering the Don and his Sancho on behalf of a new generation of English readers.

The objects of their attentions dread their ministrations. (Or they never get that far: until the King James commission, English translators of the Bible were sometimes burned at the stake or strangled-or, as in the case of William York Tyndale, both.) Translators are, for eternity, sent up, put down, nitpicked, and, finally, overturned. Garnett! Translators suffer a thankless and uneasy afterlife. Garnett closes the proceedings by reciting a conjugation of the verb “to Karamazov.” Garnett insists, is “Tchaikovsky.” When she recalls for the audience the arduous process of translating “Karamazov,” she confuses the four brothers with the “Three Sisters,” a stumble that leads inevitably to the musical number “O We Gotta Get to Moscow!” Mrs. The Russian for “hysterical homosexual,” Mrs.

The mangling of the translator’s craft is a main plot point. In the first production of “The Idiots Karamazov,” at the Yale Repertory Theatre, Garnett was played by a student at the drama school named Meryl Streep, who portrayed the aged “translatrix” as a muddled loon.

Which causes the angelic monk Alyosha to wonder, “How can there be a God if there are feet?” The main character is based not on any figure in Dostoyevsky but, rather, on his first and most enduring English-language translator, a woman of Victorian energies and Edwardian prose, Mrs. In the early seventies, two young playwrights, Christopher Durang and Albert Innaurato, collaborated on a satire about nineteenth-century Russian literature called “The Idiots Karamazov.” In their liberal interpretation of Dostoyevsky, Father Zosima is a gay foot fetishist. Constance Garnett’s versions of the great Russians inspired Hemingway but outraged exiled writers.

War and peace anna karenina